Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 52915 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 265(@200wpm)___ 212(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52915 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 265(@200wpm)___ 212(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
I watch from what I hope is a safe distance with a kind of shocked horror. Balthazar didn’t just try to get rid of me. He tried to get rid of me permanently. The lady at The End was right. I have fallen prey to the plot of an evil entity. I bet he wasn’t even Charming’s actual father. I can’t believe all these years of consuming stories and I didn’t recognize the bad guy.
“Well, Balthazar,” I say to myself. “We will see about that.”
9
Charming
I am in the greatest of miseries, having awoken from a bad dream to find a worse reality. My princess is missing. She is not in the bed, she is not in the bedchamber. She is not in the castle, nor the castle grounds, nor the village. I knew the moment I opened my eyes she wasn’t there. Her absence is an agony I can ill withstand, and so after the basic searches are complete, I prepare to tear apart every farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse in the area.
“Guards! To me!”
There is a rushing and a clanking as my thirteen guards, such as they are, rush into formation. They pant with glee, tails wagging at the prospect of doing some real work. It has been a long time since the guards were summoned. Last time I called them, they had the faces and minds of people. Now they are beasts, but willing beasts, and ones with potential for vicious aggression and tenacious tracking. Their faces are pointed and wolf-like, black and tan with teeth longer than the average wolf. They are not lap dogs. They are beasts to be feared, who happen to also very much enjoy being told what good boys they are.
“This the scent of the missing princess,” I tell them, holding her pillowcase out to them. They sniff and lift their heads, hoping to match the scent in the pillowcase to that left behind in the vapor of the air.
They set up an almost immediate baying and rush in the direction she must have taken. I run in their wake, whistling for my mount as they head out over the drawbridge. Mythos appears nearby, already at a trot as I swing onto his back, and my hounds and I give chase to the disappeared princess.
At the end of the village, the trail disappears. The hounds spread out and cast about, howling and tossing their heads with frustration, circling back and around again to try to take up the scent, but it evades them.
I call the birds to me, the ravens and the vultures, and I question them most thoroughly, but none of them have seen the princess traveling anywhere. It is as though she has disappeared completely. Even in the Ever After, such a thing is not possible. She’s somewhere. She has to be.
“EMMALINE!” I shout her name, hoping she can hear me, and even if she cannot hear me, that the shout will act as some kind of summoning. I want her to know how badly she is wanted, and how much she is missed.
“They will not find her,” a nasty old voice rasps. “I sent her where she belongs.”
“I should have known,” I say, turning my mount about to face the wizened old figure who haunts my nightmares, and this world. “Balthazar, I thought you were forever gone. I have not seen you in years. Not since…”
“Not since you made your slaughtered servants into beasts and ruled over a kingdom of mindless animals. The only kingdom you are fit to rule,” he laughs. He was always a rude bastard. “I was never truly gone. I will never stop acting in the best interests of the Ever After. You are not a good steward of…”
“Where is Princess Emmaline?” I interrupt his tongue lashing with an impatient question.
“Princess Emmaline does not exist. The human, Emma, dragged here against her will, has been sent, as I said, where she belongs.”
“And where is that?”
“The End.”
He could not have said two worse words. Every story must have an end, but not like this. What he has done is perverse and cruel. My poor Emmaline must be terrified and perhaps even facing annihilation. She may even be gone completely. The fury I feel cannot be stated. I am so angry I can barely conceive how furious I am. I’m so angry my body does not know how to process the feeling. I feel hot and I feel cold. The very edges of my vision have begun to contract, and I hear the dragon roaring.
“I should have slain you years ago,” I growl, swinging off my mount and approaching him, ready and prepared to throttle him with my bare hands.
Balthazar does not move. Instead, he looks at me and smirks in the most infuriating manner possible. “You and I both know that it is not possible to slay me. I am the repository of magic. I am the page upon which the ink rests. Kings come and go, but one thing remains the same. And that”—he spreads his clawed hands with a smarmy smirk—“is me.”