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)
I wanted to see the dang waterfall now.
“Is that what you all went looking for before? The day you came across the swamp thing?”
She didn’t hesitate to answer that. “Yup.”
Hm. “Is it a nice waterfall?”
“Yes, Nina.” She slowed down to side-eye me. “It’s the magic one.”
A magical waterfall?
I blinked.
How could a waterfall be magical? The trees here looked different, sure. I’d noticed during my walks with Duncan in the past that their trunks had kind of a glittery sheen to them, their leaves ranging in shades of green, and even Henri had suggested that things were special because of the magic in the land. Maybe the trees around the waterfall were more epic? Maybe there were magical fish in it?
I definitely wanted to see it now too.
Agnes stopped so abruptly it was like she ran into an invisible wall.
“What is it?” I leaned around her and squinted into the distance.
But I didn’t need to look far.
Spencer the sasquatch was leaning against a tall pine, looking about as pissed off as he had the other times I’d run into him.
“The dumbasses are in the river,” he growled in that inhumanly deep voice.
I was about to argue that they weren’t dumb and that he was being rude, but the hairy mythical being huffed.
“If the river doesn’t get ’em, I will, their wailing’s that annoying. I was trying to take a nap,” he grumbled. “I’d get to them soon if I were you.”
The urge to argue with him was on the tip of my tongue again, but he was warning me for a reason.
I didn’t miss that part.
Spencer deserved to have someone explain to him why he should care about children, but that person wasn’t going to be me.
“Thank you,” I told the sasquatch with an attitude problem, twisting my body enough to see through the split in the tree line. Light glinted off the surface of the river to our right, the sounds of the water rushing so much louder now. The river seemed even wider in this spot.
Agnes, Duncan, and I all started moving again, even faster that time. Soon, Agnes’s hand went up, and she violently gestured ahead. “There! They’re over there!” she shouted just as a scream pierced through the forest.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the bright flame of Duncan’s tail go vertical.
“Help!” a shrill voice wailed.
I recognized it, and that alone had me pointing violently at the ground, making brief eye contact with both Agnes and Duncan, who looked as freaked out as I suddenly felt. “Stay here!” I commanded before I turned and ran parallel to the river. If I went down to the embankment, I’d lose too much time and not be able to cover the distance as fast.
The shouting got louder, shriller, and more frantic, and I tried to find where it was coming from, but there were so many trees, and I was the wrong person to run in the forest in a panic. But I was the only person in the forest other than Spencer, and I wasn’t about to expect him to turn into anyone’s hero.
“Help!” a clear, high-pitched voice shrieked.
I ran. I ran and I ran like my life depended on it. I’d looked on the map shortly after we’d moved here, and now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember seeing any bodies of water so close to where the actual ranch was. There was a river further away by where the nature preserve part of the property was, but that wasn’t close. And that was something to wonder over later… when I wasn’t running toward a river raging in early fall, when every other one I’d ever seen had usually been starved from rainfall and snowmelt by this point in the year. But why should that surprise me? Since when had this place made any sense to begin with?
My legs pumped under me, and I was pretty sure I heard trampling from behind, but I couldn’t worry about Agnes and Duncan when they were more responsible than Pascal and Shiloh, at this point. Just as I was about to yell at them to stay again, a figure appeared by the riverbank.
And my stomach sank a split second later when I cut down to it.
Shiloh stood on a boulder just shy of the edge of the river, shivering and soaked, and Pascal….
Pascal was balanced on a rock jutting out of the water, maybe a couple inches at the most. In the middle of the fucking river. A river that had no business flowing the way it did, like it was early spring after a heavy winter. Pascal’s teeth were visibly clenched, his arms were at his sides for balance, and he confirmed he was the one screaming when he let another piercing one out.
“What the fuck?” I hissed under my breath, not wanting to yell and scare either of them. But they must have smelled me or heard me because they both looked over.