Total pages in book: 254
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Matti was already unbuckling his seat belt.
“They probably shouldn’t be running around in the middle of the day, huh?” I asked as I started to unbuckle my seat belt too.
He shook his head, hand going to the door. “No, they shouldn’t.”
Turning, I looked at Duncan who was still on top of Sienna, his long ears grazing her lap. His attention was sharp. I’d been so relieved when he’d finally woken up at their apartment, bright-eyed and acting like himself, minus his Sleeping Beauty reenactment. “Si, will you stay with him while I help Matti find the kids?”
She wrapped her arms around her little buddy, her light green eyes widening. “The baby is safe with me, but we’ll get out and sit by the tree line. I’ve seen too many videos of people getting hit by other cars when they’re parked on the shoulder. I’ll hide him with my jacket and his blankie.”
I blew a kiss at Duncan and Sienna as I reached for the door. “Be right back then.”
But I froze the second I got out of the truck.
Wow, I thought, filling my lungs with the fresh air and the magic entwined in it. That was… wow. It felt like goose bumps but inside my body. Like smelling your favorite scent in the world but better.
Matti was already waiting though. He took a long inhale, swiveling his head from one side to the other before tipping it to the left. He was trying to find the kids, not absorbing our surroundings like I was. Did it not affect him the same way? His sense of smell was about a hundred times better than mine….
“They went that way.” He pointed. “How young did they look?”
We crossed the well-maintained road and came to a stop at a chest-high predator fence that Matti somehow climbed over effortlessly despite wearing spotless sneakers that didn’t look very comfortable and pants I called khaki, and he argued were toffee, whatever that color was. No Trespassing signs were posted along the fence, and another sign claimed there was video surveillance. Too dang bad. I stood there and looked up and down the length of the fence before holding out my arms toward Matti on the opposite side. He grabbed them and took most of my weight as I used the fencing as a wobbly staircase to the top, and then he slowed down my fall as I jumped off.
“The centaur looked like a boy, maybe? He might have been about the size of a baby deer? I think he might have only had two legs, but it happened so fast, I’m not sure. The wolves… one was bigger than Duncan, and the other one was bigger than that one, I think.” Real descriptive, I knew, but it had happened so fast. I hadn’t expected to see any magical babies running around this soon.
He frowned but nodded, his nostrils flaring wide. “Badass kids.”
“Right? Who goes exploring away from home in the middle of the day?” I slid him a look that he returned with his own and a smirk. We had, so many times. Almost every weekend until he’d moved away, probably. “They looked too young to be on their own—" I stopped myself and snickered. “I sound like an adult and a hypocrite, but you were bigger than them when we went on adventures without telling our parents where we were going.”
Matti’s chuckle was one of the most familiar sounds in the world to me. “They could have found us if they wanted, and snakes were the only dangerous thing around us back then. There’s a hell of a lot more things out here that can hurt these kids.” He glanced at me. “There are fences that surround the areas close to where everyone lives. They shouldn’t be this far out.”
Way to backtrack.
But total safety wasn’t guaranteed anywhere. I wasn’t going to worry about it. “Matti, the magic here is so….” I took another big whiff of the air. It was hard to describe what it smelled like, much less how it felt.
Matti had more than once tried to explain how scent signatures came across to him, and it had been like someone trying to explain advanced physics when I was struggling with middle school science. “It’s rich. It smells really good.” The hairs on my arms agreed. Every part of me, really. It was clean and wonderful and... it shot a shiver down my spine.
“Some of the elders used to claim that a part of the meteor landed around here.”
I glanced at him, surprised, and yet not.
He kept going. “There are parts of the property that look and feel like nothing else. You’ll see.” He pointed to the right, and we moved in that direction.
Just in this section of forest, sensing the invisible weight surrounding us… I understood what he was saying. Duncan and I had stayed in South Dakota a while back, and at the time, that place had felt special. But the magic there hadn’t been anything like here.