Monsters in Suburbia

Chapter 7 The Last Dryad

Holly

"Which way now?" The Unseelie Queen flicked her metallic sliver eyes toward me.

I closed my eyes and I felt the tingling sensation of the roots leading our path below our feet. "Straight ahead." I began ahead of our group, consisting of the Queen's knights with them using me as their bloodhound.

As we progressed the trees twisted around in gnarled and grotesque positions as if everything living was in pain. I shivered under the gaze of shadows and goblins sheltering the hollows of trees. Snowflakes began to fall from a sky hidden by thick foliage above and everyone tipped their heads.

When I returned my eyes to the path hidden beneath my booted feet I stopped at the edge of a frozen river. Something heavy pitted itself in my chest and filled my heart with worry and anxiousness.

"Why have you stopped?" The Queen's eyes flashed as she moved to stand beside me. Her long hair had been braided with five separate plaits so that she would not trip over it.

"Maybe we should go around?" My hand rested on the hilt of sword I had been given. No one knew what would be encountered on the Queen's quest.

"Nonsense." A male knight with a neatly trimmed beard carelessly stepped onto the frozen water.

I sucked in a breath as we waited.

Nothing happened.

"Well." The Queen looked at me with scorn.

The ice burst out from beneath the man and he screamed as a large black-scaled basilisk cut through the ice with its two large fangs piercing right through his body, his arms failed in the air before he was tossed aside like a ragdoll.

I stared with wide eyes as the basilisk's opaque white eyes turned toward us. Those eyes...

"Wait!" I held my arm back to the knights with their swords drawn. The Queen looked utterly furious. "It's blind."

I lowered my hand from the hilt of my sword and crouched down before the serpent.

Its black tongue tasted the air as it slithered further out of its ice jagged hole toward me. Every instinct told me to run. But I remembered that when faced with a snake, to stay deathly still. I held my breath as its tongue flicked against my face. It withdrew its tongue and I let out the breath I had been holding. Big mistake. The basilisk's mouth opened wide and brought its glass hard fangs down on my arm. I screamed, as the fangs broke right through my armoured arm, down to the bones and through the other side of my arm like a stapler cutting through paper. The flesh around the fangs sizzled and burned, the smell of scorching flesh burned my nostrils.

Dawn brought her sword in a sweeping arc down onto the basilisk and cut it's head clean off, her red hair melding with the spray of red blood pouring out from the basilisk.

Tears rained down my face as I look at the two holes burning through my skin.

"Look how the Changeling weeps." The Queen looked at me with disgust. "We must go with haste, she only has an hour."

Dawn bent down before me and wrapped a piece of black cloth around my arm, her pale face spotted with blood from the basilisk. She gathered me in her arms with one under my legs and the other behind my back with ease.

"You are a fool." She walked me over the river.

"It was blind." I sobbed still; I could no longer feel my arm at all.

"Basilisks are nothing compared to the snakes you know, you are a fool girl. And you will die because of it."

Pain lanced through my spine as poison coursed through my veins, sweat beaded on my forehead as we stopped to get our bearing again.