Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 131875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
On the other side of a portal, Kerrigan Argon lands in the home of the gods--alone.
She's lost everything: Her family. Her magic. Her world.
Even her dark Fae prince, Fordham Ollivier, has disappeared. She has no where to turn, and no idea how to survive in this new world.
The first kind face in the crowd gives Kerrigan hope. Until her would-be helpers, kidnap and deliver her into a new kind of hell and the only chance to get home--the gladiator ring.
Win the gladiator tournament and receive a gift from the gods.
Kerrigan is determined to gain that boon to save her people.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
The New Land
The grass under Kerrigan’s cheek was soft and springy. As if she were waking up back in her mountain home with the feather down mattress beneath her. Any second now, Benton and Bayton would sweep in and busy her out of the comfort of her Society accommodations and off to work. Her eyes would flutter open, and everything would be well.
But that wasn’t right at all.
Her head buzzed. Bees zipped in and out of her skull, and the noise was only getting louder as she drew closer to consciousness.
* * *
“Do you think she’s alive?”
* * *
Kerrigan shuddered at the sound of the voice. Her whole body trying, yet failing, to break out of whatever web she was snagged in.
* * *
“She looks a trifle dead to me, Matron.”
“She’s still breathing.”
“Barely.”
* * *
She needed to wake up. She needed to face what was on the other side of this mossy grass. There was something out there she needed to do.
But all of it felt so … distant.
It would be easier if she just lay here and did nothing. She had lost. That much bypassed the buzzing in her ears. She had lost, and she had traveled here—wherever here was—and giving up felt so much easier than fighting.
Surrender.
A voice like honey soothed her, silencing the bees and letting her know that it would be all right. Everything would work out. If she lay here and slept and forgot what she was after, then she could go on. And on sounded so much nicer than the alternative.
* * *
“Should I run for a healer?”
“Can’t afford one, can we? It’d be more than she’s worth.”
* * *
No.
She pushed the honey tongue away from her. Memories floated past it as Kerrigan forced her way through the viscous substance coating her memories and dragging her to the deep beyond. Her mission was important. It was the only way to save her friends and family back home. A home she might never return to if she didn’t push forward.
What was she supposed to be doing?
* * *
“I don’t know. That pink skin and red hair …”
* * *
Gentle like a lullaby, the answer returned to her.
Her mother.
Her mother was alive.
For eighteen years, she’d believed that her mother had died in childbirth. Most human women didn’t survive birthing a Fae child. Even a half-Fae, like Kerrigan, who had too much magic by most people’s standards, the mother rarely survived. It was something in the amount of magic that was incompatible with the human.
Except her mother had survived.
In fact, she’d left the land of the gods to drop Kerrigan off with her father to keep her safe. As scandalous as it was, her mother had already been married, and her husband would stop at nothing to remove an illegitimate child.
Now, she was Kerrigan’s only hope.
Alandria needed her. The city of Kinkadia needed her. The Society and all the dragons and all the people it had sworn to protect needed her.
And Kerrigan had to find her.
* * *
“Her eyes are moving. I think she’s waking up!”
* * *
Kerrigan coughed, spitting up blood onto the mossy blanket. She hacked until there was nothing left in her stomach.
The sun shone like a beacon overhead. She dug her fingers into the mossy grass, and it was not half as soft as she’d imagined. The blades scratched against her fingers, her eyes felt like she had sand in them, and there was an empty pit at the bottom of her stomach.
Her magic.
Oh, right.
Her magic was gone.
She retched again. Retched until she was dry-heaving and thought she might bring up her insides.
The rest of the problem came back to her in a hurry. The Red Masks, a terrorist group set on eradicating half-Fae and humans alike, had taken control of the Society at the induction of the new council. Kerrigan’s mentor, Bastian, revealed himself as the leader and slaughtered her surrogate mother, Helly. A circle of thirteen drained the magic from Kerrigan’s body. She and Fordham had escaped only to fall through a portal to Domara, the land of the gods. Her mother’s homeland.
One of those things was too much to handle.
All of them was a punch to the gut.
She couldn’t survive without magic. People went insane from a temporary loss. But this emptiness felt endless. If she thought about it for more than a second, her world went black at the edges.
No.
She pushed that thought away. She hadn’t died from it yet, and she wouldn’t die before she saved her people. There was no other option.
She needed Fordham.
She needed to find her mother.
And she needed to get home.
“Girl, are you well?” a female voice asked urgently.
It was one of the voices that Kerrigan had thought was lost in her mind. She finally peeled her eyes open long enough to discover there were in fact two people huddled over her. A pale, freckled older woman in a brown dress robe with her blonde hair up in curls and a much younger man who was shirtless, in nothing but dark brown pants. His skin was tan in comparison to the woman’s, and he had dark hair and eyes and a muscular torso and arms.