Snow's Soldiers: An Epic Paranormal Fantasy Series (Fairy Tales and Nightmares Book 1) Read online

  Snow’s Soldiers

  Fairy Tales and Nightmares Book 1

  L.C. Hibbett

  Ellesmere Publishing

  Contents

  A Prophecy

  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

  Also by L.C. Hibbett

  Acknowledgments

  This book was written, produced, and edited in Ireland, but US English has been used. Slang words and idioms particular to each culture have been retained to respect the authenticity of certain characters. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. This book is a work of fiction. All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © L.C. Hibbett 2020

  Cover design by Ljiljana@FantasyBookDesign

  Edited by CP Bialois, N.K. Editing, and Word Witch Edits

  All rights reserved

  For Jaymin, my Australian twin, who inspired me to give writing fantasy books a whirl, who cried with me when life got hard, and who reminded me that sometimes good enough is enough.

  Everyone deserves a Jaymin.

  (But you can’t have mine—she’s taken!)

  A Prophecy

  A princess and three princes,

  Each with no throne,

  Shall find the missing key,

  But not alone.

  Three warriors of no compare,

  Nine hearts their love shall share.

  One immortal life given to turn the key,

  Then all may return as it should be.

  1

  An ax a day…

  Aria

  Bavaria, Germany, 1981

  “You need to buy another ax?” The sales assistant behind the counter of the small, dusty hardware store tilted her head as she asked the question. The woman was not a stranger, not if one considered she was familiar enough with my face that she had used English to address me instead of German, but despite the many times I’d passed her on campus and the countless trips I’d made to the hardware store, she had never deigned to speak a word to me beyond telling me the price of my order.

  I glared at the blue-eyed beauty but refrained from scowling, reminding myself I hadn’t come to Bavaria to make enemies—even of irritatingly perfect people who needed to learn to mind their own damn business. I tapped my nails on the counter and stared pointedly at a rack of hatchets, ignoring her question. She wrinkled her nose, undeterred by my silence. “I mean, didn’t you buy an ax yesterday?”

  I narrowed my eyes and weighed the consequences of telling the girl to shove her interfering head up her ass.

  Her name was Janet Jones and, like me, she was an international graduate student at the University of Freiburg. Her dorm was in the same drafty old building as mine and we shared the same laundry room, but that was about all we had in common. Janet’s hair was sunny blond; mine was inky black. Janet wore pink lip-gloss and purple eyeshadow; I wore black eye-liner and shit-kicker boots. Janet was the kind of person the other students ran to catch up with in the corridors, and I… Well, I wasn’t.

  Don’t misunderstand me, it wasn’t that I hated the other students at the university, but making friends wasn’t my thing. Sure, maybe once-in-a-while it might have been nice to have somebody to sit with at lunch or to go for a beer with, but the problem with sharing a lunch table was that it could lead to sharing conversation, and sharing conversation led to questions—and questions about my life were always bad news. So, I ate lunch alone, and I mostly drank beer alone, and I stayed under the radar. And I tried my best not to let my anger and bitterness turn me into a total asshole.

  Some days, I even succeeded.

  But I rarely succeeded on days when I had a blinding hangover. Which was bad news for Janet, considering I’d consumed so many units of alcohol the night before that I felt like somebody had pulled me out of a poisoned rat’s ass. I had barely enough energy to breathe.

  Janet Jones flicked a strand of golden hair out of her eyes. “You did buy an ax yesterday, didn’t you?” She leaned over the counter. “Or do you have an identical, hatchet-buying twin? She’s not going to show up and hack me to death, is she?”

  “Only if I’m really lucky,” I muttered. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I half-regretted them. It wasn’t the blonde airhead’s fault that my date the night before had been so disappointingly average that I’d drunk myself into a coma out of boredom. I gritted my teeth and scrambled to say something less offensive, but Janet beat me to it.

  “I’m sorry, it was rude of me to ask.” She flashed me an apologetic grimace—all pink lips and straight white teeth. Even her damn grimace was perfect. “My father says I don’t know when to mind my own bloody business and stop asking questions.” She raised her hand and gestured to the rows of dusty supplies. “Problem is, it’s so dull in here that when somebody buys a second ax, my imagination goes into overdrive. Although, if you really are part of some ax murdering duo, it’s probably pretty stupid of me to ask you about it. I’d be the idiot who gets killed in the first scene of a horror movie. My father has warned me about that too.”

  Great, not only did Janet Jones look perfect but she was funny too. I couldn’t help but give her a begrudging smile. “Well, I could always keep you alive and just lock you in a basement for a while if you’d like to make it to the second act?”

