Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 123065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 615(@200wpm)___ 492(@250wpm)___ 410(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 615(@200wpm)___ 492(@250wpm)___ 410(@300wpm)
Quite honestly, it’s shocking we’re friends and not mortal enemies.
That and alarming to every other person who lives in Deer Harbor and has a vested interest in our friendship.
He’s technically my exact opposite, I loathe his father, in theory it shouldn’t work, and yet it does.
We even holiday together—it makes zero sense to me and to everyone else, hell he even has a guest room in my home.
He asked if he could paint it black like my soul just to piss me off.
And I let him.
With a curse, I start walking out toward the pasture.
“Wait!” Cleo’s voice interrupts my irritated thoughts. Her footsteps follow as she tries to keep up. “One of the house keepers said you have cows! Can I come?”
Cows. Plural. But only one remains near Styx for a reason.
Only one matters, I need more cows to hide the one that stands out, though to the naked eye, all three look the same, except this one with its black and brown coloring that seems to shimmer in the moonlight.
Cow’s really the worst for attention during the night because she only survives off people praising her beauty—and that includes her fellow cows fawning over her. That specific goddess was asked to take care of all the animals in the Western Hemisphere for a hundred years. An entire town lost all of their cows to a fire when she was busy spending time with Constantine. Within seconds he had a cow on his lap rather than a goddess of beauty.
I let out a sigh without realizing it. Did all of my pets lose their minds over the last few hours? The whole point is to stay hidden at all times.
Maybe they’re just as bored and annoyed as I am, I wouldn’t blame them even if they have gone feral and decided to go back into their original state, it doesn’t mean that a spark of something else isn’t still existing in their blood, in their consciousness.
Hope, something says to me.
I bat the word right out of the sky.
Hope is a sad, pathetic word used for humans who have no clue who controls the cosmos. Hope is like love; it’s something offered for manipulation. When have I ever felt both of those and actually understood their meanings?
I almost feel sad for Cleo as she stands next to me, that despite her demise, she’ll have one, maybe both, and think… “I’m the outlier.”
Never.
“She’s not exactly friendly,” I mutter under my breath nothing belonging to our world truly is especially after losing so much.
“What?” Cleo catches up despite my long strides. Her dark hair bounces against her shoulders, and her blue and green eyes stare up at me in curiosity.
Funny, how people always assume it’s either a curse from birth or a miracle.
I wonder how they never understood that differing eyes is a sign of something so much greater and yet darker than their wildest imaginations. Chaos, after all, never plays fair, it never chooses until the end.
I force a polite smile. “It’s just a pasture full of beef cattle. Shouldn’t you be getting ready for training?”
“And miss all the animals and exploring? Plus I did sign an NDA.” She shrugs. “ I’m excited to see what Jake discovered while he was roaming around here.
being a complete idiot.”
I can’t tell if she’s trying to goad me or if she’s genuinely curious if her brother really is that big of a fuck up. Either way, I can’t help but smile back which is irritating in and of itself. “You should at least be prepared.” I sigh. “He had a wild imagination and did end up discovering a lot of things. He became obsessed with the hidden artifacts.”
I’m baiting her.
And she has no idea.
She’ll be curious by nature just like him.
I look deep into her eyes, my own getting strangely lost in the storm of hers. “It really can get dangerous here and some of the things your brother was looking into can be quite…dark.”
The absence of light. How pathetic.
She waves me off. “He has a hobby, he’s flightly like that, plus he’s always been interested in our family heritage and mythology of all kinds.”
I smile. “Life is dangerous, remember, you just never know.”
She stares off at the small gate in the alley way enclosure, and I know what she’s seeing. To the naked eye it looks like a small stable holding what would be a petting zoo but suddenly it shifts into something larger than life making you think you’ve lost your mind, but I allow her to really drink it in, I whisper the words under my breath. “Believe.”
She goes very still. She probably see’s the original mountainside that used to be here in this place with it’s tall green grass, a perfect black fence that holds at least a hundred head in, and a bright burning sun shining down on the land.