It’s release day for The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride on Patreon, Ream, and Kindle Vella!
I have some pretty amazing news about Fablemere, the series that begins with The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride, but I’m going to leave that until after the excerpt:
The book was shockingly heavy, and its brown leather cover was in much better shape than most of the stock. She ran her fingers across the embossed letters on the spine.
“Fablemere,” she read aloud. Maybe it’s Latin for something.
She opened it and found thick parchment pages. It appeared to be handwritten, complete with odd drawings in the margins. It couldn’t possibly be a true medieval manuscript. Not in a place that sold bulk back-dated issues of Popular Mechanics.
She carefully turned a couple of pages, until she got confirmation. It wasn’t a priceless manuscript. There was a full-page photo of…
Grass.
A close-up of grass.
That was odd.
Odder still, the longer she looked at the grass, the more she didn’t want to look away or turn the page. Something about it was utterly fascinating.
And as she watched, a small yellow beetle tottered across the photo.
She flicked it aside.
And felt the grass.
“What the—” She moved to slam the book closed. Only… there wasn’t a book. Her hands were splayed on the ground. The yellow beetle trundled over her fingers.
She sat up. Took a gasp of clean, fresh air.
No dust. No mildew.
No bookshop.
She blinked up at a gray, cold sky, marked by a rapidly closing scar, through which she could see the flickering fluorescent light above the sales counter.
“No.” She stumbled to her feet, waving her arms as the seam crept closed. “No!”
And then it was gone.
No, no, no. This is not happening.
What “it” was, she had no idea. But it was happening.
Vanessa felt the side of her head. Then the top. Then the back and the other side. Nothing hurt. No head injury.
Unless I’m in a coma. Yup. That made the most sense. She’d probably been crushed under a bookcase and now she was in the hospital, hallucinating the grassy hillside she kneeled on, and the line of trees at the bottom.
And the looming black mountains far off in the distance.
She sat back on her heels and tried to think of a way to test herself. There had to be a way to tell if this was a hallucination. What was the point of watching all that Grey’s Anatomy if she hadn’t learned something about comas?
“Fuck, how did they wake up Really Old Guy?” She pulled up a tuft of grass. It didn’t transform into a handful of butterflies or cotton candy. She counted fourteen pieces, closed her hand, opened it, and counted again. “Fourteen.”
Maybe that wasn’t a real test. She pulled the strap of her bag over her shoulder.
“Aha!” She jerked the zipper open. “If I were hallucinating,” she said aloud to the absolutely no one around her, “I probably wouldn’t hallucinate—”
A used tissue.
Her head swam. She dug around frantically in the bag. A tube of lip balm. Her prescription bottle. She held it up, praying the label would be nothing but indecipherable squiggles or big, black text reading YOU’RE IN A COMA.
It said: TAKE 2 TABLETS BY MOUTH TWO TIMES A DAY lamoTRIgrine 100 MG TAB UNIC
Only a pharmacist could hallucinate that.
If she wasn’t in a coma… where the hell was she?
Something screeched. Like a pterodactyl would screech. She assumed. She’d never met one in person and she sure as fuck didn’t plan on it now.
Scrambling to her feet, she raced down the hill, her tennis shoes sliding on the damp grass. It had rained recently. That was the smell in the air.
It hadn’t rained in days back home.
Nope, not thinking stuff like “back home,” she scolded herself. As far as she was concerned, she was in intensive care, having a very dangerous sleep.
Running from the potential pterodactyl was just a precaution.
The shrieking call split the sky again, sending out vibrations that slammed through the air and tossed Vanessa to the ground. She rolled, flipped, rolled again, and came to rest with a dull thud against something solid and furry. And very, very dead.
She scrambled back from the carcass of a huge, ghost-white deer. A foot to the left, and she would have been impaled on its antlers. Its milky blue eyes stared sightless at the sky, and darkened blood stained its snowy coat.
Once, Vanessa had ridden her bike past a puddle with a dead squirrel floating in it. The deer smelled similar, but so much worse.
The pummeling cry filled the air again, closer now, though Vanessa wasn’t sure how she knew that. Some instinct inside her, she guessed, that wanted her to get up and keep running for the trees. She pushed herself to her feet and moved faster than she ever had in her entire life, faster, even than when she’d wanted so badly to beat Mandy Fink at the five hundred meter during sophomore year.
It had been a long time and a hundred or so pounds since high school, though. Her lungs burned, and more lactic acid pumped through her muscles than oxygen. Eventually, she would have to stop and take her chances with the pterodactyl.
Stop saying it’s a pterodactyl!
The grass got deeper as she reached the bottom of the hill, and the ground got softer. The grass turned to moss, and the moss slipped away from the dirt beneath it like the skin off a blister. She almost lost her footing when the next ear-shattering screech sounded. The flap of enormous wings stirred wind across her face. Just a few more steps and she’d make it beneath the shelter of the trees, if she could even consider them shelter. The wings made another pass overhead, casting a huge shadow over the ground, and Vanessa made the split-second decision to throw herself bodily into the woods.
And directly into some nasty thorns.
She yelped as the vines scratched her face and arms, and she tried to push and kick her way free, but only succeeded in poking herself more. They tore at her hair, at her arms, and for a moment, she thought she should have chosen death by pterodactyl. But whatever had been screaming and flying was gone now. She took a few deep breaths and worked at extricating herself from the brambles.
Freeing herself ended up drawing more blood, and there were some thorns that had broken off in her skin, but she had her chin hair tweezers in her purse and plenty of hand sanitizer. I’ve got this.
Whatever this was.
You can read new chapters of The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride every Tuesday an Thursday on Patreon, Ream, and Kindle Vella.
Now, do you want to hear the news? Shortly after I announced The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride and the concept of Fablemere as a setting for fantasy stories in different genres and formats, I got an offer for another fantasy romance, also set in Fablemere! I can’t give any details until the ink dries and I’m allowed to say with who and when, but while The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride posts, I’ll be hard at work on a deeply, deeply spicy Cinderella retelling…with fairies.
This is the first time I’ve ever had an offer on a related property before the first one even came out, so I feel like a superstar, especially considering it’s something I’ve built from the ground up. I hope everybody enjoys the world of Fablemere, because it looks like I’m going to be living there for a very, very long time.