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

reached for my most private parts. I needed to scream, but choked on fingers instead.
    I had to focus. I had to be able to draw from the magic stored within me, for I could not grab onto any of my spells.
    A tongue wriggled into one ear. Fingers dug into my eyes, working to pluck them out. Hands pulled my fingers backward, pushing them so far they felt close to snapping.
    Focus.
    I drew up skeins of rage and dread magic. I forced my body to go limp and slack as I sought to ignore every assault. I made a quick and simple two-strand weave.
    Fingers dug into my armpits. Teeth bit into my back.
    I dropped the magic and tried to kick and punch the thing away. I couldn’t move an inch.
    Focus.
    I breathed in, past the fingers, so many, crammed into my mouth, past the mouth that bit into my nose and it was all too terrible. I had to get away. I had to run. I couldn’t do this.
    A hundred hands and mouths held me still.
    Focus.
    I dove into the magical wells deep within me where these awful mouths and hands couldn’t reach. I grabbed the nearest magic, some purplish melancholia. I pulled frantically at it, forming it up into a thick strand. Just that, perhaps, let loose and unformed. It might—
    The magic fell away as a mouth clamped onto my side and bit down, hard.
    There was no part of me not in agony and if this went on… it couldn’t go on.
    I tried to fight it, again.
    I failed.
    I tried again, and didn’t even come close to grasping my magic.
    So I stopped trying. I went limp, and I was always here and always going to be here until my body gave out. Every inch of my body was probed and pinched, bitten and licked.
    There was nothing and no place besides here and this and now. It would never change.
    And though I sought to accept that, every moment, every minute after long minute was an unbearable agony.
    Until something roared.
    The sound pierced the layers of gauze wrapped around me.
    The hands upon me tensed. The mouths bit down.
    Something roared louder.
    A second after the roar, something bashed into my side. I went flying and hit the ground, buffered by the amorphous blankets wrapped around me.
    The hands and mouths loosened and turned toward whatever had hit me. I shivered, desperately happy for this reprieve, for this moment when they weren’t grinding into me.
    As quickly as my stuttering mind could manage, I drew magic up from within me. I didn't do anything except tie ugly knots to keep it together and then flung it out, letting it loose. Unbridled magic created its own chaotic mayhem. While it might be the death of me it was better, anything was better, than being trapped within the Gray. I dumped more and more of it out, still blinded and cocooned. I felt the bright sparks of my magic, fizzing and buzzing like wicked firecrackers, exploding all around me.
    I got hit again, battered on my left side. I didn’t mind, for the hands and mouths were still distracted. I went skidding across… I couldn't tell what. Some hard surface.
    Roaring sound-waves pummeled into the Gray, thinning it.
    I heard a far-off voice yell. “Fie! Fie! You will not pass!”
    The mouths suckered harder onto my hands, my arms, my legs and belly. Fingers frantically tried to tear apart my face. The entire thing tightened like a constricting snake.Fingers pinched shut my nose and reached deep into my throat. I couldn’t breathe.
    I tried to break away. To bite down. To do anything.
    I failed.
    The darkness, a welcome break from the horror, swallowed me up.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 7
    The Best Dog
     
    I awoke some unknown amount of time later, heaving and retching up the meager contents of my belly onto the grassy ground. Green grass, not gray. There was sunshine overhead. And sweet air. I was not being assaulted on all and every side of me.
    I blinked. Those moist mouths.
    I vomited more, spitting up phlegmy strands of yellow and green bile when there was nothing left in my stomach.
    Those mothy fingers.
    I