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)
“Did they nail that crown to his head?” I’m aghast. I mean, dragons are awful and we do terrible things. But nailing a crown to a head? That feels quite over the top.
“Yeah.” Pell sighs again, this time with much more weariness. “Everything is fucked up.”
“You can say that again.”
“There’s no happy ending for me.”
“Oh, I’m glad you said that.”
“What?”
“Because I feel the same way!”
“Yeah… OK.”
I’m confusing the poor simpleton. He’s not processing the dichotomy between my glee and my words, because they contradict. So I tuck my issues away and focus on my only true friends in this entire life. “Let’s find Pie.”
Pell presses his lips together and nods. “Yeah. Let’s go find Pie.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE – PIE
It feels like it takes forever for me to make my way through, and over, all the ruins of Saint Mark’s before I finally step through what used to be the door to the cathedral. There’s not much difference between inside and out, but the one thing that really attracts my attention is that the extra stairwells are missing.
Not crumbled, like the real stairway. But missing.
It feels like a loss. Not that the hallways ever really participated in what’s been going on here—before today, of course. Is it still today?—but they always felt like an option and now that’s been taken away.
Maybe someday, if I live through the next twenty-four hours, I will have time to dwell on this and fully appreciate what they offered and what I have lost, but right now I’m just trying to figure out what the fuck is going on so I push all those thoughts away and concentrate on climbing up the remnants of seventeen bajillion steps.
I’m about halfway up when I have to abandon the stairs and start climbing over massive pieces of marble that used to be walls. But finally, I make it to the top.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but whatever it was, the top falls short.
There is nothing left of the grand front entrance. Like… nothing. I can see the gate out front from the top of the stairs—which, by the way, and not that it matters, isn’t even closed.
Hell, I can even see the road. There are tire tracks in the snow that alert me to the fact that even though my monster world has just fallen apart, people are out there. Living their lives. Driving their cars down this road. Going out for coffee or dinner—I have no idea what day it is, let alone what time.
The tire tracks should comfort me. It should be a relief that Pennsylvania still exists. That the world is still there.
But it doesn’t.
Because this isn’t even the end. The breaking of the curse and the crumbling of Saint Mark’s Sanctuary is just the beginning of the end. Who the hell knows what’s gonna happen next.
I blow out a breath and then notice two things on opposite ends of what used to be the grand entrance hall. The greenhouse on my left and the apothecary on my right. Both of which are mostly still intact.
OK, then.
Chances are high that the woman I was following went into one of these two places. I choose the apothecary, since it’s closer, and start picking my way through the debris towards the massive closed door. When I get there, I don’t know why exactly, but I glance up. At the curse over the doorway.
Which is gone. Because so is the curse.
And again, I have a feeling of loss.
I open the door. It creaks loudly, so the woman bent over a desk on the other end of the room should look up and notice me, but she doesn’t.
She is not one of our wood nymphs, of this I’m sure. I don’t know what exactly gives it away because I’m no expert in wood nymphs, but I am certain she is not wood nymph.
Her clothes, for one. She’s wearing a long dress made of pale blue… cotton, maybe. Very old-fashioned style with a square neckline, showing just the beginnings of shoulder and not even a hint of cleavage, and dressed up with some embroidery and lace that is most definitely not cheap and tacky like the synthetic shit they make these days.
It’s not a sexy dress. Not cut to draw the eye to her feminine assets, which are clear. But it is a pretty dress.
And she is pretty too. She’s looking down, so I can’t see her full face, but her hands are slight and dainty as an ink pen floats across the empty handmade pages of an open book. Her long blonde hair looks soft and freshly brushed. It’s pulled out of her eyes in a way that makes it look like a curtain pulled away from a window and it’s dressed up with a crown of spring flowers, small and delicate, like she just picked them off the hillside out back. She’s wearing silver bracelets that clink, and around her neck hangs a large red gemstone that looks suspiciously like the ones I made manifest in Tomas’s dungeon.