Wish Bound (A Grimm Agency Novel Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

to hit her with. “Not going to happen.”
    I know exactly what a tennis ball feels like, when someone lines up and smacks it so hard it breaks the sound barrier. I can’t say what she hit me with, just that I went flying so hard and fast I hit the ground before I had time to flinch.
    “You bear my mark.” Isolde appeared at the edge of my vision, gliding toward me like a phantom, staring down at me like Death himself. “You wear my ring. A ring you chose to put on. You declared yourself my handmaiden before the Court of Queens.”
    Now, I can explain the mark. That was so not my fault, using the Black Queen’s bones to kill a fairy. The ring, I could almost explain. I really, really needed to get into the Court of Queens. As in, “The world will end if I don’t get in there.” That said, when I did those things, I still believed the Black Queen was dead. Standing before her never appeared anywhere on my “Things Marissa needs to do” list.
    I kicked myself to my feet, unwilling to let her stare me down. “You want the ring back, take it.” I’m not entirely crazy. The debate in the Court of Queens over whether or not it was possible for me to be a handmaiden ended with the decision to seal the ring on me, until such time as Isolde took it from me.
    I held out my hand, beckoning. “You want it?”
    “No, handmaiden.” Isolde shook her head once. “You will be my emissary to the Court of Queens.”
    Some people just don’t listen. So I picked up a chair and swung it at her, getting a nice smooth arc that would make a professional wrestler proud.
    The chair
exploded
across her, shattering into a thousand pieces.
    She didn’t move. If I’d hit her with a foam bat, I’d have done more. Splinters of wood rained like confetti all around her, and she had the absolute gall to ignore me.
    “I don’t force my handmaidens. They come to me willingly.” She raised her hand toward Ari, and Ari convulsed. “I also don’t challenge lesser opponents, but I don’t deny them that right.”
    I flung myself at the Black Queen, reaching for hair, clawing at eyes. I’d learned more martial arts than you’d think possible, but all of that was self-defense. In a brawl, a good hair pulling works perfectly well.
    From what I could tell, I didn’t fall, the carpet zoomed up to smack me, then bounced me into the air and hit me like a fist again. And the building began to shake.
    See, there was this one time when I impersonated a genocidal fairy-tale character and shot up a village full of wolves (in retrospect, it doesn’t sound so great). In the process, I rescued a Fae child, and his mother rewarded me with the worst pets in existence.
    The windows split, spiderwebs running through them, and blew inward.
    My pets were fifty percent cat, fifty percent ghost, one hundred percent psychotic. Creatures of pure magic, living spells called harakathin, they started out cute and cuddly, like a pirhana. You know how people pick a puppy at the shelter, and a few years later it weighs three hundred pounds and eats ponies?
    My harakathin did something like that. The only good thing was the older they got, the less inclined to leave the house they were. Long as we sacrificed a daily can of cat food to them, they were happy. And when people made the mistake of threatening me, my harakathin objected in ways that required replacing the carpet, the windows, and every bone in the person’s body.
    A pressure wave burst past me, heading for Isolde.
    Where she’d regarded me as nothing more than a nuisance, Isolde glanced at the air above me and switched to a battle stance. Of course she had spirit sight—I’d never seen it mentioned, but from the way her eyes tracked movement, I had no doubts. She held one arm in front of her, and with the other, held a whip of raw magic, which bubbled out of her hand. She lashed out with it, twisting her whip through the air to strike.
    I closed an eye and peered through the veil. There, I could see my