The Gender Fall Read online

  The Gender Game 5: The Gender Fall

  Bella Forrest

  Nightlight

  Contents

  Map

  1. Violet

  2. Viggo

  3. Violet

  4. Viggo

  5. Violet

  6. Viggo

  7. Viggo

  8. Viggo

  9. Viggo

  10. Viggo

  11. Viggo

  12. Violet

  13. Viggo

  14. Violet

  15. Violet

  16. Viggo

  17. Viggo

  18. Violet

  19. Viggo

  20. Violet

  21. Viggo

  22. Viggo

  23. Violet

  24. Viggo

  25. Viggo

  26. Violet

  27. Violet

  28. Viggo

  29. Violet

  30. Viggo

  31. Violet

  32. Violet

  33. Viggo

  34. Viggo

  35. Viggo

  36. Violet

  37. Viggo

  38. Viggo

  39. Violet

  Bonus Chapter 1: The Secret of Spellshadow Manor

  Bonus Chapter 2

  Bonus Chapter 3

  Bonus Chapter 4

  Bonus Chapter 5

  Read More by Bella Forrest

  Copyright © 2017 by Bella Forrest

  Nightlight Press

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Map

  1

  Violet

  Everything hurt. Every time I struggled to break through the thin web of sleep holding me, I was confronted by the pain. In my hand, in my arm, in my head. Was I dead? Was this the afterlife? Was I finally paying for all the horrible things I’d done?

  No, something whispered, reassuring me. This is reality. I struggled as fragments of memories washed over me. A woman with the face of a bulldog, a vicious smile twisting her lips. A boot coming down on my wrist. The flashing silver of a knife as it came for me. A ball of fire that threatened to engulf me.

  Sleep was a refuge, the sweet blackness beckoning me in, cradling and hiding me from the pain and confusion. I was tempted to just surrender to its embrace, but a part of me held back, turning toward the light. Something in me burned with an urgency denoting importance. Something was happening. Something worth facing the pain.

  The thought created a buoyancy, forcing me to surface. Something was drilling into my consciousness: the sound of urgent voices. My eyes snapped open—and a weak groan slipped from my mouth as daggers of bright electric light stabbed deep through the two treacherous orbs, jabbing hard into my skull.

  I clenched my eyes shut as pain and panic twisted my muscles. Someone whispered fiercely, “Hold her!” and hands like vices locked around my limbs—all except my right wrist. I tried to lift that hand to defend myself, only to find it was heavier, more painful than I remembered. Something touched my hand and guided it downward. The touch was agony, and I groaned again.

  The menacing woman reappeared in my mind’s eye, taunting me, and I fought harder as I recalled who she was. Her name was Tabitha, and she was going to hurt me. I needed to free myself, but belatedly remembered that she was so much stronger than me. Too strong. I couldn’t let her win. I couldn’t… And there was something else going on, something that needed my attention, something… I couldn’t sleep yet.

  Slowly, insistently, something warm and loving cut through my terror. A strong, steady voice, reaching through the hysteria, urging me to relax. I couldn’t understand the words, but the tone itself felt like a warm blanket draping over my injuries. It told me I was safe. I was alive. That woman was gone, and I didn’t have to fear her ever again. The voice was powerful, yet it was also gentle, reassuring.

  A face flashed in my mind. A man—his green eyes haunted, a scar across his right cheek, wavy brown hair that gleamed black in the shadows and bright as chocolate when the sun hit it.

  Viggo, my mind whispered, and I felt myself smile—then forced myself to stop as half my face erupted in tight, creaking agony. I took a deep breath, trying to soothe the aching area. It took a moment, but the pain receded. My mind felt clearer again.

  I shouldn’t hurt this much. Not if I was with Viggo. If I was with Viggo, I was safe. But something in me knew that wasn’t right. Sometimes danger followed us. Was it danger that had woken me? My heart thudded hard against my aching ribcage. If nothing else, I needed to know what was reality and what was just delirium. I forced my eyes open, slowly this time.

