Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 62637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 251(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 251(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
I kick Horus’s chair.
Wine spits out of his mouth.
“And you? What do you have to say for yourself? Oh god of the sky that never came back.”
Timber lets out a low whistle. “That… could be my fault. We did go back in time with Kyra to save her and the world, so that counts.”
“It one hundred percent counts.” Alex nods.
“It’s weird when you agree with me,” Timber grumbles under his breath.
Ethan sighs. “It won’t last long, and you have Mason and Alex to thank for saving your sorry ass back in Egypt.”
I kick his chair again. “You never came back!”
“Didn’t she already say that?” Cassius asks not so quietly, then points at the basket in the middle of the table. “Are there any rolls left?”
I jump to my feet. “What is wrong with you people? I just got my memories back from being a freaking fox in a forest in Japan, and you guys are asking about dinner rolls?”
“Japan has forests?” Alex raises a hand. “Because I have questions.”
Mason groans into his hands. “Why the hell would Japan have no forests?”
“Doesn’t every country have forests?” Tarek pipes up.
“Holy shit!” Alex jumps back and falls out of his chair. “You’ve been here the whole time?”
Tarek flinches. “That was hurtful, and you know it.”
“Sorry, bro.” Alex lowers his head. “You were just so quiet.”
“I had to chew.” Tarek tugs at the last dinner roll and looks like he’s purposefully eating slowly just to piss Cassius off. “Sorry, got the last one.”
I kick back my chair and leave the room. They’re all insane! How is every immortal impossible to live with?
Tears fill my eyes. I can almost feel my pretty tails then crumple to the ground in a heap at the top of the stairs when I remember that day.
She took them.
She wanted my bead, but I offered her something else.
I reach to my lower back, my fingers slowly grazing over the nine ridges.
I gave her my tails.
I gave my tails to see him again, even if it meant living three lifetimes; I gave over my nine tails, three for each lifetime.
I have no more tails left.
A fox without its tails can only transform if they have their bead and the bead only truly works with transformation when you have at least one tail left.
She asked for them all, which means I trapped myself and cursed myself at the same time, all in a vain effort to wait for a god who never returned.
Does he realize what I sacrificed to see him again? The hellish lifetimes I’ve lived through all in hopes that one day I’d be on equal footing with the god I’d fallen for?
“I waited in the forest for seven days,” I whisper. “You promised you’d come back, but you never did. I didn’t eat or sleep. The moon was a constant reminder of who you were, god of the sky who promised everything only to become a liar.”
“I got trapped,” Horus murmurs behind me. “You know that.”
I ignore him and walk toward the first bedroom that doesn’t look occupied and shut the door, closing him off just like I wish I could close off the pounding memories in my head of a man I loved too much.
And being the woman he loved too little.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
弱肉強食
jakuniku kyoushoku
“The weak are meat” or “survival of the fittest”
~Japanese proverb
Horus
I chase after her. I was trying to give her time to process the memories flooding her, and because of my limited power, all I could do was watch the emotions cross her face. Our moments were private. They were part of a past I wish to forget yet also long to remember. Does she think this is easy on me just because I’m a god? That I don’t care about our time together? Our friendship?
She thinks I left her. As if I would ever just leave her.
She doesn’t realize I chose my brother and that the lives she lived without me didn’t truly happen to me in the present. She suffered for centuries, and I simply skipped ahead in a moment.
She waited for me.
And all that time, I forgot about her until the memories started flooding back, and now that my all-seeing eye is gone, all I have are the last few fragments of godhood in my body and the love I have for a little fox who used to play with me in the forest only to turn into a beautiful woman in the moonlight and tell me stories.
I was only supposed to stay in her forest for a week.
I stayed seven.
And promised to return on the eighth after Timber’s joining.
And now, thousands of years later, I have a very pretty woman upset with me over promises I made in my past that I never carried through within our future.
I take the steps two at a time and find her at the top of them, touching her lower back and feeling her scars. I know what she feels there.