Facets of Feyrie Box Set Read online

  Contents

  To my readers:

  Elusion

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Acknowledgments

  Ascension

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgments

  Deception

  Prologue of a Big Boob

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  Obliteration

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  The Journey After

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  About the Author

  Also by Zoe Parker

  Copyright © 2019 by Zoe Parker

  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.

  I’m already a starving artist, let’s not make me a homeless one too, eh? Thank you for purchasing the book, if you can’t afford it you can also ask your local library to order it.

  For everyone who stood by me the last two years.

  To my readers:

  This set contains all four books plus some bonus content. I hope you enjoy it!

  Elusion

  Facets of Feyrie Book One

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Acknowledgments

  To My Children:

  Without you, my imagination would have died a long, long time ago.

  Chapter One

  Bad memories have a way of dragging you under and trying to drown you in their agony. They force you to remember that life can always be worse, even if you think it’s already there. You get to walk through every stupid decision you made, every single thing that was ever done to you—over and over again.

  Today is one of those days for me.

  My pretend ma, Mary, always said that the terrible things she and Paul did to me were for the greater good. That there was a prophecy saying I would save the world and be a hero. She told me that only they could prepare me for that honor. I wanted to be that person so bad that I ignored my in
stincts and chose to be the dumb, naïve kid that believed in fairy tales. But even denial on that scale has a limit. As the days went by—as the pain became harder to bear—I started doubting everything she said.

  It took a while, and I managed to keep a death grip on that tenuous hope for years, which says a lot about my stubbornness. I developed coping methods to delay accepting the truth; mind tricks to keep believing in that stupid bullshit as long as I could.

  One of them was simple enough, and probably one of the few solaces I got as a child. I would sneak out of the house—before my room became an actual cage—to an old rowan singing tree that grew at the edge of the forest behind our house. My only safe place back then. I’d hoist my bruised body up to its gnarled branches and tuck myself away in a nook that was baptized with my tears of grief and blood. Wrapped in its thick, leaf-covered branches, I spent many a night mourning the loss of yet another piece of myself.

  And sometimes, I dreamed.

  A lonely, abused child in a world stuffed with misery, I imagined what this fake future life would be like as this ‘hero’ person. I know now that those dreams were me manipulating myself into continuing to eat the crap that Mary fed me. A way to accept the trauma by convincing myself how fortunate I was to be chosen and prepared for some grand life. Every day, repeating the mantra that, ‘There’s always someone worse off than me’ was the only thing that got me through my most profound moments of despair.

  Yeah, what a load of dragonshit.

  It broke me that lie of a life.

  The ‘teachings’ crossed into something that took me to the precipice of ceasing to exist as a thinking person. In that glaring moment, I realized that I could no longer deny the cold, hard truth. Mary and Paul were abusers who were using me for the Magiks they could steal from my blood. I violently tore those blinders off, and those abusive assholes died in the wake of it.

  Still, the world wasn’t done claiming its pound of flesh from me. The authorities caught me and convicted me of murder at the tender age of twelve-years-old. Sentenced to serve a life sentence, they threw me into a prison run by the very creatures who had nearly wiped Dark Feyrie off the radar of existence.

  The Schoth.

  All these years later, I still don’t regret killing Mary and Paul. Some people in the world don’t deserve to stay in it, and they’re good examples.

  Frustrated with the memories that serve no purpose other than to make me dream of the life I so desperately wanted to have, I try to make myself bury them, once again, in that place of pain and horror that torments me with its existence. The one I can sometimes close the door on and be free for a little while—albeit, delusionally so.

  Your mind should never have the power to pull you in and hold you hostage in remembered misery.

  Flattening my hand against the cool stone of the cell wall is a fruitless attempt to pull me out of that emotional shithole and give me a physical connection to the world of reality. Failing to do so, I rest my cheek against it and welcome the cold seeping into my face. The slight bite of it against tender skin as it sinks into my bones and manages to remind me of where I’m at and who I am.

  The reality of what my life is now.

  The soul-sucking memories are reluctant to release me. They hold on with claws made of regret and lost dreams, burying them deep in my skin, but I will not let them pull me under—not yet. To go under entirely is to give in to the insanity that lingers at the edge of my consciousness daily.

  There’s no return from that.

  This walk down memory lane is purely because I was foolish enough to let myself think about—and miss—the night sky painted with drops of brilliant light. The tickle of a cool breeze across my skin that stirred my hair up around me. I let myself try to remember, and that stupidity started a chain reaction of nostalgia for the things that I’ve almost forgotten. Like the sounds of the forest outside of the hellhole of my childhood home; full of chirruping crickets and the mournful howls of wolves on the hunt, as the pale moonlight reflected off their eyes in the shadows. The feel of the rough bark of the singing tree beneath my hands, as it cradled my young, broken body and helped keep my dreams alive enough to survive.

  These things were my lullabies.

  Irritated with myself and those useless thoughts, I pull my face away from the wall and physically shake myself with a grunt of annoyance. Why did I let myself go down that never-ending hole of awful? The past before this place isn’t something I think of often, it serves no purpose to dwell on it, and ultimately only causes me to miss what I can never have again. Miss things that I’m not sure that I even had to begin with. Who wants to think of a time when they were a battered lonely kid aching for a life that was more than blood and pain?

  If only it were that easy.

  As much as I’d like to forget it all and completely deny its existence, it lurks behind a door in my mind; one that I know better than to open. Sometimes, though, it decides to open itself. Angry at my inability to move forward, I swipe a hand through the thick dust on the floor, leaving trails from my fingers in it like scars.

  Maybe the unexpected transfer to this private sector of the prison brought it on? I was dragged here from the general section and dumped in this stupid cell, alone. Not that I mind the alone part, but the unknown element is concerning. Being here, in this unfamiliar place, makes me nervous because I don’t know the reasons for it.

  I suspect that this is the place I’ve heard other prisoners whisper about. They call it the ‘Blackhole.’ Some of the stories I’ve heard say that people who come here, never return. Everyone assumes they die here, and that’s probably true. Now I’m in this place, which makes me next in line to meet the reapers.

  Not that dying in prison is a surprise.

  I’ve been counting down since I got here, waiting for that inevitable conclusion. Well, as much as I can count down. There’s no real way to tell time in prison; they don’t provide clocks or watches; it's part of the punishment—no sense of time passing. Since there are no windows, you can’t see the rising of the suns or moons. There are no true shift changes so you can’t base anything on those either. The guards live in quarters connected to the prison, and all of them work all of the time.

  In the other sector, I tried to gauge it by the food being served. That at least seemed to be on some semblance of a schedule. But since I came here—there hasn’t been any food served to me, which adds to the building anxiety.

  Strangely desperate for a way to keep track, I started trying to keep track of the water bucket getting refilled. It was something to latch onto, and beggars can’t be choosers. One bucket seems to last me several days, so going by that, six buckets of water would be around a month. That’s how long it’s been since I woke up here—lying naked on the dirty floor—stitched up like some little girl’s dolly. I was covered in dried blood, crusty mud and strangely enough, bandages. That wasn’t the first time I woke up in such a state or worse—not even close—but it’s the first time I woke up with any semblance of medical care.

  Someone even used real medical supplies, modern ones, which probably came from the human world. Anything like that does. All of the technology on Juras came from Earth, originally. The Schoth mainly managed to merge Magiks and human technology to be able to use things like televisions here.