Read creepy hollow 05 - a faerie's revenge for Free Online Page A

night at the old—
    Noise erupts behind me. I whip my head back around in time to see a black shape explode from the water. The wolf, his shaggy, dripping fur flinging water everywhere, collides with both women. Their screams chill my blood.
    I don’t waste a second. My arrow zooms across the water and finds its mark in the wolf’s side before he’s finished rearing his head back. With a roaring snarl, he leaps off his prey and swings around to face my side of the bank. Wild, gleaming eyes stare hungrily at me through the hazy air. I discard my bow. It disappears, its glow vanishing in an instant. In the near darkness, I can see little more than those fiery eyes on the other side of the swamp.
    The moment he jumps, so do I. With a single bound, he’s across the water, but the muddy earth I was standing on is now bare. Those glowing eyes turn upward. He sees me above him, balancing on the branch I launched myself onto. He lets loose a vicious growl. Then his head morphs and shifts and becomes something almost human. “Dinner time,” he snarls.
    Fear ripples through me, raising the hairs on my arms. I don’t show it, though. Instead I reach swiftly for my bow and point an arrow directly at his head. “Try it,” I say, hoping he doesn’t.
    But he readies himself to spring. He’s an enormous beast, after all, so of course he thinks he can take down the pesky guardian trainee trying to rob him of his dinner. I get ready to flip backwards out of his way the moment he launches at the tree. He tenses. He leaps—
    And from a doorway in the air, a man steps out, knocks the wolf back onto the ground with a mere sweep of his hand, and brings slender branches slithering across the ground to bind the wolf’s limbs.
    “Who the hell are you?” the wolf demands in rough, grunting tones as he morphs into a shape that looks far more like a hairy man than a four-legged beast. The newcomer sends a stunner spell straight at the wolf’s chest, knocking him unconscious.
    Good question , I think to myself. Whoever this is, he’s interfering with my assignment, and I doubt Olive will be pleased with that.
    I drop to the ground, bending to absorb the impact before I straighten. “I’d like to know the answer to that,” I say.
    The man turns—
    —and I feel the air punched from my lungs. “You,” I manage to gasp.
    “Calla?” He seems as startled to see me here as I am to see him. He can’t be feeling what I’m feeling, though. Never in a million years could he understand the way my heart just split. “Calla, what are you—”
    “Stay back!” I say as Chase moves toward me. I hold a hand up between us, as though that might keep him away. As though I might possibly stand a chance against the most powerful being our world has ever known. The heavy air seems hard to breathe. The sheen of sweat coating my skin turns icy. “Is it true?” I manage to whisper. I already know it is, but I want to hear him say it. I want him to admit it.
    Chase’s expression is indefinable as he says, “It is.”
    I’m shaking, partly in anger and partly in fear. After all, it is Draven standing before me. Powerful, dangerous, a killer. What’s wrong with me that I couldn’t see that in him? How did I miss it? “You lied,” I whisper.
    Stupid, stupid. Why are you still here? Why aren’t you running ?
    “I didn’t,” he says.
    “I trusted you,” I yell. “I told you things I’ve never told anyone else.”
    “I know, and I—”
    “And then you made a fool of me!”
    “No! That was never my intention. I was going to tell you everything.”
    I choke out a laugh. “Everything? You were going to tell me everything ?” I shake my head. “You were never going to tell me who you really are. Why would you do that? This is the only reaction you could possibly have expected.”
    “I was going to start at the beginning.” He takes a step closer. “Tell you about the person I used to be. The guy I was before I discovered this world