บททั้งหมดของ Fairy-Struck: บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

Restraining Bress wasn't a problem since I kept him enchanted all the way down to the dungeon. It was two floors below the dining hall and was actually pretty nice for a dungeon; not that I'd seen a lot of them. It had clean cells equipped with sturdy beds, little private bathrooms, and small dining sets. They looked pretty damn comfortable... except for the bars and bare stone walls that is.I waited until Bress was locked away in one of the cells - the only one now occupied - before I released him from the enchantment. He immediately fell to his knees; his whole body shaking as he lost the contents of his stomach all over the stone floor."Maybe I shouldn't have let him eat first," I said dryly."My Lord Bress, are you all right?" Tiernan called out tersely. "There is a washroom behind you if you need some water."Bress spat, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then rolled his eyes up to stare at me. His shoulders were tense and his expression was enraged. I caught myself

The tunnels were empty, and we made good time in reaching the lower levels of the castle, but once we were there, I realized there was another flaw to our plan. I had no idea where they kept the seelie prisoners. Tiernan saw me hesitate as I stepped out of the tunnels, and he stepped past me to look around."Prisoners are commonly kept in cells." Tiernan glanced back at me. "True for humans and fairies.""Excellent," I said and looked around the large room. "You think those cells are down here?"We were in the bowels of the castle and the room we stood in was carved out of the mountain itself. The stone was roughhewn, with obvious tool marks marring its damp surface. The floor was smoother than the walls, laid with tiles of some kind of gray stone. Directly in front of us was a set of stairs and although it was too dark to see how far up they went, I knew from my last journey down them that they went quite far. At the base of the stairs, a hook was set into the wall and a lantern hu

We couldn't risk taking the seelie back to the Twilight Castle and have my father discover what we'd done, so we had to take them directly to the Seelie Court. Unfortunately, the fairy mound which led to the Seelie Court was all the way on the other side of the Twilight Kingdom and we couldn't make it that far by nightfall. So, after a few hours, we decided to make camp.When I opened the door of my carriage, the moth that I'd completely forgotten about flew out and landed on my shoulder. "There you are." I gave it a quick glance before I reached up to help my passengers out."I don't know how you did it, but thank you for bringing us a mending moth," said an apsara—a fairy of clouds and waters—as she took my hand."A what?" I cocked my head at her as she found her feet."A mending moth." She drew a graceful finger down the blood-red fur of the moth's body. "They can heal almost anything with their dust." Then she leaned down to speak to the moth, "Thank you again, little one."Th

It took a full day to get to the Seelie Castle. We had to go through another fairy mound; this one was set with silver gates with a stylized sun in the center of them. Beneath the golden sun was a castle that perched high on a hill, the base of which was surrounded by a forest, just like the other gates, but this castle and forest were carved from ivory.I thought back to when we'd left the Unseelie Kingdom and remembered how the mound we'd traveled through to get there, the one with the golden moon gates, had a different scene entirely on the other side. When we'd returned to Twilight, the gold gates we passed through had a silver star in their center with a silver castle and forest beneath. Just like the door leading from Gentry to Twilight. I was right; the doors were an indication of where the paths led.It was a few more hours to the Seelie Castle from the rath. We once more pulled off the dirt road early so we could sneak up on foot. Although, there would now be quite a few mor

"That was awkward," Amanda said."And totally stupid." I rolled my eyes. "This is my father's business. All of those fairies work for him so we weren't in any danger.""They were all fairies?" She gaped at me."Uh, yeah." I chewed at my lip. I hadn't thought of how to handle Amanda's knowledge of the Fey. "Look, it could be dangerous for you to talk about fairies. I'm going to take you to the Human Council, and they'll be able to help you get back home and sort things out but they're probably going to tell you the same thing; you need to pretend that you don't know anything about the Fey.""Trust me, I want this all to just go away," she said. "I'm not going to cause any problems. Besides, who's going to believe me? They'd lock me up in the loony bin.""Great." I grinned as we exited the elevator and headed toward the reception desk. "I mean about your not talking, not the loony bin part."Sunlight poured in from the wall of windows; blending with the artificial light shed by the