Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
I look at my mother now, eyes darting to the closed bathroom door as she puffs on a cigarette. She is pretty in a used-up kind of way. Like her life was rough. And that’s why she is rough now too.
And I guess I should give her some credit. Because she hung in there for three years. She took care of me for three more years before she’d had enough and finally walked away. And actually, I still have her number. She never really disappeared. Not completely.
I was a little piece of string that attached her to the devil.
Every now and then she came to see me at the foster homes. Not many times. Maybe… three or four. But the last time, it was my eighteenth birthday and I was walking home that night with Jacqueline. We’d been partying a little. A few beers, that’s all. We were buzzed, sloppily walking down the sidewalk towards the three-story row house we called home, singing some pop song off-key, happy as a couple of discarded teenagers could be.
And there was my mother. Standing in front of our stoop, smoking her cigarette. Nervous smile on her face as she watched me for a reaction.
There were a few awkward moments between her and Jacqueline. A few snide comments, too. Jacqueline was buzzed and her tongue was always sharper when she was drinking. But she went inside and left us alone. And my mother talked to me outside my foster home for five whole minutes.
She asked how I was. She asked me if I ever saw my father. And back then, I didn’t even have the foggiest idea of who she was talking about. But now, of course, after this hallway memory, she was talking about him.
The devil.
Who was not my father any more than she was my mother.
She was looking for him, I guess. And I was her only point of contact.
But up until I met Russ Roth outside Saint Mark’s that second day of my curse, I didn’t have a single memory of that face the two of them share.
I wonder if Tomas was right about the payment for my enslavement. He told me that my parents would’ve been compensated once my curse began. But which parents? The ones of this world? Or the other one where I originally came from?
If it was this one, then imagine the surprise on my mother’s face when she won the lottery or whatever. A windfall. I think that was the word Tomas used. She would’ve gotten a windfall.
And maybe she felt it was just luck. Just dumb luck.
But if the devil was acting as my father in this world, and he got his windfall, might he not have figured it out? Might he not have put two and two together and that’s how he got to be the devil of Savage Falls?
I let out another long breath as the bathroom door opens and little me walks out, clutching Pia to her chest. And in this moment, I have the most uncontrollable urge to go back. It almost makes me sick.
To go back, and be little, and be with Pia. And do it all again.
Because yeah. These two jerks walked out on me.
But I was never alone.
I was never alone because I always had Pia.
And I get it. Pia is just me. Just the magical part of me. Somehow, when they pulled me through that door and I came out the other side as a human instead of a beast, my magic was packed up inside the body of a little bird.
Callistina didn’t kill Pia. Because Pia can’t die. Pia is me.
But I feel her loss so hard.
And this loss makes me want to do horrible things to my gryphon-chimera sister.
That’s why I haven’t gone back down to the Bottoms.
Because when Callistina ‘killed’ Pia, all she really did was give me my magic back.
And with this magic, and these rings, and these doors—I can do things.
Spectacular things.
Or maybe horrible things.
Maybe I will do horrible, horrible things.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN – PELL
A glow passes across my eyelids and I slowly come out of a deep, sound sleep. When I open my eyes the first thing I see are fireflies. They are crawling out of Pie’s palm, which is resting on my chest, and their tiny feet are tickling my bare skin as they crawl away and then lift off into the air.
When I look up, there are hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. And the whole forest, all around us, is aglow from their little bodies.
One of them breaks off from the group, heading into the darkness of the trees. Then another follows. And another. Then dozens. Until there is a little stream of fireflies up in the dark sky. A little pathway, maybe. Something we can follow, perhaps.
“Pie.” I whisper it. “Pie, wake up. Look.”