Princess of Shadows: A Dark Fae Fantasy Romance by Olivia Hart (read me a book txt) 📕

It was like that, except instead of the stutter happening to a movie or song. It was my very existence that stuttered. For that half-second, I was sure that I was as close to being dead as possible. There was this nothingness everywhere.

Then it was over, and there was no mistaking it. If I’d had a cute little dog with me, I’d have told him that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Instead of being in my room or a crackhouse or even a forest somewhere, Tinkerbell and I reappeared into something out of an alien movie. We were in a cave filled with a dim light that seemed to come from the very rock itself. I hesitated to think it, but it felt almost magical. A perpetual gray twilight. No color. No smell. No sound.

There was a mist, though. Barely noticeable, it filled the tunnel we were in. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down, tried to stop the panic that threatened to make me freeze again, and I felt the mist move against my lips, soft and damp. Like fog on a cool morning.

I was still hanging over Tinkerbell’s shoulder, and I tried to wiggle off him, but his arm clamped down tightly over my waist, holding me tightly against his shoulder like I was a bag of flour.

“I’ll explain everything soon, but we have to move,” Sebastian said as he began sprinting down the tunnel.

He took a deep breath, and the mist gathered around him. When he exhaled, a mirror image of us appeared. It kept pace with us, and when Sebastian ran his hand along the walls of the tunnel, the mirror image did the same thing.

I started to yell as what was happening started to click into place. Some crazed, knife-wielding, bad guy was abducting me and running through a magical cave after I’d teleported through a mirror into a crackhouse. As soon as any sound left my lips, Tinkerbell slapped my ass hard enough that the sound carried through the caves, echoing over and over again. “Shut up or you’re going to get us both killed,” he whispered.

Then, the copy of us that had been running next to us somehow flowed into the rock. Sebastian kept running, and I looked down, realizing that mist had surrounded his boots, becoming almost solid. His footfalls should have made noise, but they didn’t. Somehow, that mist was keeping his footsteps completely silent.

Once more, he created a copy of us and began to run his hands along the wall. The entire time, he continued to sprint, and I thought of how much I’d run in my life. How could he possibly still be sprinting while carrying me? I would have been dead a mile back if I’d tried to do this.

My awe went away pretty quickly as the minutes passed. I wanted to scream, but I knew that he’d just hit me again, and maybe he was right. Maybe that other guy with freaking bloody knives was the actual bad guy.

The longer that he carried me, the more the questions that had no answers plagued me. Where were we going? Where were we? How’d we get here? How did I walk through a magic mirror? Who was chasing me? And, more than anything, who the fuck was Sebastian?

The copy slid into the wall just as the last one had. Sebastian still ran. The tunnel was eerily silent as we moved. No footsteps. No panting. No dripping water. No noise.

He put his hand against the tunnel wall again as he ran, letting his fingers trail against the strange gray rock. We ran into a fork in the tunnel, and he stopped.

Then I heard a sound. The first one since we’d gotten to the tunnels. Footfalls. Far away, but definitely there. Did the mist not cover the other man in black?

Another copy of us formed from the mist, and it began running just as we had. The copy of Sebastian began to run his fingers against the stone, and then he stopped, sliding into the stone, becoming a shadow as he did.

I could feel Sebastian’s heart pounding, but his breathing hadn’t changed. I knew instinctively that silence was our best friend in these tunnels because our tail could hear us just as easily as we could hear him. I would trust Sebastian just long enough to take me away from bloody knives guy.

Sebastian turned down the split, making another copy of him as we ran. The copy slid into the stone. We moved just a little further down, and Sebastian made yet another copy, sending it much farther down the tunnel.

I watched it, still amazed at how realistic it was. Fully solid. Identical in every way. It moved just as we had. At one point, a copy had turned around, and I’d seen the copy of Sebastian’s eyes, and that was when I realized the difference. There was no fire in them. None at all.

I smiled to myself when I realized that I could see the difference. It only brought those same questions back to me. Questions that couldn’t be asked here. I would get answers though. And soon.

The homeless woman’s words echoed in my mind. The world is about to become a very strange place for you. She had been more accurate than I could have imagined. How had she known? That was the second time that she’d predicted something no one could have known. A shiver ran through me. What else had she said? I didn’t have long to think on it, though.

A second later, Sebastian touched the wall in front of us, and then we slid through the nothingness.

Chapter 8

Rose

When we left the nothingness, I was immediately confronted with the fact that we still weren’t in Kansas anymore. Not even close. I’d thought the tunnel was weird. I was wrong. This place was even weirder. Like, pinnacle of weirdness.

I glanced up at