Page 5 of ORC’d By the Emperor

But no time to ask questions about our realms’ mismatched space-time continuums.

A train’s warning whistle sounds from the tunnel’s dark depths, and I take off running, my bare feet slapping against the cave’s stone floor.

I launch myself into the tunnel’s black void with no idea what waits for me on the other end of my journey.

Or which monster.

Chapter 4

First Stop

Despite having gained tens of pounds since my last Army Fitness Test, I still make the… I mean, I guess you could call it a train. Straps hang down in a neat row to give passengers steadying handholds. But there are no seats. As far as I can tell, there’s only a single car. And instead of zipping along a track, the train burrows through the ground with a faint whirring buzz.

A bipedal mole attendant lines me up toward the front of the car with dozens of other women. Only a couple of them are crying now. Most of them appear happy to be here, actually. Maybe because they’re fully clothed.

It’s warmer in the train than the dank way station cave, but I’d kill for the comfy pajamas on the Asian woman a few straps down. She chats excitedly with a redhead I recognize from the crystal ball—the one in the pink sundress who got chosen by the male Fae.

After we’re situated, another Black woman standing to the right of me introduces herself as Adelaide. She wears her hair in a crown braid, and a pair of large, round glasses gives her a professorial look.

“Exactly how does this conveyance work?” she asks the mole attendant.

“Troll tech,” he answers.

“Of course.” Adelaide nods sagely, as if his explanation makes perfect sense.

Then she turns back to me with a sympathetic grimace. “Oh no, it looks like you got pulled from our world at the worst time! Here, take my⁠—”

“No trading allowed on trains!” the mole attendant squeals when she tries to take off her tweed blazer.

“It probably wouldn’t have fit me anyway,” I tell her, eyeing her thin frame. “But thanks for trying.”

After that blazer block, the woman standing to my left tries to introduce herself as well, but she doesn’t have to. As an avid Quinnver, I instantly recognize her as the popular ReelGram cosplayer Aimee Amazing.

It helps that she’s currently wearing one of her signature costumes: Elnara, the ever-optimistic Silver Moon Elf who’d found love with a cynical warlock in Spring of the Fae.

She’s absolutely drop-dead gorgeous in a curly blue wig, brown Elf ears, sparkling silver contacts, and full elven makeup that includes silver freckles dotted across her dark cheeks.

Apparently, she’d just finished up a live makeup tutorial when she made the mistake of saying she wished she could live in the Middle Realm, right after she opened up her Spring of the Fae copy to show off all of her annotations.

Hundreds of her followers watched her get sucked into the book.

I’m not sure why the mole attendant lined us up together. Maybe because our names all happen to begin with A?

“I actually have a fraternal twin named Addison,” Adelaide tells us as the auction train burrows toward what we’ve been told will be the first of twenty stops.

She pushes her glasses up her nose with a worried look. “He’s very protective of me, and he’s going to be apoplectic when he gets back to the apartment we share and finds me gone. Otherwise, I’d be elated to have been accidentally ferried here by that book portal.”

Adelaide, as it turns out, is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota-Gemidgee, where Clara Quinn used to teach. She was cross-checking a few notes for her doctorate in African American Literature on the use of supernatural beings as avatars of real-world issues in the Seasons of the Fae series when she was sucked into the latest novel, too.

“Who are you hoping picks you?” she asks after we’re all done with introductions.

“Well, I don’t have any family to speak of who will be missing me, and my love life back home is drier than dry. So’s my bank account because I spend all my money on costumes,” Aimee admits with a shrug. “I’m just so happy to be here, I don’t care who I get, as long as I can stay in the Middle Realm.”

I am nowhere near as enthusiastic as them about getting auctioned off to whatever Middle Realm creature decides he wants me as a wife.

But the mole attendant is only standing a few feet away. Probably wiser not to say out loud that all I care about is getting some clothes to wear, finding out where the nearest mage cave is, and escaping back to our dimension the first chance I have. It’s only been an hour or so since I arrived. I still have time to make my test tomorrow morning.

“I dunno,” I mutter. “Maybe a Faun? Someone really gentle.”