  “That would be brilliant, thanks.” Janet grinned. Her accent was decidedly English; it wasn’t quite cockney, but I guessed she was some shade of Londoner. “You know, if you were feeling really generous, you could just torture me a bit and let me make it all the way to the end. Chop off a couple of body parts but nothing fatal. For my dad’s sake—only child and all that.”

  I couldn’t help myself; laughter escaped through my nose in a snort. “Okay, it’s a deal, you can live. But only for your father’s sake. I admire a person who can acknowledge their offspring's flaws.”

  Janet schooled her features into exaggerated agreement. “Absolutely, it’s what any decent parent should strive to achieve. Total and utter disdain for their adult children.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “So, what do your parents hate about you?”

  “My parents?” I raised my eyebrows. I could have told her that my foster f
ather, Mr. Hunter, thought I was far too careless with my weapons, or that my foster mother, Mrs. H, said I should stop going on dates with men she hadn’t approved first because she thought my taste in guys was dubious at best. But the fact was that Mr. and Mrs. Hunter didn’t like me to talk to anyone about them—they didn’t like me talking to people, period. So instead, I told Janet the truth. “My parents are dead. They died when I was a child.”

  “Oh, shit, that’s awful. I’m sorry. Me and my big mouth,” Janet said.

  I shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Both of them though, that must have been terrible. Was it an accident?” Janet’s expression was so genuinely pained that it made me uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, something like that,” I lied. Except with wolves and monsters and magic and high-speed trains and awful stepmothers. I let my gaze slide from Janet’s perfect face, suddenly wanting to be anywhere else. I stared at the rack on the far wall and pointed my finger at the bottom-most hatchet. “I’ll take the Helko Werk. Thanks.”

  While Janet turned to retrieve the hatchet, I yanked a thick wad of cash from the inside pocket of my denim jacket and counted the correct amount of Deutsche marks onto the counter. The blonde handed the ax to me gingerly and toyed with her delicate bracelet as I checked the blade. I glanced at the twisted silver band around Janet’s wrist and something about the swirling lines of metal tugged at my brain. I’d seen the patterns before; I just couldn’t remember where. It was only when Janet dropped her arm so that her wrist was out of sight that I realized I’d been staring.

  I sheathed the ax head and gave Janet an awkward smile. “Nice bracelet.”

  “Thanks. My dad gave it to me. It was my mother’s.” Her voice was smaller than before. She glanced at the locket hanging on a chain around my neck; the one I toyed with whenever I got nervous or excited. “Your necklace is really pretty.”

  “Thank you. It was my mom’s too,” I said. Janet nodded like she understood, and I found myself nodding back. Maybe Perfect Janet wasn’t the absolute worst after all. I gripped the ax in my right hand and turned toward the door, glancing back at the blonde as she counted my money into the till. “And you were right, by the way. I did buy one of these yesterday, but I lost it.”

  “Ha, I knew it,” Janet said with a triumphant wag of her finger. “I never forget what a customer buys.” She frowned. “Wait, how did you lose an ax?”

  “I left it on the tram,” I admitted. “I got distracted.”

  Janet eyed my crumpled outfit knowingly. “Was he worth it?”

  I made a face, thinking about Karl, the guy I’d spent the night with. It was his guitar case that had caught my eye first, and then his tight jeans, but sadly it had been a case of all style and no substance. I wasn’t the kind of person who expected fairy tale romance, but I was pretty certain Karl spent more time on his David Bowie wannabe hairdo than he ever had on foreplay.

  The best part of our date had been the room service I’d ordered after I’d kicked Karl out of his own hotel room. Lounging in bed with crepes and ice-cream all morning wasn’t an adequate substitute for decent sex, obviously, but it was better than nothing. “Not really. Big ego, small… conversation skills. He definitely wasn’t worth losing a hatchet and gaining a hangover for.”

  Janet laughed. “Maybe you’ll find somebody more worthy of your ax at the party tonight. I can’t wait to see what outfit you’ve got planned. If it’s not something particularly gory, I’m going to be very disappointed.”

  “Party?” I echoed.

  “Brad’s Halloween party, that’s what the ax is for, right?” Janet gestured toward the Helko Werk hatchet in my hand. “You’re going as some kind of psycho killer?”

  “Brawny Brad’s party? Hell, no!” Brad was a tall, blond beefcake from Texas who roomed in the same building as Janet and me. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t make it through a thirty-second conversation without mentioning that he had played college football and owned a Ferrari that his super-wealthy daddy had bought for him. I assumed his father had also bought his place at the University of Freiburg because Big Brad certainly didn’t have the brains to get the grades. “I don’t really do parties,” I said. “Especially not Brad’s parties. It wouldn’t be safe to leave me alone with Brad and a hatchet for too long. My will-power isn’t that strong.”