  Light, less stabbing than before, but still too bright, streamed down on me, and a brown pattern flew over me, unfamiliar, disorienting. It took me too long to realize what should have been simple. We were inside a building… I was staring at a ceiling.

  My head bobbed up and down on something firm, but not hard. I could feel fabric under my fingers. There was a smell of sweat, but something underneath it. A scent that reassured me with its familiarity. I was in Viggo’s arms. The thought was absurdly comforting, although everything still hurt, my environment still swinging dizzily before me.

  His voice continued to murmur above me, and I turned my face toward the source, listening. He was saying something… something different now. I couldn’t understand the tone anymore. It was… determined. But worried? Was that regret?

  I wished I could understand what he was saying.

  And then, abruptly, the voice turned to a different tone—sharper, harsher, more desperate. Then it hushed altogether. The sensation was like sitting by a window, reading, only to become aware that the grasshoppers had stopped singing—a sign that a predator was among them, in the bushes, waiting to feast on the first brave soul who started to sing. The quiet convinced me, again, that something was horribly wrong. And yet the ceiling above me continued swaying before my eyes, moving past me, as though our flight was uninterrupted.

  I tried to speak, just a word. A question. But my mouth felt like it was stuffed full of cotton, my jaw a taut spring, impossible to uncoil. I rounded my lips, forcing sound out anyway.

  “Wha—?”

  “Shhhh,” someone replied, and our movements seemed to increase in tempo, vertigo swelling in my stomach with the motion. I briefly closed my eyes, trying to fight the nausea. Stabbing pain bloomed from my sides every time Viggo’s body jostled. I swallowed, my mouth going dry. But when I opened my eyes again, I realized I had a sense of direction—we were moving downward.

  I tilted my face away from Viggo’s body, and suddenly I could hear the thump of feet hitting stairs. I burrowed my head back into Viggo’s shoulder, and the sound faded. I slowly sucked in air, still trying to calm my stomach.

  Someone was talking. His voice was familiar, but muffled, as if I were listening to it underwater. I tilted my head slightly, and suddenly his voice was loud again, so sudden after its absence that it felt as if the familiar voice were shouting from inside my skull. Owen. I sagged in relief as I recalled his name. The recollection was strong enough to cut through the pain, and I clung to it. It was hard not to. It helped keep me in the present. Something was happening. I needed to be a part of it. If I could just figure out what it was…

  I tilted my head again, only a little, determined to be ready for the burst of noise this time. The sound got louder, and I was prepared—focusing on Owen’s voice. Intensity and foreboding flooded his tone. He was conveying information, but his words were coming so fast I could barely understand them.

  One word�
��a phrase—stood out. I hung on to it, repeating it like a mantra. Matrian patrol. I couldn’t recall why I knew it was important. It was more of a feeling, like having someone’s name on the tip of my tongue. The more I pressed, searching for the information, the more it eluded me, like trying to catch butterflies in a meadow.

  I took a deep breath and then stilled myself. I let my mind relax, and the answer came to me. We were in serious danger. It was fear that had woken me.

  Memories flooded me then—female guards bearing a crest. Explosions. Screams of terror and confusion. Gunshots. It was confusing and disjointed. Is any of this real? The thought frightened me, and I felt my hand tighten around something, a whimper escaping my throat.

  Big hands on my shoulder and thigh squeezed back, reassuring me with their casual strength. We had stopped moving; I tried to look around, figure at least something out. My eyes slid around the room, overwhelmed by the jarring unfamiliarity of the things in it. Or rather, I recognized them, but my brain couldn’t supply me with the words to identify them. Some of them seemed to move in ways they should not. More than that, everything about this room felt wrong. It wasn’t where we were supposed to be.

  A shadow passed before my eyes, and I blinked, trying to focus on the face near me. It was more a swirl of colors than a face, and it made me dizzier, my stomach turning again. I closed my eyes.

