Rogue's Pawn Read Online Free Page B

my heart.
    Then was gone.
    I cautiously opened the eyes I hadn’t remembered closing. Even the brook’s babbling had ceased. It, too, was gone.
    The Dog stood an arm’s length in front of me. He loomed a good half-a-head above me, where I was still kneeling in the pool of my black skirt. We were the antipode of the virgin and the unicorn. My already straining heart thumped with the tension.
    I thought about wishing him gone.
    He leaped.
    I screamed.
    My hands flew up like the frightened birds as his teeth buried in my throat, launching me backward. I braced to die. Being torn apart by a wild animal had always seemed the worst possible death to me. I waited for the tearing pain, wondering how long I’d stay conscious and aware—something I always wondered when I read those horrific news stories—but found myself still pinned under steel jaws while I sobbed.
    I fought. Frantic. Shredding myself against him. The Dog pinned me, a relentless strength, a furnace of heat and muscles under glossy fur. Tears ran hot over my cheeks and down my neck.
    A panicked shriek bubbled up through the sobs, my chest billowing with it, but the Dog only sank down tighter, stopping my voice, my breath.
    A sweet fragment of blue beckoned me, past his great obsidian head. Wishes. I could wish for rescue in this crazy place. I focused on the wish, but the Dog growled softly and closed his jaws slightly more. Stars sparked at the edges of my eyes.
    “Please…” I tried to choke out, part sob, part whimper.
    Blood-dark gathered at the edges of my vision, seeping in, blurring the circle of blue sky above, then drowning it in blackness.

ChapterThree
    In Which I Am Nullified
    I awoke to stone walls.
    My throat screamed. When I tried to swallow, it seared like the worst strep infection on the face of the earth. Or wherever the hell I was, since I was clearly still Elsewhere. I wasn’t dead, at least, unless being dead sucked more than I’d imagined. My contact lenses were glued to my eyeballs, my body was one giant bruise, and the pain in my neck echoed dully through every joint.
    Peripheral vision told me I was lying on some sort of bed, on top of a deep blue coverlet. The gray stones of the walls rose to a ceiling high enough to gather shadows. Misty light fell through a window behind my head and I could see a stripe of ashen sky through a window at my feet. The sill looked to be as deep as my forearm and so it cut off most of the view from this angle. There seemed to be no glass in it—nor in the one behind me, judging by the chill breeze coming from that way. It put me in mind of the ruined castles in Scotland. Only somewhat less desolate.
    I shifted carefully, to see if moving would make me feel worse. It did. The pain in my throat consumed me. I reached up to touch it, wondering if I would feel a bloody gash, but the drag of chain on my wrist halted the movement. Turned out, both wrists and ankles were chained.
    Charming.
    I lifted my right hand, rolling my eyes as far as I could to see it better. A silver cuff circled my wrist, attached to what appeared to be several feet of chain running over the edge of the pallet. Attached to the bed or wall somewhere, probably with iron rings cemented into the stones. I kicked up one foot. Same arrangement on my ankle. They probably didn’t give me enough slack to sit up, though I wasn’t feeling excited about trying that yet. This was fast going from Disney Ireland to Wes Craven’s Ireland.
    At least I wasn’t chained naked to this bed. As it was, I felt acutely aware of the pressure of the cuffs on my skin, the soft slink of the chains as I moved.
    With a sigh, I closed my eyes, trying to focus my thoughts. Okay, this could be real or not real. Under “not real” fell all sorts of unpleasant alternatives like concussion, coma, psychosis. I could be locked in my own skull for whatever reason, my neurons struggling to make sense of random signals. Not a pretty prospect. And not one I could