The Seer, Deadly Fairy Tales Book 1

By Elizabeth Marx

Fairy tales aren’t supposed to be deadly, but anything can happen on Halloween night in Salem ... even a human sacrifice.

When a supernatural beast murders a sixteen-year-old girl, her soul is reawakened as an OtherWorldly being. Now, as the Seer, she is destined to serve the Order, even as she craves retribution. Invisible, isolated, and confused, she rejects her calling and seeks solace in the one thing she believes is real: her connection to Locke ... only he can’t see her, or feel her presence.

Determined to find some way to warn Locke of the danger he’s in the Seer sets out to discover the truth behind the clandestine Order. Unfortunately, those who are like her fear her, and only one acknowledges her existence—Tristan, a Guardian sentenced to defend the Order at all costs.
Soon Tristan discovers something sinister, something that cannot only destroy the Seer, but every witch in the Order.

To protect the one she loves and regain the life she lost, the Seer must join forces with Tristan and save the thing responsible for taking her away from the world to which she desperately wants to return.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Marx
• Release date: Mar 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476372365

Elizabeth Marx

Windy City writer Elizabeth Marx writes deeply emotional romances that take her readers on a roller coaster ride through desire and despair. Elizabeth’s cosmopolitan flair for fiction makes her unafraid to push you over that first drop just when you think you know what’s going to happen next. Her writing is described as hilarious, heartbreaking, and heartwarming. Her characters achieve the ‘happily ever after’ through a journey of poignant and passionate moments.In her past incarnation she was an interior designer—not a decorator—which basically means she has a piece of paper to prove that she knows how to match and measure things and can miraculously make mundane pieces of furniture appear to be masterpieces.Elizabeth grew up in Illinois but has also lived in Texas and Florida. If she’s not pounding her head against the wall trying to get the words just right, you can find her in her garden. Elizabeth resides with her husband and an Aussie wigglebutt.Elizabeth has traveled extensively, but still says there’s no town like Chi-Town.You can contact the author at [e-mail] or visit her website www.elizabethmarxbooks.com

Book preview

THE SEER

THE SEER

Deadly Fairy Tales Book 1

Elizabeth Marx

Contents

The Seer

First To Know

The Rules Of Fair Play

Do Not Apply To Love & War

Hellish Rehilibitation

Witches Of The East & West

Age Old Battles Tied Together With The String Of Fate

The Order’s Incognito Manifesto

The Devil You Know

Extraordinary Slap Down

At Last Sight

Blessingston

The Stolen Bride

What Nightmares May Come

Mirror, Mirror

Missing From the Wall

Final Words of Caution

NEXT BOOK IN THE DEADLY FAIRY TALES SERIES

BONUS MATERIAL

THE SEVEN PRECEPTS OF AMERGIN

COMPENDIUM

What’s in a Name?

ALL’S FAIR IN VANITY’S WAR

Other Titles

ASCENT OF BLOOD

CUTTERS VS. JOCKS

BINDING ARBITRATION

SIGNING BONUS

JUST IN CASE

JUST CLOSE ENOUGH

How You Can Support Indie Authors

About the Author

The Seer

Deadly Fairy Tales Book 1

by

Elizabeth Marx

Copyright 2012 Elizabeth Marx

1st Edition

Copyright 2016 Elizabeth Marx

2nd Edition

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Digital edition by: Elizabeth Marx Books

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Edited by: There For You Editing

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First To Know

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Locke & Key fit together seamlessly.

This is the start of a fairy tale, and with it the knotted string of my fate, tied so closely with theirs.

The Seer

The Rules Of Fair Play

Seer: Ordinary human transformed by human sacrifice into an ethereal body; an OtherWorldly being able to travel the nine realms. A Seer watches and records ExtraOrdinary events, they are formidable and talented once they learn to control their sight, which is called second sight.

Seer

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HALLOWEEN NIGHT 2008

I feel like a pork-chop going to a bar mitzvah, I said, as my seatbelt trapped the pink chiffon dress I was encased in against the passenger’s seat. Without the restraint taming my costume, I might have tried to combust out of the ridiculous neon pink colored confection. My stomach churned again, I’d been queasy all day and my mother had tried to use it as a reason to keep me home, but I was going with Locke, no matter what her dire warnings were.

Locke and I left the mansions of Salem’s historic McIntyre District in our rearview mirror, speeding past bungalows and Halloween weirdoes as we made our way to the outskirts of town.

Have you considered tweeting the sarcastic one-liners? Locke’s dimple crested his cheekbone. Then his lingering examination of my mouth stole my breath. Relax. His eyes crinkled at the corners. It isn’t as if they’re going to perform a human sacrifice. It’s just a party.

