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)
“You’re the boss. Fine.” Eyebrows looks over his shoulder, then looks back at me. “Be the boss. But you will not use that voice on us like we are children who need admonishment.”
“Well, you’re acting like children.” I cringe when these words come out of Pie’s mouth. She’s not usually so confrontational and this is not really the time to start. “You’re running around here like”—Don’t say it, Pie. Do not—“like animals.”
There is a collective gasp across the sanctuary. It’s kind of the ultimate insult in monster world. But Pie’s not from monster world, so I don’t think she means it that way.
“What she means is”—if I don’t interrupt here, we’re gonna have another scene—“you’re disrespectful. And we take offense to that. You will be considerate of the sanctity of Saint Mark’s. You will not run around fucking, and shrieking, and partying.”
“What are we supposed to do then?” The question comes from a petite naked wood nymph, still riding the back of a large bull-like monster I’ve never interacted with. “If we’re stuck here and we can’t have fun, what are we supposed to do?”
And this one comment opens the door to all the complaints.
“Yeah.”
“She’s right.”
“We didn’t ask to come here.”
“We’re bored.”
“This place is stupid.”
“We want to go to town.”
I raise a hand to shut them up. “If you want to party, do it down by the lake.”
“Outside the walls, then?” I turn to find Batty back on his feet. There are still bits of plaster in his hair and lining the bones and webbing of his wings, but he’s mostly pulled himself together.
“Down by the lake.” I say it again, just so I’m clear. “Do not leave here without permission.”
I know how this sounds, and I know how they will react. The same way Pie reacted when I told her she needed to ask permission to leave. But when you start a negotiation, you have to be unreasonably heavy-handed or you’ll lose too much ground.
“Permission?” Batty says this, but he’s not the only one. There’s a lot of whispering now as the monsters get all riled up over my command. “Again, you seem to think we’re children who need minding. We’re not.”
“You’re not. I agree. But you are in my world, living under my protection. You are eating our food. Pie goes into debt with every bite you take. And she does that willingly. Following a few simple rules is the least you can do to pay us back.”
“What if we don’t want to stay here?”
I turn to the small wood nymph again. “You cannot leave the boundary of Saint Mark’s.”
“Why not?” she asks.
I don’t really know the answer to this, I just know it’s true. To a point.
I redirect my gaze over to Batty. Because he can leave the boundary of Saint Mark’s. All he has to do is fly upwards until the magic dissipates, and he’s quite literally free. And he’s not the only one. There are half a dozen winged monsters here. So far, none of them have left the sanctuary’s sphere of influence. But that doesn’t mean they can’t leave. It only means they haven’t.
I decide this question needs to be answered, so I make something up. “You cannot leave because you have debt. And if you leave with debt, you have to pay the price with years off your life.”
This is mostly true. Well, for Pie, anyway.
But it could apply to them. Maybe. It sounds good, anyway.
“Debt? We have debt?” This comes from another wood nymph. Average height, long dark hair, and big, wide, green eyes. She’s actually wearing clothes—translucent pink harem pants and a matching halter top. It’s unusual for a wood nymph to wear a top, so this is interesting. Plus, she’s not hysterical. She’s actually quite calm and reasonable. “How do we get rid of this debt?”
“You pay us back, of course.”
This one steps forward now. In front of Batty, even. Like she just decided to take command of the Saint Mark’s monster army. “And how do we do that?”
“I’m sorry, what is your name?”
“Isla.”
“Isla, you get rid of your debt by making me happy.”
She snickers. “Is that so?”
“That’s right.” Pie steps up next to me. “I have all your Books of Debt down in the Bottoms prison.”
“Bottoms prison?” This question reverberates through the crowd as a whisper.
“It’s where all these monsters you see in front of the tombs are kept behind bars.” Pie waves her hand at the hundreds—thousands, probably—of tombs. “I have a library down there where all the Books of Debt are kept. If you’d like to see your book so you can understand your debt, you can make an appointment with me, and we’ll go over how you can make Pell happy and erase your debt.”
I’m not actually sure this is a lie. Pie told me about the Bottoms, of course. And I know all the tomb monsters really are down there behind bars, as well as Callistina. But a library of debt books?