  There was a muffled sound of thumping, of rasping, of voices—maybe a new one this time, but I couldn’t be sure, with how the sound kept cutting in and out. I kept my head still, trying to quiet my beating heart, which was thundering under my ribcage. We moved forward, Viggo clutching me tighter to him as he walked, then relaxing his grip. We stopped moving abruptly. I heard another muffled thump, followed by the repeated sound of wood sliding on wood.

  Then silence. I risked opening my eyes again. It was dark now. So dark it took my eyes a long time to adjust, but at least it seemed less painful to focus. When the picture finally came into some clarity I realized I was looking up at Viggo. In the dimness, his eyes were hard and distant, and there was tension around his mouth. He was worried.

  I slowly looked around, and my gaze found Owen, just a few feet away. From the little I could see, his mouth was turned down in an uncharacteristic frown. His mouth was moving. I licked my lips, narrowing my eyes. I should be able to hear him now, I realized.

  Curious, I tilted my head farther, exposing my sensitive ear again, and flinched, reeling as his voice came through. Even the low sound encouraged the dull, aching throb in my skull to dial up to a sharp, stabbing sensation, one that felt like it was ripping my skull in two.

  I couldn’t hear out of one ear. And at that moment, it was just too much. An icy rush of fear shot through me, causing my skin to feel too tight, sucking the oxygen from the room. All my thoughts of remaining as still as possible disappeared, and panic began to spread into my limbs. I jerked, trying to escape, trying to scramble away somehow.

  Viggo grunted as I flailed, and I heard Owen murmur something, but I couldn’t stop—something was terribly wrong. I needed to get up, needed a gun, needed to fight—

  But my body resisted the very idea of motion, betraying me. I felt my strength leaving me like water down a drain, and suddenly the darkness was back, beckoning to me. I tried to escape from it, the desire to fight and overcome still burning like a fire inside me.

  The darkness didn’t care. It loomed over me like a terrible, ancient thing. My lips barely had the chance to form the word ‘no’ when it crashed down on me, dragging me back, deep into unconsciousness.

  2

  Viggo

  Violet went limp in my arms, and it took everything I had not to panic. I carefully adjusted her until my fingers could seek out her heartbeat against her chest. I felt the steady thud against my hand and let out a breath I hadn’t even been aware I’d been holding, biting off a growl of irritation at having to move her again so soon. Too soon. But there was nothing that could be done about it.

  We were in a dim, cramped space beneath a set of wooden stairs in the house of one Mr. Alton Kaplan. The dim space smelled like old sawdust, and I could feel the crunch of old spider webs disintegrating as I brushed against them. We’d stumbled across the man by chance a few hours after escaping from the palace. We’d been desperately driving around on the dark, dirty backroads of the farm country in search of not only a doctor, but fuel for our car, hoping some scared countryfolk would take some of our modern tech arsenal as payment for letting us siphon a tank from a tractor or unused vehicle.

  We’d managed to find something even better: a huge, busy old ranch that kept a supply of gasoline in their own tanks for their farming equipment. We’d managed to trade one of Ashabee’s guns—the rancher had been more than happy to let us fill up to get his hands on the state-of-the-art semiautomatic we’d had in the trunk. And then, as we’d been debating the safest way to get Violet some medical attention, the local veterinarian had come out of the barn, fresh from treating a cow with some kind of infection… Close enough.

  Mr. Kaplan was a kind, older man with no family to speak of, and his skills were probably the reason Violet was still breathing now, why she was even somewhat conscious. Upon seeing her condition, he’d let us follow him home for the remainder of the night, shaking his head at our notion that we would immediately continue our journey. Owen had slept. I had not—I couldn’t let this stranger operate on Violet throughout the long night, on his own. He had been able to set her arm, stitch up cuts, and provide strong medication that was helping to stabilize her. It was also effectively doping her up, keeping the pain at bay but doing who knew what to her logical reasoning. At this point, I didn’t care what kind of animal the sedatives had been designed for. It would at least tide her over until we got back to Ms. Dale and the others and let our doctor look at her.

