Page 141 of Once Upon a Fable

My hands clawed at the trunks, struggling to get a good hold.

God, he’s heavy.

Even with his weight distributed by the stretcher, it still cost me. Jerking him higher, I did my best to get a strong position, then lurched forward and dragged him behind me.

I dragged, and I dragged.

At one point, he groaned.

A guttural groan full of pain.

I almost dropped him. A sick recipe of hope and anxiety commanded I check on him.

But he fell silent as quickly as he’d made a noise, and I kept going.

Kept dragging him through the darkness, resting, stumbling, struggling...all the way back to his ivy-covered, secret-shrouded mansion.

CHAPTER THREE

––––––––

“STAND UP STRAIGHT, ALL of you.”

We all snapped upright, a long line of Fable kids who’d been summoned before our master.

Storymaker sat slouched in his favourite chair in the library. He nursed a drink that he’d made Elise pour for him. He trailed his fingers up her delicate forearm as he accepted the glass. Tugging her forward, he tiptoed his fingers up her bicep to her cheek in that sick, disgusting way that said he had two tasks for her tonight.

A guest and himself.

I almost bit my tongue into pieces, doing my best not to launch myself at him for touching her. For daring to make her tremble. For making her owlish eyes gleam with knowing tears.

If I could, I’d take her place. I’d volunteer, just like I volunteered as much as I was physically able, accepting the beatings and sodomy so my family didn’t have to.

I was the oldest, after all.

It was my job to protect them.

The only problem was, Storymaker preferred girls. He’d yet to touch any of us boys, and it fucking killed me that I couldn’t step in and save her.

Dismissing Elise, Storymaker narrowed his gray eyes at us as she joined our lineup. Watching us over his glasses, he sipped his drink and made us all squirm in tense silence.

I happened to know he was almost blind without his thick glasses, their silver frame painting him as some bookish father figure with saltand pepper hair, long, lean body, and obscenely feminine hands.

He’d been the feature of many of my nightmares.

His feeble, nerdy body was unable to create too much pain by fists and feet alone, but his affection for torture, sex, and age-old sadism had well and truly made him the scariest motherfucker in this house.

“Neo, didn’t I tell you to stand up?” Storymaker drawled, his stare locking onto the boy beside me. The boy who’d named himself after his favorite character of all time. He wanted to be Neo fromThe Matrix. A man who’d been normal until he suddenly wasn’t.

Neo bowed his head, his black hair swinging to obscure his face. His almond eyes, courtesy of a Vietnamese mother who’d been raped by an Englishman, gleamed with hate. He braced his shoulders, sticking his scrawny chest out.

Storymaker huffed. “Are you forgetting your manners, my children? What are you supposed to say when I summon you to a family meeting?”

I swallowed bile that washed up my throat, reciting along with my fellow prisoners. “Thank you so much, Master, for giving us a night of fun. We can’t wait to play with our friends.” Our voices all droned together, sounding like a hive of dying honeybees. “We promise to be good. We promise to go to bed when they tell us and to play whatever game they want. We promise to make you proud.”

Quell, standing next to Neo, wretched, her blond hair jerking as she pursed her lips and swallowed down whatever her stomach had tried to evict. Nyx with her fire-colored hair and milky skin grabbed her hand. Nyx seemed even whiter tonight. A ghost with flames upon her head, her light green eyes locked on the window as if she could escape.

“Ah, ah, ah, what have I told you? No touching unless a guest commands it.” Storymaker leaned forward, his temper cutting through the suave refinement he did his best to maintain.