Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
“Good timing, actually.” I gestured them in. “Fred is here for a computer tech job or whatever we’re calling it, and Niamh needs to explain this town. She’s from the Jane world,” I murmured.
Jasper pushed Ulric forward so he could get a look. “I heard Niamh mention something about that.”
“Yeah, sure, we can help.” Ulric walked farther into the room. “Cheese, nice. I’m starving.”
Mr. Tom sniffed. “Yes, we are all well aware, given that you are always starving.”
I slipped out with Austin following. It was time to relax.
“Well?” I asked him once we were safely hidden in our room.
He lay down on the bed and held out his hand for me to join him. I crawled across the mattress and curled into his arms.
“She’s genuine. She even seems honest, which is surprising, given how she ended up here. If she can come around to the magical side of things, I don’t think we’ll have any problems with her. I really don’t. And given her, uh…fashion sense and overall love of eccentricity, she might be easier to convince about magic than most.”
I hoped so. Sebastian and Nessa were out there somewhere, and if the weird hacker could find them—and didn’t run screaming—then I’d pay whatever she asked.
ELEVEN
Jessie
“What did you think of training, Jessie?” Hollace, the thunderbird, asked as Ulric and Jasper dropped from the sky. A plethora of gargoyles were still running their flight patterns, but my portion of the training session was over.
Tristan had me on beginner status, and a few of the house crew with me. The crew understood the larger picture and also how to improvise with me. Tristan thought they’d help me learn the ropes and acclimate to the army’s strategies.
The army.
I had a gargoyle army. Me, Jacinta Evans, the shy and quiet Jane. The thought made me want to cackle.
If someone had told me a year ago that this was possible, I would’ve shrugged it off. Laughed, as I wanted to do now. I’d never, in my wildest dreams, thought this would—could—exist in modern times. But here we were, led by the infallibly confident Tristan, who had to pull double duty managing me and the guardians at the same time. After a few short days’ work, he’d begun to anticipate my moves more often, and frankly, I thought he’d grown leaps and bounds—all because he’d stepped in about my schedule.
How had Niamh known?
“Jessie?” Hollace said.
I blinked rapidly at him, trying to corral my mind into the moment.
“Oh. Um…it’s complicated,” I replied as Cyra streaked fire through the sky, heading toward the corner of the property. She hadn’t gotten to set fire to the gnome nest there yet. The crazy thing was, burning the gnomes out didn’t seem to be working. They were tenacious little suckers. “It’s a lot to remember.”
“Yeah.” Hollace slipped on a purple muumuu. “Especially when flying is new to you, huh? Once you acclimate to organized flying, though, you’ll pick it up quickly.”
I headed toward the house in my own purple muumuu, checking a bare wrist for a watch that wasn’t there. After I dressed, I planned to head to Austin’s bar to meet Aurora and Broken Sue for training of a different sort. The two had agreed to communicate with each other in words and exaggerated body language, and my goal was to decipher their conversation.
Yeah, right. I already knew it would be a hopeless effort. Their version of exaggerated wasn’t much more than a twitch and a grunt to express a novel’s worth of information. Aurora thought I was intuitive, but I greatly suspected that she was giving me far too much credit. I was about to prove it.
“This is all hopeless,” I said to no one in particular.
“Seriously, Jessie, you’re a fast learner—”
“Not flight,” I told Hollace. “That, at least, I think I’ll pick up eventually. I’ve got another session of shifter practice ahead, and honestly, flight feels more natural than noticing a squint and realizing it’s meant to be raucous laughter.”
“Ah.” He nodded as Ulric and Jasper caught up. “Yeah, I’m not great at any of that. It’s an entirely different language. Why would they assume you, or any of us, could pick it up in a couple months?”
“Right?” Ulric said as we threaded our way through the flowers. “I tried to learn French a while back. Two months in, and I could say my name and ask for the time. No one could understand me, though. And I couldn’t spell the words…”
“Tristan picked up body language really quickly,” Jasper pointed out.
“He’s unnatural,” Ulric replied. “We’re just going to blame it on that.”
“I could get behind that…” Hollace’s voice trailed off, and everyone slowed.
I’d been looking at the ground, still conscious of my connections in the sky. Now I glanced up to see what everyone was reacting to.
Fred stood a few paces away from the back door. She wore a pink-and-black checkered suit jacket, buttoned at the waist, with no shirt underneath and brown pants. The hand at her left side had apparently just held the closed laptop lying beside her foot, while her right hand had dropped a half-eaten sandwich. Bread stuck out of her lips, and some meat had slid down her chin. She stared at us with wide eyes, her entire bearing tensed.