The Robin on the Oak Throne (The Oak and Holly Cycle #2) Read Online K.A. Linde

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Fantasy/Sci-fi, Paranormal Tags Authors: Series: The Oak and Holly Cycle Series by K.A. Linde
Advertisement

Total pages in book: 194
Estimated words: 187021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
<<<<21220212223243242>194
Advertisement



Chapter Nine

A red light was blinking in their house. She knew that was wrong. Daddy had said to find a hiding spot when the red light blinked.

“Daddy!” she cried. “The warding.”

Her father strode into the house, grizzly and hardened. “They found us and pulled down the warding.”

He was all hard edges. She’d seen the hardness take him more and more each day. Tears streaked down her cheeks. She knew what this meant, and still she ran into her father’s leg and held onto him tight. “Daddy, I don’t want to.”

“You must,” he said in his thick Scottish accent.

“I’m strong. I’ll stay here with you.”

His hand settled into her hair, and then he bent down to pick her up in his arms. “Shh, now, my darling, you know what we have to do.”

She rubbed her face in his jacket, drying her eyes. “Hide.”

“That’s right. I’ll take care of everything.”

“Daddy…”

“Come now.” He set her on her feet. “We don’t have much time.”

She ran ahead to the back room where Daddy had installed a false drop through the floorboards. He pushed aside the rug, pulled up the flooring, and revealed a space just big enough for a young girl to settle into.

He kissed her temple. “I love you so much, my wee darling.” He slid his fingers under her cheeks, brushing away her tears. He pressed a kiss there and eased her down into the hollow.

She heard the front door crash open.

“No,” she gasped.

Daddy put a finger to his lips. “Not a peep.”

She nodded even as her tears began anew. The flooring settled back into place. She could see from the light filtering in from between the boards. Then the rug was thrown back on top of her hiding spot, and she was cast into darkness. All she heard now was yelling and pleading and screaming.

“Kierse,” a voice broke through the screaming.

Kierse thrashed against the hand on her. A second hand gripped her shoulder and shook her, repeating her name over and over again.

“Fuck, what is that?” the voice said.

“No,” she moaned. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Kierse, it isn’t real. Whatever you’re seeing is a dream. Wake up.” The shaking grew more frantic. “Come back to me.”

She was still there. Locked in that floorboard. The screaming all around her. Tears running down her face. And there was nothing she could do. No way to escape, except to give away her position, and then it would be all for nothing.

“Kierse!”

And then she was ripped free.

Everything was gone. No screaming, no floorboards, no locked rooms. The tears were real, though. They had soaked the collar of her sweater and into the pillowcase. She scrubbed at her cheeks to erase the evidence of her pain.

A dream. It was just a dream.

Her breath came out in heaving pants as her vision cleared to reveal Graves. She was okay. She was with Graves. He had an arm around her shoulders, and she was cocooned against his bare chest.

“What…what happened?” she whispered.

Already the edges of the dream were fuzzy. Like she’d been clinging to something important that only slipped through her fingers the tighter she held on.

She couldn’t remember what had happened. A woman’s screams. No, had it been a man yelling? Something about hiding or being chased down. It had been terrible. As had most of her dreams in the last couple months.

“You started screaming,” Graves said. “Like someone was harming you and I couldn’t wake you.”

“Oh.” Kierse shuffled upright. She didn’t want to move away from him. In fact, his arms had been one of the few things to silence the terror in her mind. “Sorry I woke you.”

“I don’t care if you wake the entire block. That’s hardly my concern. Has that happened before?”

She bit her lip and nodded. “Most nights.”

At his displeasure, she wanted to take it back. She shouldn’t have confided in him, but having someone there to wake her in the middle of it made her feel safe. Gen had helped her through it in Dublin. In fact, she’d been studying her healing magic to make Kierse sleeping concoctions. And while the brews had dimmed the dreams, they’d only resumed in a murkier and more hypnotic form, as if she were swimming under water. Sometimes she preferred sheer terror to being trapped in a potion-induced sleep.

“Do you dream of the hole under the floor every night?”

Kierse jerked backward. “What do you mean?”

He furrowed his brow. “That is what you were dreaming, correct? Your magic was drained enough that I got a read on it when I touched you.”

“You read me?” she accused.

“You were screaming,” he shot back. “It wasn’t intentional. I thought you would absorb it, and when you did not, you practically threw the images into my mind.”

Kierse pursed her lips. “I did not.”

“How it happened is irrelevant. Answer the question. The same dream?”



<<<<21220212223243242>194

Advertisement