Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
“Do you remember anything?”
Her eyes squint down. “Should I remember those wings?”
“No.” I laugh. “Not the wings. They’re just…” I look over my shoulder at them. “They’re…” I don’t want to say it, because it’s not technically true, but it’s the only thing I can say. “They’re the ones I was born with. The bat wings were just part of my punishment.”
Which isn’t even true. Or maybe it is. I’m kind of at a loss why I had bat wings in the first place. But I’m kind of at a loss for a lot these days.
“Oh.” She studies me for a moment, then narrows her eyes again. “Are you… cooking?” And the next thing I know, she’s getting to her feet.
“Whoa, there,” I say, setting the wooden stirring spoon down on the flat, slate rock I’ve been using for a plate and walking over to her. “Take it easy. You don’t want to fall.”
“Fall?” She sucks in a breath and smiles at me. “I’m fine. I feel fine.” Then she stretches her arms and yawns. Like anyone would when they first wake up. “That food smells delicious. What is it? And what is this place?” She looks around for a few moments. Then her gaze lands on me. “The door led here?”
I’m already nodding my head. Already lying before I even think about telling the truth.
There is no way I’m gonna describe what I saw when I walked through my door.
“Yeah.” I spread my arms wide. “It’s not bad.”
“How long was I out? I’m so hungry.” She walks over to the little camp stove—which I have improved over the months so it looks like a very proper kitchen fireplace now—and squats down, leaning over the turtle-shell pot of soup. “Smells good.” Then she looks over her shoulder at me, grinning. “You made this? Or was it cooking when we got here?”
She has no idea how much time has passed.
“I made it.”
“Mmmm. Is it almost ready? I feel like I’m starving.”
I want to stop the lie. I do.
I want her to know the truth.
But why ruin everything with the truth? Why make her think back? Why force a memory when all it’s gonna do is hurt her?
She’s OK. I’m OK. Ire’s OK. We’re all OK.
She does not need to know how not OK she was when we got here.
So I just smile bigger and say, “Let me make you a real meal.”
Callistina is surprisingly talkative while I prepare a meal of badger stew filled with greens, plus a few potatoes I dug up just a few days ago. It hasn’t been hard finding food here—wherever ‘here’ is, because I still don’t know. There is a road within half a day’s ride that I found several weeks ago. But it’s not a mountain road. So how we get from here to that road we were on in the last trip, I haven’t a clue.
“I can’t believe I was sleeping for three days. That’s crazy. How long did you sleep, Eros?”
I lied to her. How the hell do I explain a three-month sleep? It doesn’t even make sense. And she doesn’t remember how her antlers were cut off. She doesn’t remember any of it, so why should I remind her? She didn’t seem too upset about missing her antlers in the other ‘when.’ It’s best to just leave it be.
Ire has been coming and going lately, but he has stuck close to the camp. Like he can feel a change coming. And I can too. It needs to come and I’ve actually been preparing for it. Like the readily available food choices, there are many, many magiceuticals in this forest, so the goldberry and sharptongue were procured in the third week, after I was satisfied enough with the camp I was making and the food I was eating to think of a few other things.
I don’t have a bottle, and the acetic acid is still fermenting in a mash I made out of apples two months ago, but it should all be fine. And I’m eager to get the fuck out of here, so when the food is ready and Callistina and I are sitting at the makeshift table I made using a large slab of gray slate, I bring this up.
“We should really get going on finding another door.”
Callistina is smiling as she blows on a spoonful of hot stew. “Oh, I don’t know. We could stay and check things out if you want.”
“Nah. We should go.”
“Go where, though? Back to Glory Rome?”
“Home.”
“We don’t have homes, Eros. We have a cursed town that lives in a fog of in between. We’re certainly not going back there, right?”
“Well, there’s always the Realm of Pittsburgh.”
She frowns. “The human world. Where we have no magic.”
“Maybe magic is overrated?”
She scoffs. “But I’m not human. I like this.” She pans a hand down her golden body.