Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 119764 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119764 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
She nods, eyes wide.
I hug her again, and then I head off to find my new husband. He’s not inside, so I open the door to the store and head back out near the fire again. It’s not unusual for Murr to be out and about in the morning. I’m not much of a morning person myself. I drag myself from bed to make a fire and boil old coffee grounds in the hopes of squeezing a bit more flavor from them. Once I’ve had the saddest, palest cup of coffee in creation, I start to feel human. Murr is very much a morning sort of dragon, however. He is up at dawn, hunting or digging furrows for the garden I might have offhandedly mentioned the day before. He checks on all his cats constantly, making sure they’re fed and that the little ones are taken care of.
When I find him this morning, he’s got two piled into his lap and he’s cradling a third like a baby. The cats give me sleepy looks, unmoving, but Murr beams at me. “Hello, wife.”
I get all warm and mushy at his greeting. “Hello, husband. Still want to go scavenging today?”
He nuzzles the cat in his arms and sets it down, then displaces the others carefully from his lap. He’s wearing one of his kilts today, I notice. No more shorts for him. He bounds to his feet with a nod. “We go.”
I smile wider, adjusting the straps of the pack over my shoulders. “How do we want to do this? If you shift into your other form, how do we communicate? How am I going to stay on your back?”
Murr takes my hand in his. “No stay on back. Murr hold like this.”
And he makes a grasping motion, his big fingers encircling my forefinger. I guess I’m the forefinger in this scenario? Yikes. “So you’re going to just…hold me around the waist?”
Why does that make me feel faint? I don’t like the idea of my legs dangling as we fly through the air, but he’s the expert here.
The dragon-man nods and taps my hand with a quick double-tap. “Hand talk.”
“Okay.” I can do that. I rack my brain, trying to communicate what we’re looking for specifically. Normally when we scavenge, we dig through whatever we run across in the hopes of finding something useful. If we can fly, however, it opens up new worlds of possibility. I don’t want to be greedy, but there are certain stores we haven’t run across that I’m dying to find. We’ll start there. “We’re looking for buildings with plants. Big green signs. I want seeds and plant nutrients, or if we can find entirely whole plants, that would be amazing. We’re also looking for camping or sporting goods stores, since they’ll most likely have food supplies that survive long term instead of a grocery store. We want signs with a fish on them.”
He absorbs all this, blinking at me. “Fish store. Plant store.”
“Yes, perfect.”
“Explain…store?” He gestures at the bookstore that we’ve made our home. “Is not store?”
Oh, oops. I guess I took for granted that he’d follow everything. Of course he doesn’t really grasp what a store is and what it’s for. “No, this is a store, too. It’s a big building like this, but we want a different one.”
The door to the store opens just as I gesture at it, and Aggie steps out. She brightens at the sight of the two of us standing in the parking lot. “Good, you’re still here. I need a favor.”
CHAPTER 80
DAKOTA
Aggie walks out to us with slow, measured steps. She’s by herself, and as she approaches, she looks around furtively. “Is anyone else out here?”
“Just me and Murr,” I tell her, curious. “We were about to go scavenging. What’s going on?”
She moves in closer and puts a hand to her mouth, as if sharing a secret. “I need a favor. Dottie’s eightieth birthday is coming up and I want to give her a party. Cake, hats, presents, the works.”
I’m torn. Part of me loves the idea, but I’d be willing to bet we can’t find most of those things. I need to set proper expectations with Aggie so she isn’t disappointed if we come back empty-handed. “We can look, sure, but I don’t know how we’d find flour or make cake at this point—”
She waves off my concerns. “You’ve got a dragon. You’ll figure something out. Get what you can. I want to make her feel special. She’s my best friend, you know.”
I should tell her that there’s no way we’ll find everything on her wish list. But there’s something about the look in her eyes and my worry over Dottie that makes me pause. “We’ll check some party stores and I’ll look for a grocery that hasn’t been destroyed. I can’t promise anything, though.”