Blue Blood (Series of Blood Book 3) by Emma Hamm (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

her eyes, Mercy waved the others along. “Go on ahead. I’ll get the big guy.”

“You sure?” Tiny asked.

“Yeah. He needs to be introduced slow and easy, or he’ll faint again.”

With a wink, she wandered back to her Fairy and wondered how she was going to keep him awake this time.

Jasper sat on a log at the edge of a fire, wondering how he had managed to get himself in this predicament. One moment he was in a cell, and just two nights later he was staring at what some would call a nightmare. The rest would call it hell.

The creatures around him were more demon than man. Hell, some of them weren’t even man anymore.

He had thought he’d seen some drastically changed humans. Jasper hadn’t thought that magic had made human bodies so warped and wrong. The Centaur actually had a horse’s body below his hips. The Banshee didn’t have a corporal form.

And the Giant?

Jasper didn’t want to think about the Giant. Every time the ground started to shake, he got the jitters again. A real, honest to God, Giant.

Waking up had been disorienting. His head spun from the moment he looked up into Mercy’s ombre eyes. Unsurprisingly, she had been less than accepting of his need to ease into this new world. Instead, she threw him to the wolves and left him alone.

She had held her hand out for him and then withdrew it immediately as he reached for her. Jasper had thought they had created a bond in the forest. Fleeing from a common enemy could do that to people.

But no, they had gotten nowhere. She withdrew back into herself and left him to fend for himself in this strange new world. And this place was a completely different world.

His spine hunched as he watched real creatures walking among him. The Korrigan made Bluebell nervous. Even his tiny twitches made Jasper’s skin crawl.

“Not natural for a Fairy to become something else,” Bluebell grumbled. “If he was a Fae, this wouldn’t be happening. He’s something else that he doesn’t have any right to be.”

Jasper couldn’t help but agree.

Mercy was talking to the Thunderbird, another creature that made him nervous. He wanted to flinch every time it opened its beak. Beak! Sure, there were plenty of people that had bits and pieces of creatures showing through. Horns, feathers, scales, the lot.

But he had never thought in his life that he was going to look at something that wasn’t even remotely human.

The log creaked. He clenched his jaw, muscles bouncing, as he steeled his will. He could turn and see who it was that now sat beside him. It required more bravery than it should have.

Another beak. Wrinkles lined the Hag’s face, and she was covered with what he would describe as moth-bitten wool. She looked horrible. Scraggly hairs framed her face in long, tangled strands. She needed to bathe, or see a Sorceror about getting some kind of glamour.

She held a wooden bowl out to him.

He didn’t want to take it. He didn’t want to be poisoned, or worse, by creatures he didn’t know or trust. At some point, he knew he had to throw in the towel and just let life take him down the river. His stomach growled loudly.

So, he took the bowl from her with a small nod of thanks.

She didn’t appear capable of smiling, but the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened. When she opened her beak to speak, he tried not to wince at the chalkboard scraping voice. “We must look very strange to you.”

“That’s, uh—” He scratched the back of his neck. “That’s one way to say it.”

“You know we all looked like this long ago.”

“We?”

“The creatures inside of us.”

A question burned in his chest until he couldn’t hold it any longer. “If you look like your creatures, do you still share a space with the humans?”

Her silence made him fidget. Jasper understood how rude it had sounded. He had blurted the words as though they were vomit. These people hadn’t said a bad thing to him, and here he was asking personal questions. Maybe Mercy was right, and he did try to dissect people upon meeting them.

“We still share a space with them,” the Hag finally answered. “Without them, we would not exist. Surely you do not think we would stamp them out so quickly?”

“I don’t know what to think.” He lifted the bowl to his mouth to keep his tongue from wagging any further.

It appeared he was not going to be given that amount of privacy. Instead, the Hag used the pause to ask a question of her own. “How did you meet our girl?”

He swallowed hot soup too fast and began to cough. “Uh, we both, uh… Well you see—”

Mercy’s voice drifted out of the fire. “We were in a prison.”

The flames roared higher into the night. Within them, a scene manifested. He stared at the image of himself caged in a cell, anger distorting his face into that of a wild animal. Somewhere behind him, the shadows rolled. Jasper hadn’t realized he looked quite so fierce. His hair was tangled into a lion’s mane, beard overgrown, dirt smearing his arms and clothing. It was easy to forget he was a large man when he housed a Fairy inside of him.

“Mercy,” the Hag gently chided, “eavesdropping is rude.”

“And yet, it is the only way I hear things at all.”

The flames shifted back to a normal bonfire’s height. Jasper couldn’t help but wonder if she still listened. His eyes found her seated at the Giant’s much larger fire, which spewed sparks constantly into the air. She laughed at a conversation he could not hear.

His gaze lingered upon the long line of her throat. Cords of muscle disappeared into the brightly colored wrap someone at the camp had given her. She looked as though she wore flames instead of fabric. Fitting, as she often burst into flame without warning.

“You watch her very carefully for one who professes not to like