He’s teasing, I thought as my lashes swept together. He knew I was apprehensive about officially meeting them.

Locke leaned into me and his peppermint-flavored lips brushed mine, sending brief images through my mind. The satiny softness of Locke’s breathing across the inside of my ear when he helped me into the car. His woodsy evergreen scent always enveloped me when he closed the car door. Tonight when he picked me up for the Halloween bash, his eyes danced with a mischievous brilliance and the thought of getting into mischief with Locke Cavanagh was exciting and enticing.

Deep trouble.

I shivered in anticipation as I glanced through the windshield to gauge how much longer we’d be alone on the deserted road. Out of nowhere there was another vehicle, about a single car length ahead of us with its blinding high beams headed right for us.

As we collided head on, my scream spiraled off the pavement with the car. Two three-hundred-and-sixty degree spins across the roadway before we broadsided the brick wall surrounding the old cemetery. Everything stalled to slow motion as my body cartwheeled through shattering glass and metal debris. I catapulted through the tops of the evergreen trees and over the brick wall where I landed with a bone-cracking crunch, before skidding across the damp grass. Every ounce of air was knocked out of me on landing, and my head throbbed as chaotic stars burst red and black against my corneas.

My arms felt like dead weight as I tried to shake the slimy leaves from my hands by brushing them across the pink chiffon dress. When I touched my skin I got shocked, not by the sight of blood, but by thousands of pinpricks of light racing through my limbs, electrifying every hair on my body as if I’d plugged the vacuum into the outlet that always overloaded and gave off a little jolt. I held up my trembling arm, trying to see if the blast of current had seared my skin, but a trail of blood raced a shower of sparks sprinkling the ground from my body. My body had conducted electricity and now my arms were 4th of July sparklers. What the hell?

I managed to get my tingling legs under me, but they were shaky as I searched for my ballet flats. I couldn’t locate them so I hobbled barefoot toward the brick wall I’d been tossed over. My head felt like I’d ridden a Tilt-a-Whirl a few too many times but I wanted to get back to Locke. When I reached out to lean against the wall to catch my breath, a sound roared off the crumbling bricks; it was so brain piercing I covered my ears. Then some unseen force pushed me away from the wall, forced me to about face, and pulled my body through the graveyard with such power I dropped the silvery wings of my getup between a Celtic cross and a crumbling obelisk. My costume’s halo was torn from my hair when I’d been hurled through the windshield. I pulled the last hairpin from my scalp, and my elbow-length hair danced around my shoulders like a black veil. Me being crowned with a corona on the night decadence and debauchery ruled Salem was about as likely as a red-horned demon dropping into the center of the Easter Day parade anyway.

This unseen energy maneuvered me through the minefield of monuments; something directed the course of my electrified body, as if searching the tombstones for one in particular. I came to an abrupt stop and my knees buckled, pulling me to the ground as my fizzling fingertips were forced to score the headstone. I felt like a marionette as I traced the letters of the epitaph. Death’s cradle straddles all our graves, lulling the elderly, while catapulting the young to their eternal rest. The first time I read this marker last summer, I knew you’d need more than tenth-grade honors English to understand it, but now I’d been cannonballed out of my own body, and Gram’s words raced through me as if they were adrenaline as understanding dawned.

I looked down at my puppet-like body: it was misty white, ethereal even, and my essence burned as if I’d stayed in the sun too long without enough SPF 30.

I am dead!

I gasped for air, and when I couldn’t get any oxygen I panic breathed.

For a brief moment my fuzzy mind wondered if I should be concerned about being spotted and I glanced around. It’s difficult to believe, but on Halloween night in this peculiar town stuff weirder than a specter prowling a cemetery is happening. Although, I do expect our accident to make the front page of the Salem Evening Journal. Last year, Buffy Stakes Elvira at Broomsticks Bistro was November first’s headline. Tomorrow’s caption will read: Homecoming Queen and Star Quarterback Eternally Separated in Horrific Crash.

The realization of my demise dawned on me like the headline shouting off the front page: I was no longer inside my physical body. I’m sparkly and burning and dead, but somehow still here, still alive. I ran my fingers over my electrified arms … well, sort of.

My brain throbbed in my cranium. I couldn’t be dead. I couldn’t be gone. I couldn’t lose Locke. I couldn’t breathe without Locke.