  Janet laughed. “So, if the ax isn’t for a costume, what’s it for? Cutting down beanstalks and slaying dragons?”

  Closer than you think, Perfect Janet.

  “Hiking,” I said. I lifted the hatchet onto my shoulder, preparing to exit the hardware store. My mind was already on the coffee and cake I planned to devour as soon as I decided where to eat. The lie rolled off my tongue with practiced ease. “The Black Forest is lovely this time of year. Lots of fallen branches, though. I like to make sure I’m able to clear a trail if I need to.”

  I sensed the shift in the atmosphere the moment the words were off my lips. There was no obvious change in Janet’s expression, but I had spent enough time reading people’s body language to notice the subtle signs. The stiffened shoulders under Janet’s peach blouse. The way her sparkle-tipped nails dug into the scrubbed wooden counter. “But the forest is off-limits for students, isn’t it?”

  It was a perfectly reasonable question. The university had issued a warning weeks ago that the forest was unsafe for students until further notice because some unnamed idiot had fallen and badly hurt themselves or some such bullshit, but there was something about the intensity in Janet’s stare that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. I shrugged my shoulders, forcing myself to keep my posture casual. “Sure, but I’m an experienced hiker. It’s no big deal.”

  Rotting trees were low on my list of things to lose sleep over; I’d faced far worse things in the Black Forest, once upon a time.

  Janet’s body seemed to stiffen another fraction, and I got the impression that she was winding tighter, like a coiled spring. “But it’s not safe. Even for experienced hikers.” She beat her fingers on the countertop for emphasis. “There’s a warning. You could get hurt, and you’d be in trouble with the university if anyone saw you.”

  Wow. It seemed Perfect Janet was a real stickler for health and safety. Hopefully not enough of a stickler to tell anyone about my trips into the forest—because that could be a problem. A big problem.

  I cursed inwardly; that’s what I got for talking to strangers. As if the Hunters hadn’t warned me enough times.

  “Yeah, well, it’s getting late…” I eyed the blonde cagily as I started to edge toward the door, strongly regretting my decision not to walk to the larger hardware store a few blocks over. As a rule, I alternated where I bought my supplies to avoid drawing unwanted attention to the unusual volume of hatchets and blades I purchased, but I had been so damn tired when I had dragged myself out of bed that I’d been too lazy to walk the extra few blocks out of my way home from the hotel where I’d spent the night with Karl Von Massive Ego.

  I reached for the door handle in an attempt to slip out without further conversation, but Janet ducked under the counter and grabbed the door before I could close it behind me. “You just shouldn’t go into the Black Forest alone, okay? Especially not after dark. It’s not safe. There are falling trees and there could be kidnappers or sexual predators.” She leaned toward me and her voice dropped to a whisper. “There are things in the forest—”

  Janet’s mouth clamped shut, and she stared over my shoulder. I twisted to follow her line of sight. It was almost six o'clock and evening was falling fast but there was nothing in the street outside to merit any particular attention. Janet swallowed hard and flipped the door sign to ‘closed’ without saying another word. She stepped back to let me exit, and I squeezed past her. She lifted her hand in a limp farewell, and I felt a lurch of regret that the conversation had soured so badly.

  I twisted to face her as I stepped into the street. “Honestly, Janet, you don’t need to worry about me in the woo
ds. I can handle rotten trees and creeps.” I raised my sheathed hatchet. “This ax can chop more than fallen branches.”

  I swung my rucksack over one shoulder and my hatchet over the other, glancing at my watch as I made my way toward the closest café. I’d almost reached the street-side tables when Janet caught up to me.

  “Aria?”

  I turned to stare at her. Janet had never called me by my name before; I wasn’t even sure she knew what it was. She bit the corner of her bottom lip and watched me through long fair lashes. I noticed her eyes were an unusual shade of blue, like cornflowers in bloom.

  “I mean it, Aria, you shouldn’t go into the forest at night.” She bit down on her lip again, scanning the street furtively before she took a deep breath and met my stare. “There are things in the Black Forest an ax can’t kill.”

  The world tilted under my feet as I watched Janet spin away from me and run back down the street. I gaped as she slammed the door and slid the bolts into place. Her words echoed inside my skull.

  There are things in the Black Forest an ax can’t kill.

  Time ground to a halt as Janet’s words slithered down my spine and settled deep in my gut. It was true. There were things in the forest an ax couldn’t kill. I’d spent every day of my life since I was eight-years-old obsessing about those things, but I’d never met a single soul who believed the truth about the Black Forest.