Read Forbidden (A New Adult Paranormal Romance) for Free Online Page B

of a pond – calm, glacial and reflecting the round ball of the moon. The scene was so tranquil that her breath caught in her throat.
    “Salvation,” she whispered, not wanting to shatter the peace around her as fireflies swooped everywhere in a merry dance. She knelt and drank her fill, wishing she had a pouch or pitcher. Who knew when she would next find water?
    The next morning, she rose, unrefreshed from her sleep. Now burning vapors cored a hole into her stomach. She was tempted to stay by the water, but decided she had a mission more important than dying of thirst. That’s right. I have to get to Lapland.
    She trotted resolutely north, leaving the security of the pond behind her. The farther she got from the water, the more uncertain her steps became.
    A green-and-blue dragonfly swooped by her nose.
    “Well,” she resigned herself to saying, “if I don’t talk, I’ll go mad. But if I talk too much, I’ll be thirsty. It’s a no-win situation. I hope you and your friends can lead me to a nice trencher of lamb marinated in garlic sauce.”
    She had zero survival instincts and she knew it. She was equally skilled to trap a rabbit as she was to stand on top of a horse. She looked for fruit trees, but the pines and junipers were disappointingly barren of apples and pears. There were rabbits, but she only saw the flash of their tails as they bobbed away, unafraid, from her incompetent grasp.
    She saw her doom written in the laughing barks of the trees. The irony. To escape from the Queen’s clutches only to meet starvation and thirst.
    Just ahead, where a clump of trees blocked the path, she thought she glimpsed something to interrupt the monotony of bough and smirking rabbit. She couldn’t be sure at this distance, but the crimson glint came again, like light reflecting off a red mirror. Snow White hesitated. She had already experienced a lifetime of children’s nightmares. Her stomach growled again.
    The dragonfly sped ahead.
    “Yes, sure, run away when the going’s good. Leave me all to my lonesome self.”
    She steeled herself to approach the anomaly. When she drew nearer, she saw that it was the mouth to an underground cave. A light pulsed within its depths as though a great colony of fireflies glowed in unison inside.
    The dragonfly spiraled into the mouth of the cave, as did entire colonies of insects – ants, grasshoppers, beetles, flies. They trooped inside and out again in orderly lines. Snow White observed that the exiting ants carried tiny yellow crystals between their mandibles.
    “It’s some sort of food for you folks, isn’t it? I’m not sure I can eat it, but I’m hungry enough to try.”
    She stooped to enter the cave, whose entrance was shorter than her by a head. Her right foot slipped against crumbing rocks and she had to grab the wall to steady herself. The light pulsed. She saw a large and long object on the cave floor a little distance away. It was amber in color. When it glowed, its center was like burning coal upon a hearth. Large chunks of the amber exterior had broken off. Insects massed and flew all round it, picking up the crumbling matter and carrying it away in work lines. The object smelt of honey, and for a moment, Snow White wondered if it were a new sort of hive.
    “A new species of bee?” she said excitedly.
    But wait, she was supposed to be a fugitive, running for her life. And yet, here she was, the scientific part of her as curious as ever. Perhaps this was meant to happen. Perhaps her banishment was a prelude to the greatest discovery ever known to man!
    (Or woman.)
    Without fear, she approached the object. Up close, its texture was woven like a cocoon. She ventured a questing hand to touch it. It was warm and very alive.
    “Wow,” she said. Then she remembered her sack of instruments, lost forever with Coleoptera. A pang fleeted through her when she thought of her horse and her lost life. Back in the castle, she hardly rode Coleoptera and never gave a second