Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
“Not in the celibate sense,” I say. Then I realize that’s not necessarily what she was asking.
She laughs.
“You’re funny,” she says. “Well, I guess if you’re not going to let me hold your hammer, I should see about some fish and chips.”
The hammer is humming. Threatening to dance. I have to hope she doesn’t notice that. I have to hope that she doesn’t notice many of the little oddities around the abbey. We are banking on people bringing their sense of the mundane to this place that is anything but. There are things here no mortal should ever set eyes on. One of them is cooking the popular meals.
I glance down at my hammer again. I’d love to let her taste the power of it, but I know that it’s not worth the risk. The insurance alone…
“See you later,” she says with one last bright smile. I watch her saunter off toward the line for chips, and that’s the last I see of her. Nobody else comes by for about thirty minutes, at which point it doesn’t matter anymore because the abbey has caught on fire.
“FIRE!” The scream goes up from what’s left of the straggling crowd. I can see smoke near one of the thatched overhangs of an outbuilding. If that goes up, we lose valuable history forever. Over a thousand years gone in a flash. I race toward the smoke, to discover some moron has set a fish and chip wrapper alight and stuffed it in some of the undergrowth that should never have been allowed to grow there. I grab an as yet to burn corner of the wrapper and stamp the flaming mess out on the ground. Chip and fish smear beneath my boot.
“What’s this?”
“We let the public in for two minutes and they set the place on fire. They can’t help it. It’s the residual Norse DNA,” Crichton deadpans.
This is no attempt to sack the abbey. This was an attempt to rob me. I run back to my stall, but of course it is already too late. The top of the glass display case has been shattered. There are shards of glass absolutely everywhere. The hammer is gone.
So is the girl.
I raise my voice and begin to stalk the grounds, though I know she’s probably already made a run for it. She doesn’t look like the type to enjoy cardio, but brains can fix what brawn misses.
“Has anybody seen a short, curvy minx holding a hammer bigger than she is?”
Nobody has seen anything. The remainder of the visitors are politely but firmly shooed out of the abbey.
I curse underneath my breath. To have lost the hammer would be a misfortune, but to have allowed it to be stolen out from under my very nose, that feels like carelessness.
“Yep. There you go,” Bryn says, sitting back in his chair and putting his hand to his mouth to hide the smirk. He knows this is a big deal. The biggest deal. But he has been through worse. A missing object is nothing compared to a missing bride.
It’s also quite amusing, I suppose, when one watches the video with a level of detachment and sees the way the local wench scammed me from the moment she came up to me. The cameras follow her around to the kitchen, where she has a few handfuls of chips — actually eating them out of her fisted hand like a small scavenging creature — before darting around behind the outhouse, which I now know used to be a quarantine hut for monks who happened to be infected with whatever the latest plague was. She set the wrapper on fire there, then made a big circle out around the bushes before screaming FIRE, panicking everyone, and making me run over like a massive marionette on her strings.
“I like her,” Nina says. “She seems cool.”
Nina is American, which means she thinks anything reckless is cool. She's also young, approaching her twenty-first birthday fairly soon. The young lady who ripped me off is a little older, perhaps.
“The last thing we need around here is any more bad influences,” Bryn says, quirking a brow at his wife.
“I’ll find her,” I vow. “And I’ll get my hammer back.”
“Make sure you don’t lose anything else in the process,” Nina smirks.
“Like what?”
She gives me a sweet smile and tosses her hair, her features assuming an all too knowing expression.
“Like your heart.”
2
Anita
I’ve cut my bloody hand, but that doesn’t matter. I have a bit of paper chip wrapper around it and that’s enough to stop it dripping blood in an obvious way in the back of the ride share I grabbed with a nice old couple who happened to be leaving around the same time as me.
What a rush! And all totally worth it. I would cut my hand a hundred times over for what’s now in my rucksack. We’re almost back to town and I’m still out of breath. I'd not run that far or that fast in a long time.