  If we got out of here.

  Even if we did, we would be scrambling to keep ahead of the other patrols flooding the area, in search of the terrorist who had bombed King Maxen’s palace. These farms were out of the way enough that they hadn’t been immediately searched, and I had hoped, last night, the patrols wouldn’t get around to it until after we were gone… but no such luck.

  I wasn’t sure what news had filtered out into the area regarding the attack—the news tickers had gone out around the same time the palace had fallen, according to our host’s news report—but I was certain that while the public was being told the official “terrorist” story, the Matrian wardens were well aware of whom they were looking for.

  Violet was barely twenty years old, but she was Matrian enemy number one. She was being held responsible for the assassination of her home country’s former monarch, Queen Rina. She had actually killed another one of their princesses, although that operation had been kept much quieter. Two princesses, if Tabitha had been killed in the blast in the palace, as I fervently hoped.

  Now it was morning again—much too early in the morning after yesterday, barely past dawn—and we were hiding from an approaching Matrian patrol in a storage compartment under Mr. Kaplan’s stairs. Our host was outside the door, casually adjusting the painting that hung over the already seamless spot of wall that marked the hidden door. He was a man who spoke softly and asked few questions, for which we already had cause to be grateful.

  “It will be all right, Mr. Kaplan—just act natural,” Owen coached our ally quietly through the wall, though I thought he might have been more nervous about this than Mr. Kaplan was. The blond man met my questioning gaze, but kept talking. “Be polite, calm, and answer their questions without giving it too much thought. Avoid lying when you can. Be vague.”

  I frowned at his growing list of suggestions. Everything he was saying was good advice, individually, but it was like taking months of spycraft training and trying to condense it down, then jam all the tips for being questioned into a thirty-second speech.

  Mr. Kaplan’s replies were soft, too soft for me to make out from my position beside Owen. I looked do
wn at Violet and felt my heart clench.

  She looked terrible. Her face was ashen, the violent red-and-purple bruising that covered one half of it standing out in stark contrast. Her eye was swollen and black on that side, her lip split. White bandages enveloped her neck and chest, covering the first- and second-degree burns she had received from being caught in the blast. Parts of her hair were singed off, and other parts were clumped together.

  It was gut-churning to see her so damaged, and I felt rage at Tabitha swelling in my chest. That monster had hurt my girl. If Tabitha had survived the blast, I was going to tear her head off.

  “That’s perfect, Mr. K,” Owen replied, interrupting my dark thoughts. “And please… if they try to take you somewhere, and you have a chance to run, then run. Please.” I shook my head at him, half worried that the statement would upset the older man, half worried that Owen hadn’t made his warning stringent enough. Elena’s wardens were tasked with reducing the male population of Patrus by sixty percent—by systematically isolating them from their families and loved ones, and then executing them.

  I turned to set Violet down, taking great pains not to jostle her too much. She shifted fitfully as I rested her against the wall, but her eyes didn’t open again. I gently pushed hair out of her face, then turned back to Owen.

  “How much time do we have?” I asked, studying his face.

  Owen shrugged, then raised his arm to wipe away the sweat collecting on his forehead. “Hard to tell. I spotted them when they were close to the turnoff for the farm, but I hightailed it through the field. They had to go the long way around, but they were in a car, so…” Owen made a gesture with both his hands, as if weighing something, then let his hands drop down.

  I grumbled a curse and grabbed my gun, sliding back the muzzle and chambering a round. Owen’s look was wary, but he didn’t hesitate in pulling out his own gun. I took a deep breath, trying to calm my frazzled nerves. To say I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the last few days would be an understatement, what with the Matrian attack on Ashabee’s manor, and then Violet running off to face Tabitha in order to rescue her family. Granted, she hadn’t gone alone, but if I hadn’t gone after her…