Atone: A Fairytale (Fairytale Trilogy) (29 page)

She checked the first few storage rooms but found nothing more interesting than cardboard boxes and a few old posters highlighting former exhibits. She pulled open the door to storage room B-23 and stuck her head inside.

Set back about halfway into the room was a huge, cobweb-covered four poster bed. Alex started when the door banged shut behind her. She'd been so focused on the bed, she hadn't even realized she'd been moving, walking towards it slowly.

She vaguely noted that the rest of the room was filled with wooden packing crates of various sizes. But she couldn’t pull her attention away from the bed long enough to really look at them.

The head and footboards were covered in intricately worked gold and silver which at first appeared to just be a tangle of shapes. After a moment’s observation, the metalwork resolved itself into heavy coils of twisting vines and branches, each covered in wicked-looking thorns. The dull gold and silver vines twisted off the headboard and footboard and up the four posters, snaking like living plants around the sturdy posts, here and there seeming to sprout leaves and more thorns as they went up. The whole pattern gave the illusion of a violent twisting and upward movement, as if you were watching the vines growing rapidly before your eyes. She wondered if the bed was solid metal—the weight would be astronomical—or possibly a heavy wood covered in a silver and gold overlay.

But it was the gems that banished all other thoughts from her mind. Bursting out of the vines in huge clusters on the head and footboards and running down each of the posts were huge flowers crafted of precious and semi-precious stones. The flowers were pink and red, the soft colors of rose quartz and the deep reds of rubies and garnets. The stones ranged in size, many of them larger than anything Alex had ever seen before. All had faceted cuts that gave the illusion of depth and individual petals. At the heart of each flower were clear, hard stones that Alex knew without a doubt were diamonds, although they were in a strange, partially polished state. The vines were dripping with the flowers. It took her slightly addled brain a few moments to put the whole picture together.

Roses. Dozens of jeweled roses bloomed like living flowers on the gold and silver vines.

Alex had never seen, or heard of, anything like it.

She took a step closer to examine the metalwork. The items they were receiving from France were supposed to be twelfth-century, but the workmanship on this bed was far, far beyond what any metal smith of that era would have been able to accomplish. It looked like something out of fairytale. Not that Alex believed in fairytales, or even really knew much about them, but she did know that what she was looking at skirted the edges of possibility.

A soft sound interrupted her rapid thoughts. She wasn’t alone. She had been so entranced by the bed itself that she hadn’t noticed there was someone actually on it—sleeping on it, in fact.

At first Alex thought the sleeping figure, like the bed, was covered with fine cobwebs. As she looked closer she saw that it wasn’t cobwebs draping over the figure but hair – foot after foot of sandy-colored hair streamed from the sleeper’s head and over its face and body, moving gently as the figure breathed in and out. The hair wasn’t growing just out of the sleeper’s head, but from the face as well–a beard that would have done Rip Van Winkle proud flowed down to well past the knees. And that is when she figured out that she didn’t have a sleeping beauty on her hands, but an enchanted sleeping man.

As she stared at the figure in shock, trying to calculate how long it would take for that much hair to grow, the sleeping man emitted a soft snore. Alex jumped back at the quiet sound, trying to stifle her slightly hysterical giggles. She may not know much about fairytales, but she was pretty sure that enchanted sleeping princes weren’t supposed to snore.

“Holy crap!” Alex whispered, almost as if it were a prayer, under her breath.

She slid her backpack off, set it down quietly by the door, and walked slowly toward the bed. As she got closer she had a flashback of creeping into her mother’s room after having a nightmare as a child—that moment of indecision. The desire to wake up her mother for comfort weighed against the fear of startling her mom out sleep and thereby scaring herself even more. She wasn’t sure at all that she wanted to wake up this sleeper. She was thankful that the floor of the storage room had quieted the squeaking of her shoes as she crept up to the bed.

She knew that the smart, sensible thing to do would be to turn around and run out of the room, report the whole thing to Nicholas or the police, whoever answered their phone first. Alex could usually be counted on to do the smart, sensible thing, but for some reason she felt almost physically incapable of turning around and leaving. Whether it was the bed, or the sleeper in it, something was drawing her in.

As she reached the edge of the bed she took a steadying breath and looked down. Under the masses of slightly curling dark blond hair, she could see the sleeper’s chest rising and falling in a slight, but steady, rhythm. She wasn’t sure why—maybe the cobwebs and the masses of hair gave the appearance of great age, but she had expected the sleeper to be frail and fragile looking. Yet the breadth of his shoulders and chest surprised her. Now that she was closer, she could tell he was actually quite tall. He took up most of the bed, which was oversized to start with.

“Um, hello?” She cleared her throat and started again. “Are you going to wake up?” She leaned over and continued in a stage whisper, “Who are you? Why are you here?”

There was no response, other than the quiet, steady breathing.

She screwed up all of her courage and poked the sleeper in the chest with her index finger, immediately jumping back in anticipated response.

Nothing.

She clapped her hand over her wildly beating heart and almost laughed.

“I’m going to give myself a heart attack!” she muttered under her breath, leaning back over the sleeping figure. “Curiosity killed the Alex...Oh, Mr. Enchanted Person...” She poked again at his chest a few times. “At least I assume you’re enchanted, there’s really no other explanation for hair like this...” she trailed off mid-poke as a memory flickered through her mind. A memory of almost-curly, sandy-colored hair, the sun flickering through the strands as he looked down and laughed at her.

“Oh my god.” Alex flattened her hand against the sleeper’s chest, her palm against the compact, corded muscles.

