The King's Leash (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 7) Read Free Page A

sifted through a couple of boxes until I found it: an old Ouija board from the 1800’s. It was made of leather and waxed papyrus. Though I'd never had any luck using it to contact the dead (ghosts were terrible spellers), the board had other uses. I unfolded it on top of my card table and beckoned the cowering man to come and sit beside me.
    “How will that help?” Lila asked, peering over my shoulder. She ran her fingers across the alphabet and then the yes and no written in the corner. She held the weighted crystal planchette that was used to slide easily over the surface of the board, and then put it down.
    “Any guesses?” I asked.
    She thought for a long moment, and then said, “By doing what he does not want?”
    “Indeed,” I murmured.
    The faerie-dust-addled man walked step by cautious step toward us, looking as though each motion might fell him. I held out a length of hempen rope toward him. “Come. This won't be easy for any of us, but it will work.”
    He glanced backwards at my door, but then sat down. Lila put her hands on his shoulders as I tied him firmly to the chair. He did not struggle, but relaxed once he was bound and the option of fleeing had been taken from him. Had he always been so gutless?
    “Tell me, how did you become a man of the faeries?” I asked, starting with an easy question to ease him into this interrogation. I slid the crystal piece over the letters of the alphabet written with an artful hand. I watched and moved the piece where he seemed the most uncomfortable. Spelling out words and using yes and no questions, slowly we learned his truth.
    There are secret histories everywhere. Some are forgotten. Some are poorly-recorded. And some are kept hidden on purpose. A faerie tale, a true one, is rarely found and rarely told, for the fae folk have little reason to have contact with humans, and many reasons to stay away.
    This group of faeries had lived peaceably, hidden from the local tribes for thousands of years, but when white people began to settle in the 1850s, the faeries soon found that the land they had once roamed freely through was filling up with roads, cleared land, and many more people. The faeries decided they need a human to teach them about all the humans populating Seattle. So this man, an early settler of the city, had been taken under their hill. He’d been beguiled, tricked, and dusted so that he might serve them.
    Faeries were ever and always casually cruel, and though I did not ask him about it, I imagined the long years of being half-starved by fae who would forget to procure him human food, or being left shackled to a tree for days after some bacchanalian excess. Faeries were not evil, but like many humans, they could not imagine another creature being as important as themselves.
    And so this man had lived below for a century and a half, surrounded and beguiled by faeries.
    “And why are you here now?” I asked. “What has happened?”
    The man rocked back and forth in the chair and shook his head. Waves of fear rolled off him.
    “You are here to help your faeries,” I reminded him. “They will thank you for your help.”
    “Will they?” he asked with a ragged voice.
    I slid the piece across my Ouija board, watching him and moving the planchette in the direction that produced the most protestations and whimpers. I spelled out, An attack. Rotting within .
    “A what now?” Lila asked.
    It puzzled me as well. An attack on a faerie hill was rare: they were generally wrapped tight with a dozen forms of faerie magic that made the place unappetizing for anyone not of their ilk. And any hunters? A faerie did not make a good meal, in flesh or magics. And though faeries waged war against each other, that was a common thing. This man would not be here if it was that kind of attack.
    “It emerges,” he stuttered. His whole body shook and his jaw clenched.
    “Steady on,” I murmured, “We are almost done. All I need to know is where the hill is.” I moved the