Barbarian Prince Read Online Free PDF Page B

Monica with her elbow.
    Monica lifted her head and stared at her blurry eyed. “We’re still here,” she muttered. “It wasn’t a nightmare.”
    “ Actually it is. Unfortunately, it’s also real.”
    The old woman they’d jumped the night before came in with some more of the same nasty food she’d brought the night before, grinned at them, displaying more gum than rotting teeth and then left without untying them.
    “ I guess we’re supposed to make like inch worms and mosey on over there and eat with our faces,” Monica muttered. “Not that I’m hungry enough to eat that … whatever it is. I’m dying of thirst, though.”
    “ Let’s don’t talk about that. My eyeballs are floating.”
    “ You just had to bring that up!” Monica snapped irritably.
    “ I didn’t bring it up! You did!”
    Monica fumed for a little while. Fortunately, a guard came as the sun began to rise above the horizon. Opening the door to their cage, she gestured at them to come out.
    Monica and Noelle both stared at her uneasily and pretended they had no idea the woman wanted them to leave the cage. After glaring at them for a moment, she lifted her head, turned, and yelled at someone they couldn’t see.

Chapter Three
    “ That sounded like ‘come help me’ to me,” Monica murmured.
    “ Yeah. So they have been pretending they don’t understand us. I mean, assuming we’re right and that’s what she meant.”
    Apparently that was exactly what she’d yelled because in a few minutes another warrior arrived and the two ducked through the door of the prison/cage. Each of them was grabbed unceremoniously by an alien, hauled up and out of their cage. The binding at their ankles was removed and then they were marched through the village and out the other side.
    Noelle, convinced they were on the way to a sacrificial ceremony, began to fight for her freedom the minute that thought occurred to her, fought for all she was worth—which was not much since she was still tied. The warrior woman merely hauled her up and flung her over one shoulder, gripping her thighs hard enough she couldn’t kick and ignoring the blows she rained down on the woman’s back with her bound fists.
    She reared up, trying to see where they were going, trying to convince herself they would’ve headed to an altar or maybe the main lodge near the center of the village if they actually were plotting a sacrificial ceremony. She was still struggling to break free when the woman abruptly stopped, dragged her from her shoulder and then half shoved, half pitched her backwards.
    Flailing wildly to recover her balance, Noelle caught nothing but a flash of rocks. She screamed at the top of her lungs as she felt herself flying backwards and descending—her first thought that she’d been thrown from a cliff—a scream that ended in a gurgle when she hit water and sank below the surface like a stone. As tired as she was from fighting the warrior, the fear of drowning galvanized her. She began beating at the water around her and trying to push herself upwards with her feet.
    That was when she discovered the water she’d been tossed into was only a few feet deep.
    Monica was bobbing up and down a few feet away, screaming her head off when Noelle stood up.
    “ Stand up!” Noelle yelled at her. “Can’t you reach the bottom?”
    The question seemed to penetrate Monica’s terror. She stood up shakily. “I was in a hole,” she lied.
    The two alien women, they discovered, were laughing at them.
    It was the first time in her life that Noelle had actually experienced the urge to kill. She thought, though, that if she’d had a weapon to hand she would have slain both of their tormentors in that moment.
    She exchanged a long, speaking look with Monica. “It’s a damn good thing I don’t know their language,” Noelle muttered. “I might be tempted to say something I shouldn’t.”
    “ Bathe!” the alien that had carried her to the river snapped. “You stink!”
    “