Teresa Medeiros - [FairyTale 02] Read Online Free PDF Page B

from the throat of hell itself. Its deafening clamor went on and on, sending the villagers fleeing into the night and leaving Gwendolyn at the Dragon’s mercy.
    Gwendolyn could not have said when she closed her eyes and began to scream. She only knew that the terrible roar died at the exact same moment as her scream.
    She slumped away from her bonds, going limp with terror. The rigid stake pressing against her spine was the only thing keeping her on her feet.
    It took her several long minutes to realize that the rain had died to a gentle patter, more melancholy than threatening. It took her even longer to screw up the courage to open her eyes.
    When she did, she discovered that her only companion was the headless statue of the woman in the corner, looking as forlorn and abandoned as she felt. She swallowed around a knot of panic. At least she still had her head.
    For now.
    That little girl’s voice came from somewhere in the past—from a time when she had believed that flickering will-o’-the-wisps haunted the marshes and bogs, that squat bogies could transform themselves into handsome men just long enough to lure innocent maidens to their ruin, and that a boy with eyes the color of emeralds might mistake her for an angel.
    She searched the shadows, realizing with a start that she was not alone after all. Someone… or something… was watching her.
    Although it cost her the very last crumbs of her strength, Gwendolyn forced herself erect, refusing to meet any monster, real or imagined, while cowering in terror.
    “I don’t believe in you, you know,” she called out. Embarrassed by the hoarse croak that emerged from her throat, she tried again. “This is 1761, not 1461, andI’m not some ignorant peasant you can intimidate with your superstitious nonsense!”
    When only the whisper of the rain greeted her defiant words, she wondered if perhaps her sanity had snapped somewhere during that torturous journey to the castle.
    She shook a sodden string of hair out of her eyes. “I’ll have you know I’m a student of science and rational thought. Whenever Reverend Throckmorton journeys to London, he brings me back pamphlets from the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge by Experiment!”
    A gust of wind swirled through the courtyard, snatching away her words and raising the gooseflesh on her arms.
There.
In the corner to her left, something had moved, had it not? Even as she watched, some formless shape was beginning to separate itself from the shadows. Her entire body began to quake with a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with the rain or the cold.
    “You don’t exist,” she whispered, praying that if she said it often enough, it would be true. “You don’t exist. You’re not real. I don’t believe in you.”
    Every instinct urged her to close her eyes and make the thing that was slowly emerging from the darkness go away. But the same damnable curiosity that had once prompted her to dip one of Izzy’s hair rags in a flask of oil and light it—while Izzy was wearing it— wouldn’t even allow her to blink.
    In the end, it wasn’t the stark ebony wings that rippledaround the magnificent breadth of his shoulders or the silvery smoke streaming from his nostrils that proved to be Gwendolyn’s undoing. It was his face—a face more terrible and beautiful than any she might have imagined.
    That face was the last thing she saw before her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped into a dead faint.

Chapter Three

    A STHEMANWHOCALLED himself the Dragon gazed with stunned disbelief upon the offering the villagers had left for him, the lit cheroot tumbled from his lips and hissed to its death in a puddle of rainwater.
    “I know you’ve earned a reputation for making women swoon,” his companion remarked, stepping out of the shadows and cocking one sandy eyebrow, “but never before at the mere sight of you.”
    The Dragon began to circle the stake, his long, black cloak billowing around his ankles