Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 121146 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 606(@200wpm)___ 485(@250wpm)___ 404(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121146 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 606(@200wpm)___ 485(@250wpm)___ 404(@300wpm)
“Holy fuck, I think we’d better run!” Fierce growled. He squeezed off a few more deadly shots, dropping several of the goat men guards in their tracks, but he didn’t have time to kill everyone. A whole hoard of the hairy guards rushed towards them and then Hold was grabbing Celia’s wrist and the three of them were running for their lives.
“Back to the sky-lifters!” Hold shouted as they ran. “Brother do you have enough charge to shoot through the ropes that hold the others so they can’t follow us?”
“There’s no time—they’re right behind us!” Fierce bellowed back. “And you know what will happen if they catch us!”
Celia knew—they’d be entombed in the Mother Tree, right beside Sess’ely and her brothers and there would be no one to give them a mercy killing as Fierce had done for the hapless unicorn girl and her kin.
We can’t let them catch us! she thought. We can’t! But even as she thought it, she heard the clattering of many hooves. Risking a glance over her shoulder, she saw the goat men were galloping towards them and there seemed to be a lot more of them than they had seen earlier. Had more joined the group? Where were they all coming from?
“Come on—onto the lifter!” Hold was shouting, grabbing for her and Fierce both. The Dark Twin was shooting as fast as he could but no matter how many of the guards he dropped, there always seemed to be more. The Mother Tree was crawling with them!
Crawling with them? Wait a minute… A plan began to form in Celia’s brain. As Hold and Fierce began lowering them as quickly as they could, she tried to think it through.
“We’ve got a head start but I’m afraid they’ll catch us at the bottom,” Fierce was saying grimly. “They’ve got legs like a fucking Take-me—they can gallop and we can only run!”
“Then let’s not go to the bottom,” Celia told him. “At least, not right away.”
“What?” Hold frowned at her. “My lady, are you suggesting that we ought to stay here and try to hide in the Mother Tree? Because I’m afraid they would find us pretty quickly.”
“No—I’m talking about a way to slow them down,” Celia said. “Here—what branch are we passing?”
“That was Third Branch and we’ll be to Second Branch shortly,” Hold told her.
“Good—stop at Second Branch—just for a minute,” Celia ordered.
The two of them exchanged a look over her head and she could see them debating whether they would do as she asked or not.
“Look—you have to trust me!” she said earnestly. “I know a way to slow them down—and to distract the whole damn Mother Tree from trying to follow us! But you have to stop on Second Branch or it won’t work!”
The twins exchanged another look.
“All right, we’ll do it,” Fierce growled. “But you’d better not get us eaten by the fucking Mother Tree, lelka!”
“I promise I won’t. Look—here we are now! No—don’t tie the ropes off,” she added. “Hold, stay here and hold the ropes so we can jump back on in a minute. Fierce, you come with me.”
“Where are we going?” the Dark Twin demanded, even as he jumped off the sky-lifter with Celia and followed her down the broad tree branch.
“Here!” They were suddenly standing in front of the vast, Olympic swimming pool-sized spider web. The white strands of silk glimmered in the moonlight filtering down from the trees and the web itself stirred, rippling slightly in the nighttime breeze.
“What the everloving fuck?” Fierce stared at it in amazement.
“Grab it and shake it,” Celia ordered him.
“You want me to what?” He frowned at her.
Celia could have cursed herself—why had she brought the Dark Twin instead of the Light Twin? Hold would have done what she asked without question.
“No time to explain,” she told Fierce. “Grab it and give it a good shake and then we’re going to run back to Hold as fast as we can!”
At first she was afraid that Fierce would demand an explanation, but the Dark Twin appeared to decide to go along with her for once. He reached out and grabbed a handful of the sticky silk web and shook it as hard as he could.
The motion made huge ripples in the fabric of the web—ripples that reached all the way to the house-sized cocoon at the edge of it.
“Hey, wake up!” Celia shouted for good measure. “Come out here—there’s a male touching your web! A male!”
Nothing happened for a split second…and then the enormous cocoon erupted with huge, furry white spiders, boiling out of it like bubbles from a pot.
“Holy fuck!” Fierce breathed, his eyes going wide. “What the—”
“Go! Run!” Celia grabbed his muscular arm and tugged on it urgently.
She didn’t have to urge him again. Fierce grabbed her by the hand and practically dragged her back to the sky-lifter where Hold was standing, holding both ropes and watching for them anxiously.