My chest constricted on a sharp pain so acute I doubled over. The thought of a final separation was too much to stomach, so I ignored the agony by pulling forth flickers of the past. Locke’s hand brushing sand off my hip at the beach last summer, the way he’d eyed me through his sunglasses in anticipation as his fingertips played with the strings of my bikini bottoms. The way he’d squeezed my hands when I’d snuck into his barn a couple of weeks later, refusing to let me unbutton my shirt as he whispered, Wait, on a husky breath between kisses, which made me think he really meant ‘go’. The way his body arched against mine in desperation as we moved in tandem just a few nights ago at the high school dance, only again for his deep voice to murmur, Soon, along my ear.

All these thoughts made me cry out in a sharp, silent pain. I collapsed against Gram’s headstone again, calling forth the image of her as she eyed Locke from her squeaking front porch rocker the first time she’d met him. That boy will lead you down the wrong road, she’d said.

We were only twelve and I had no understanding of what she could possibly mean, so I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t Locke’s fault his square jaw and angelic features were perfectly proportioned. His piercing violet eyes could burn almost obsidian in a moment of annoyance, and then turn to laugh at you with the sparkling majesty of purple robes. His mop of hair was as thick and rich as the sable collar of an imaginary robe. His face was the only one that stoppered the hole created in my heart at the loss of my own father. His heart was the only one—beyond those of my own immediate family—I had ever loved.

As if Gram could read my mind, she’d said, Mind me, granddaughter. Pretty is as pretty does. I loved her wrinkled face, mapped with both pleasure and loss, because it had always staunched the heartache before Locke came along. The steady movements of her gnarled hands spoke words most eyes could never comprehended. I worshiped slices of her buttermilk cornbread, slathered with sweet-churned butter. She’d been raised so deep in the South sushi is still called bait, and she never feared karate-chopping us Massachusetts Yankees with her Southern-style wasabi tongue.

As her worried face perused him I asked, You don’t think I’m pretty enough?

Pretty beautiful, and apt to stay that way, she scolded. You are eternally beautiful. Your hair as silky as blackbird’s wings, they’ll carry you on, where his road leaves off. Echoes of her Southern drawl rang through my mind in clear contrast to Locke’s upper-crust articulation screaming my name in the distance, his voice barely filtering through the hazy curtain of energy encircling me.

His call pierced through the veil as if summoning me to my finale.

I used Gram’s headstone to pull my body up, then dragged myself toward the sound of his voice as if it was a beacon in the blackest moment of my life. I struggled to pull my shimmery body over the brick wall. On the other side, I examined the lonely stretch of road; thick fumes of gasoline and fizzled wiring pulsated through the atmosphere, tickling the back of my throat. I coughed. The knock and hiss of Locke’s car scratched against my iridescent skin, hardened metal electrocuting satiny flesh. The cars stood hood-to-crumpled hood, each burning angry steam out its radiators’ nostrils. I expected the tires to paw the ground and tear out against his armored opponent, as if dueling to the death.

My death.

Tears saturated my lashes, the black sheen of my mascara dripping from my chin, as papers pirouetting though the air drew my attention to my shredded book bag hanging from a sapling. I watched in horror as my English book opened, the pages fluttered, and my term paper—Bronte vs. Austen: Battle of the English Heroines—floated through the air as easily as I had during my last dance recital. The paper was due tomorrow, it would never get turned it.

Which reminded me, I was out past curfew. My mother would be pissed. Whenever I came home late, which was always Locke’s fault, she would say, I was afraid you were lying in a ditch somewhere. If she thought I was lying somewhere, she wasn’t imagining a grassy knoll, but one of Locke’s reclining bucket seats.

The bright side is I no longer have a curfew. The downside is I think I’m almost invisible, motherless, and … oh yeah, dead! I couldn’t believe I wasn’t freaked out. I must be in shock or some sort of deep denial.

A sharp screech of metal on metal called me back to the cars where the spike-haired driver of the other vehicle shoved his door open wide as he climbed out. The biker dude raised his smoke-clogged voice to the heavens and twisted vile curse words together; they gave me head pains and wreaked havoc with my heartbeat. He pounded on his chest in conquest and the earth gave a slight tremble in reply. His bloodied hand went to his skull, pushing a piece of torn flesh back into place, but spiked scales rose in response to his darkening skin. He sluiced out of his leather vest and pants like a snake shedding his skin. I watched in horror, as his features grew ecstatic, his nose elongated, and his mouth chomped the smoky air exposing two rows of teeth. Talons formed from his fingertips, as his ears slid up the sides of his head, becoming a miter-shaped crest and frill.

Terrified, I screamed and backed away as I located Locke in the middle of the highway. Locke wasn’t looking at me; he hadn’t heard me shriek as biker dude had morphed into a lizard. No, the reptile is too huge to be called a lizard he’s a crocodile. Rather, a basilisk, king