Page 2
For once, Vance being an undermining asshole comes in handy. I let out a little breath of relief. Why am I even panicking?
CLOMP…
No way the Orc Emperor will want me.
There are dozens of women in this line who are way prettier than me, women who have things like gym memberships and the ability to look at a tin of Trader Joe’s Peppermint Bark without inhaling the whole thing…
My thoughts trail off when I realize the boot steps have stopped.
Right.
In.
Front.
Of.
Me!
Chapter 1
Way Station
“So how do you choose, Human Female?”
I tighten the bath towel around my still damp body, then glance to the left and the right, trying to get my bearings.
Meanwhile, the gigantic grey-and-brown spider clerk impatiently taps two of her left legs next to the glowing golden passport she’s waiting to stamp.
She’s sitting at a desk underneath a floating Lower Realm Immigration Control sign, all four of her front eyes focused on me. And though she doesn’t have lids to squint, it feels like she’s glaring at me.
I’ve waited in a long line just to get to this clerk’s desk.
All around me, women and a handful of men are either crying, asking each other questions none of us new arrivals could possibly know the answer to, or yelling out pleas for information to the burly rat guards in armor keeping the line in order.
These guards are enormous, brown, bipedal rats—not the smaller-but-way-scarier red-eyed white ones—dressed in green, straight-collared tunics that bear a passing resemblance to medical scrubs.
One of those white rats walked up to me just a few moments after I set down in a large round cave with a ring of tunnels lining its walls. I was still dripping wet from the bath I’d just gotten portaled out of, and I barely got the towel wrapped around my curvy body before he—possibly she? Okay, let’s go with they—they wordlessly, and without any warning whatsoever, plunged a needle into my arm.
Only then did they explain that they’d just inserted a translator “specimen” that would allow me to hear the words they were squeaking in my own native language.
“Welcome to the way station. Wait times are longer than usual,” the white medical rat intoned before shoving me into a long line of humans waiting to talk with one of the Lower Realm immigration clerks.
There are five desks lining the back wall of the way station, with floating neon signs hanging above them. But only two of them are occupied by gigantic spiders with off-white bouffant hair that appears to be made out of web silk. To be fair, though, the line did move pretty fast.
Technically, all the other people lined up are in the same predicament as me, but at least most of them had arrived here fully clothed.
Dressed in nothing but a towel, I was shivering and still not fully dry by the time I’d arrived at this spider clerk’s desk.
“Hurry up, Adora Myers!” She lets out an irritated chittering sound over the glowing passport. “I don’t have all day here!”
“Where exactly is here again?” I ask.
Chapter 2
Halloween Night
Less than an hour ago, I was in a bath, indulging in a re-read of Spring of the Fae, the long-awaited (and unexpectedly spicy) final book in Clara Quinn’s Seasons of the Fae series. It was supposed to be my reward for surviving the shittiest October ever.