“Oh my god,” she repeated, as she began frantically brushing the hair out of the sleeper’s face. It was tangled with his beard, and her frenzied, grasping hands fought with it for a moment before she was able to brush it off of his face.

Alex’s world rocked on its axis. Not just her world, but the room was rocking too. The floor and ceiling began to swirl together, and almost switched places.

I am not going to faint. I am not going to faint. Alex thought to herself. I am not going to faint.

Slowly, the room righted itself, but her world was still horribly upside down.

The sleeper was Luke Reed.

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Sample: Attempting Elizabeth

Please enjoy the following excerpt from

Attempting Elizabeth

by

Jessica Grey

T
HERE’S REALLY ONLY
one course of action after a sob fest of that magnitude. I changed into my rattiest and most comfortable sweatpants, pulled out Pride and Prejudice, poured myself a glass of wine, and stretched out on our living room couch for a date with some of my favorite characters.

I fell asleep reading. I hadn’t started at the beginning of the book. I’d read it so many times that I knew the plot forward and backward. I could quote dialogue. I may or may not have read and written fan fiction. I admit nothing.

I do admit, however, that I’m not-so-secretly in love with Mr. Darcy. What’s not to love about a handsome and rich man (“ten thousand pounds a year!”) that falls so desperately in love with a woman that he is willing to examine his own prejudices and overcome his pride to be with her? Actually, it’s even better than that, because Darcy changes not knowing if it will result in Lizzy falling in love with him. And he does, I think, a truly amazing and dashing thing, when he helps rescue her sister from certain ruin and wants no recognition for it. He saved her younger sister, Lydia, at great trouble and expense, just because he loved Elizabeth and didn’t want to see her hurt. Sigh.

And yes, I know he is a fictional character; I’m still kind of in love with him. It’s a pity that my own attempts at finding my own Mr. Darcy had turned into such debacles.

I had started reading at the first proposal scene. There is something so heartbreaking about Darcy’s awkward attempt at a proposal. He so desperately doesn’t want to love Elizabeth, and he makes it abundantly clear. The verbal smackdown she gives him is one of my favorite scenes in all of literature. I figured I’d read from first proposal, through Lizzy coming to love Darcy, and all the way to the happy ending.

I didn’t make it to the end, though. I was so tired out from the ill-conceived hiking excursion and my crying jag that as soon as Darcy stormed out of Hunsford cottage after being soundly rejected, I felt my eyes getting heavier. I had barely made it through the letter Darcy gives Elizabeth the next day when I dropped off to sleep.

As my eyelids drifted shut, I felt like I was being pushed and pulled from all sides. There was a loud rushing sound in my ears. I opened my eyes, but I seemed to have trouble focusing. I could bring the scene in front of me into focus, briefly; then it got blurry again. It was bright, much brighter than my softly lit living room. After a moment or so of fighting to focus, my vision cleared. The strange sounds remained in my ears, like the sounds of waves pulling in and out.

I felt different. I looked down at my body. I was dressed in a pale muslin morning dress, holding a sampler as my hands—except they weren’t my hands; they were much smaller and more delicate than my hands—were busily setting a series of small precise stitches into the fabric. I have never sewn in my life.

I looked around the room. It was lovely—filled with early afternoon sunlight from large multi-paned windows, decorated in a soft feminine style, and stocked with the most gorgeous antiques I had ever seen.

I became aware that someone was talking to me. There was a woman sitting on a small couch to my left. She was dressed in a Regency era dress just like I seemed to be and had a small lace cap on her head. It appeared she’d been speaking to me for some time, but her voice was just beginning to filter through the rushing in my ears.

The woman was dark-haired and petite and looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. She also sat with a sewing project in her lap, but unlike my hands, which were still busily working away, hers were gesturing in the air as she punctuated whatever point she was making. As her voice became clearer I became even more confused.

“...and I must say, he was paying you particular attention yesterday during our stroll. Did you not notice it? Such charming manners, and so handsome. Georgiana, are you attending me? You have quite a blank look on your face.”

Georgiana? Who was she talking to? I turned my head slightly to each side, but there was no one in the room but the two of us. The woman looked at me in exasperation, but then laughed.

“I dare say you are daydreaming about a certain gentleman. You should do me the favor of attending when I am speaking of the very same gentleman,” she teased.

I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are talking about.” For some completely inexplicable reason my voice came out significantly higher and softer than my usual alto. And in an extremely refined sounding upper British class accent. I was so shocked I dropped my sewing sampler and it fell to the floor with a soft whoosh.

My companion looked surprised as well, but she recovered quickly with a patently fake-sounding laugh. “Oh my dear, what a dreadful tease you are turning into. Who else could we be speaking of? Do you have that many beaux that you are getting them confused?”

I continued to stare at her. The look on my face—I had a brief dumbfounded moment of realization that I had no idea what my face looked like; judging from the difference in the appearance of my hands and the tenor of my voice, it might look extremely different from my own—must have given her another moment’s pause, because she furrowed her brow and said, “Why, Mr. Wickham of course.”

If the surprise I felt at hearing my voice registered at about a nine out of ten on the shock scale, the mention of Wickham blew it right off the charts.

“Wickham?” My voice was now a frightfully high squeak, like a church mouse that inhaled helium and then was stomped on. I cleared my throat. My hands clutched at my skirts, frantically, as if by finding purchase on them I could somehow grab onto reality. My spine felt unnaturally straight. I don’t think I’d ever sat up so straight in my life. My normal reaction would have been to jump up and pace about the room. I was kind of a fidgety person in general, but for some reason, other than the spastic movement of my hands, my body refused to move from its extremely still state.