Reign (An Unfortunate Fairy Tale, #4)(82)

Mina pointed her finger at him. “No, I mean someone else—wait, listen!”

Jared stopped and tried to listen, but all he could hear was the beating of his own nervous heart, when he focused he heard how quiet the woods behind the house had become…too quiet.

“The bullfrogs, they stopped,” he whispered.

The screen door opened again, and Kathleen exited the house holding something in her hands. She turned towards the woods and started down a small gravel path toward the creek.

Jared yanked Mina into his arms and dropped to the ground. She struggled slightly under his upper body weight and the inconvenience of being smothered by his leather jacket, but he couldn’t worry about that. He needed to make sure that he masked her human scent. At least she couldn’t sense that there was another Fae nearby.

Of course Mina wouldn’t know that. Maybe he should tell her the reason for pressing her face into the earth and practically making her eat dirt, but that wasn’t in his nature. He would just let her grumble and fume and complain.

He watched Kathleen walk to the creek bed and crouch down beside the running water. “You’re a disappointment, Tom, just like all the others.” Kathleen spoke sadly.

Jared felt Mina wiggle underneath him and escape enough for her head to pop up. She’d be able to look through the tall grass to watch what was unfolding in front of them.

Kathleen slid off her shoes and stepped into the dark murky water. As soon as her legs touched the flowing liquid, her legs turned green and sinewy, her mouth began to stretch and widen, and her eyes grew even larger until she resembled a skinny but very human-sized frog.

Her green webbed fingers still clutched something in her hands, and it was trying to jump away from her, but she gave it a slight shake in frustration. Jared heard the small croak come from the frog she was holding.

“You were supposed to save me and end my curse. You promised to be my prince. Instead, you failed. And now you are like all the others. Ugly, useless, beasts.”

She flung the bullfrog, who was once a very human Tom, into the creek, and he landed in the water with a small splash. A few seconds later Tom’s frog head peeked above the water and croaked at her in protest. Followed by another frog head, and another frog head. The creek was quickly filled with dozens of large bullfrogs. All of them were croaking at Kathleen in anger.

She waved her hand at them, and they silenced their croaking symphony.

“You’re all disappointments. Failures. Making promises you cannot keep. You deserve your fate. Every single one of you,” she yelled into the night before walking to the edge of the marshy creek. Once she’d stepped onto the embankment her glamour faded, and she was fully human again. She collapsed to the ground and began to sob miserably.

The wind picked up, and the tree’s branches blew. A whispering moan filled the air. Kathleen and Mina didn’t hear the ethereal words whispered into the night, but Jared did. And he shivered in understanding as the Fae warning raked through his very core.

This is not her tale to finish, but yours.





Chapter 2


“We need to do something!” Mina demanded. “We should have gone back there and captured her in the Grimoire.” She yanked on the ends of her jacket in frustration.

He sighed and shifted gears in the car as he sped toward the international district to take Mina home. Good thing Mina just used the word should and didn’t command him to go back. There was only so much he could do to indirectly disobey her since she had the Grimoire. If she figured out just how linked they actually were, then there would be no end to her demands. He would be stuck saving every lost kitten, dog, and—in this case—frog.

No, it was better that she never learned this particular secret. Mina needed to believe simply that he was a Fae and that he was there to guide her—sort of—some of the time—when he felt like it.

“You just can’t go charging in declaring war on every Fae you don’t like and trapping them in the book. I hate to use this pun in the situation, Mina, but you really need to look before you leap.”

“I have to stop her. That’s my quest. It’s the frog prince tale. I’m sure of it.”

“But how are you going to stop her? You could have captured her right there and—boom!—quest over.”

She turned and gave him an ugly glare. “I would have, if you hadn’t shown up on my personal stake-out and interfered. Which leads me to my next question. Why in the world did you show up in the middle of the woods?”

He gripped the steering wheel and took the right on to Main Street a little too fast. Mina clutched the door handle until her knuckles turned white. He felt a little bad and released pressure off of the gas pedal, but not much.

“You saw what she became. You saw what she did to…to…that young man!” Mina pleaded at him with her big brown eyes. Gosh, she didn’t know what those pleading eyes did to him. It made him feel weak, and he hated being weak.

“So what! Did you even ask yourself if maybe he did something bad and deserved being turned into a toad?” Jared spat out harshly. A knee-jerk reaction to the way she was making him feel internally.

Mina blinked, taken aback by his harsh tone. “No, that never crossed my mind at all, because she was the one that was the walking-talking toad monster. Not Tom.”

“So now it’s Tom, is it?” he grit his teeth in anger and actually missed the turn for her apartment. After a quick U-turn, he pulled in front of the Golden Palace Chinese Restaurant and checked to see if he could see Mrs. Wong inside. Nope, the restaurant was as dark and abandoned as the rest of the street. He was free from running into the annoying woman.