Free The Hunter's Prey (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 5) by Katherine Sparrow Page A

the hunted was your friend, that you changed your allegiance and decided to help me?” I tried to keep a pleading tone from my voice.
    “Alas, old friend,” she murmured with her hissing voice that filled every corner of my store. “Would that I were here to help you, but I cannot.”
    I stood up straight as her words hit me. “You mean you choose treachery over friendship,” I said, biting into each word. “You choose to hunt the one who saved your life. Who put herself in harm’s way that you might live. You choose to sacrifice me, you insect. You choose to throw one of your children into my heart to track me. Would that I had let your own hunters tear you apart.”
    She hissed, long and loud. “Human, do not pretend to understand why I must do what I must.”
    Sweet Morgan. I would never hurt your heart, the unicorn said.
    I glanced at him and saw that his words were so true. He would only be my truest and most trusted friend and stead. He would only ever—
    I wrenched my gaze from his. “Until you skewered it through with your broken horn,” I said, reminding myself what he truly was. “That is your nature, after all. But you, great spider, you have fallen far.”
    The spider hissed and moved her insectile head from side to side, tasting the air. “We have all fallen.”
    “At least tell me why, Shin Harawa. What makes you willing to sacrifice my freedom? My life, most likely.” She had once been a noble beast. Perhaps the centuries had evolved her into a true monster. Perhaps not.
    “It weighs heavily, Morgan. Know that and take some small comfort with it. To join the hunt was not a journey taken lightly. To know that I must find and fell an innocent, and then to hear it was you.” Her legs made a skittering sound on my floor as they shifted with discomfort. Her mouth pincers opened and closed. “Do you remember how, when you rescued me, how I spoke to you of how few of my kind there were left? How we were a waning species?”
    I nodded, shifting my gaze from the unicorn to the great spider and back again, trying to keep both monsters in sight, for either could attack at any second. “I remember,” I said, and took a step back from both of them.
    “That was hundreds of years ago, and the lapsed time has been even less kind to me and mine. I stand before you the lone survivor of my species.”
    “Yet your child wriggles and bites me from within.” I took another small step away from both of them.
    “Yes. There are thousands of eggs filled with hatchlings within me, and they are the last hope for my kind’s future. I still have so many that could be born, that want to be born and lay in wait for their mother to lay them, but therein lies the problem. For I have been hunted, Morgan, so many of my days that I have developed a fear that clings to all that I do. I am not strong enough to raise my young. It takes a mighty warrior to raise a great spider well, and I am far from the mother I need to be. In fact, I have developed an anxious condition and any time I think of hatching my young. I cannot breathe and suffer for days on end.”
    “So you will bring me to the witch and exchange me for some bravery so that you may raise your young. The unicorn will get his horn restored, and the vampire brothers, had they survived, would have gotten their brains back, most likely. Pray tell, are you sure this witch can truly restore you, or has she merely fooled you all into thinking she is powerful? It all sounds like some sort of bad movie. Perhaps we could, the three of us, go to her and find out the truth.”
    Clever words, I like you. I love you, said the unicorn and lightly pawed the ground.
    I bit my lip to keep from saying that I loved him back.
    I took another step backward, toward the rows of drying herbs and tinctures. Toward a spell lodged in the center of some skeins of lichen-dyed wool that I’d hidden there on some paranoid day or another in my past.
    “It is no trick. The witch’s promise is a