Happily Ever Awkward (The H.E.A. Files, #1)(62)

“They symbolize your perverted… perversion!” Princess Luscious spat, wrenching the chain toward Seeboth with even greater force.

As it jumped toward him, the dark wizard planted a foot on the chain and pinned it to the platform. “Hear me, Luscious. Please, just hear me. These chains, I forged them myself. One link at a time, to remind me. One link for every year I sought the Spell of Unmaking… which is really to say, one link for every year I sought you. Can you not see how long I’ve been waiting for you? Have you not realized that without you and without your love, my princess… I have no magic.”

Princess Luscious froze. Seeboth’s words had almost sounded… romantic. And that triggered her Princess Reflex.





One must not judge Princess Luscious too harshly for her reaction at this moment. Royal daughters are trained even more strictly than royal sons, drumming the Princess Mindset into them until it becomes pure reflex — even though that reflex often works to the detriment of the princess.

One such Princess Reflex is Victim Mode, which strikes whenever she is threatened, inconvenienced, or simply too lazy to do something herself and subsequently requires a Prince Charming to save her.

Another such reflex is the Swoon, and it strikes whenever she is confronted by either True Romance or Very Cheesy Pickup Lines. Because a princess often has a hard time telling the two apart, the aftermath of a Swoon may trigger another round of Victim Mode, which will then lead to another Swoon, and so on, and so on, in an endless loop.

This loop is called Dating.

Dating, however, does not usually involve being killed to end the universe.





“Do you really mean that?” Princess Luscious asked softly. “Do I bring magic into your life?”

“Of course you do,” Seeboth said. He moved the last few feet toward Princess Luscious, stumbling through several treacherous loops of chain as he went. “Why, without you, I would have no one to sacrifice.”

As quickly as it had started, the Swoon reflex ended, and Victim Mode resumed in full force.

“What? Wait, no! Stay back! Someone help me!” She started swinging the chain again, but it was too late. Seeboth was already in stabbing range.

“I just want you to know, I’ll never forget what we shared,” he said. “Now don’t move—”

He jabbed the sword at her, but at that moment Laura suddenly made her move, shoving Princess Luscious from the platform!

As the startled princess plunged with a shriek, her chains slithered over the edge of the platform and pulled a loop of chain tight around Seeboth’s ankles, jerking him past Laura and whipping him over the edge as well.

In the moment of his whisking past, Laura grabbed the shackle key from his belt. Everything had gone according to plan.

She snorted. “Not so hard being a hero—”

That was the precise moment a loop of chain tightened around her ankles and yanked her over the edge of the platform right after the others.

The trio jackknifed toward certain death. Fortunately, the chains were bolted to the altar, so the slack quickly ran out and jerked them up short.

Princess Luscious dangled like a marionette from her shackles. Above her, Laura and Seeboth tangled among the four chains that stretched upward from the princess’ wrists and ankles. Together, they all swayed in a pendulous arc, thirty feet below the platform and one hundred stories above the ground, hanging from the full length of Seeboth’s “love”.





50



THE LONE ARCHER


For an overweight, middle-aged pirate who wore an ill-fitting cannonball as a prosthetic skull, Captain Head could certainly swing a cutlass. Each blow sent shockwaves quivering along Jack’s sword and up his arms like the impact from a charging bull.

The pirate’s considerable bulk also provided him with certain wall-like qualities that made it virtually impossible for Jack to budge him from his stance upon the uneven stairs. Jack, on the other hand, found himself battered left and right, always in danger of toppling down the central shaft, but this time without the aid of a severed Zombie arm to save him.

Jack’s swordplay devolved into a sad display of flinching and flailing, rather like watching a clumsy man trying to fend off a swarm of bees while dancing on spilled marbles along the edge of a cliff.

As Captain Head continued his hammering assault, Jack flailed a desperate, careless blow that did nothing more than glance harmlessly from the pirate’s iron cheek. But, in the process of glancing, it flipped up the eye patch over Captain Head’s left eye and revealed a lightning-bolt-shaped impression cut into the iron of the pirate’s brow.

Jack’s eyes opened wide because the sight before him was so utterly and overwhelmingly surprising that wider openings in his face were required to allow all of the surprise to fully flow into his brain.

Without thinking, Jack’s hand snapped to the chain around his neck — to the lightning-bolt arrowhead he wore there.





You may recall many chapters ago when Jack showed Paul an artist’s rendition of Sir Whitethorne’s assassination. Little more than a charcoal scribble, it purported to capture the assassin, a lone archer on a hill, at the moment he fired the fatal, lightning-bolt arrow.

I thought you might appreciate being reminded.

As a wise Ogre once said, “A timely reminder… reminder me… time.”