Fairy Tale: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 3) Read Free Page B

should never have forgotten. I knew magic. I tried to focus on my power, but even as I did Kishi started to slip back down into the mud.
    “No!” I shouted and for a brief second my power flared. It flowed out of me like a wave crashing down on a beach, and just like that, I was falling backward with Kishi’s muddy body on top of me.
    She started to flail, covering my flesh in mud. “You saved me,” she gasped between great gulps of air.
    “Don’t mention it,” I said, trying to push her muddy body off of mine, but my hands just slipped away from her skin. “No… seriously. Don’t mention that we basically mud wrestled in a sticky jungle in our underwear.”
    Kishi glanced down at our intertwined bodies and a tremor ran through her form. She started squirming around like an eel on top of me. I’m assuming she was trying to get off of me, but all she managed to do was entangle our bodies further. Mud squelched between our flesh as I finally managed to roll us over so that I was on top.
    “Stop squirming,” Kishi snapped, glaring at me. “You’re just making this more difficult. If you just stop struggling—”
    “Is that what she said?” The voice that cut off Kishi mid-sentence cut through me like a dull knife. I froze. Someone had seen us, no, was watching us, roll around in the mud like some teenage fantasy? My heart began to thud in my chest, and my cheeks turned bright red.
    Very slowly, I glanced over my shoulder, and I’m fairly certain my eyes got as big as saucers. Standing there was a blue man no bigger than a marmot, which is to say not very big. He was blue from head to toe, with blue pants and a blue hat.
    Something shoved against my abdomen hard, and I tumbled head over heels. Kishi stood and brushed herself off, which did little more than smear mud around on her otherwise flawless skin. Maybe I had really needed to stop squirming in order for her to get free? Or maybe she was just more proficient when someone else pinned her down?
    She glanced back at me with a mischievous glint in her eye before turning back to the blue elf. “We come in peace,” she said extending her muddy palm toward it.
    He glanced curiously at her hand, his large blue nose sniffing at the air like a rodent. Very carefully, he shook his head once and scampered back over the log he had been sitting on. Kishi dashed after him without a care that she was virtually naked and mud-covered. Also, there was that whole chasing a strange indigenous creature through an enchanted forest thing too.
    That was exactly how grim fairy tales began.

Chapter 3
    “I can’t believe we lost him,” Kishi said for perhaps the fifteenth time.
    “I can’t believe you think you’d be able to catch him. I’ve tried to catch rabbits before and those don’t live in enchanted forests. Let me tell you, rabbits are damned hard to catch,” I responded.
    “Why would you chase rabbits?” Kishi asked, glancing at me and raising an eyebrow.
    “Mom made me do it.”
    I sighed and shook my head. We had been walking for what I think was an hour, but for all I knew it was much longer. Now, we were coming to some kind of village. Huts made almost entirely out of branches latticed together with fungus filled my view. It was as though someone made a frame out of sticks, and actually grew some kind of bright purple moss to fill in the gaps.
    “Well, if those creatures do live here, at least we know his house isn’t blue with a blue little window.” I smirked at Kishi who looked at me as though I was the dumbest person on the planet.
    “Doesn’t seem like anyone’s here,” she said, evidently choosing to ignore my reference. “Though since we’re on the edge of a lake, this is the perfect place for a village. Maybe it got all fished out or something, and it was abandoned.”
    “You don’t know it’s abandoned. It could be filled with blue elves,” I said, waving my hand toward the village.
    “Why do they have to be blue? They could be green