The door shut and I could finally breathe again. Another twenty minutes of cushion time elapsed before I felt confident he’d be truly gone. Somehow, after he left the house and came back, I could pretend everything was normal again, as if it were a reset button.
An hour later, I was on my third cup of coffee as I sat on the couch and holding a copy of the watch schedule I’d found in his papers. I’d been snooping around. My philosophy was if he didn’t want me to see them, he shouldn’t have left them sitting in plain view on the dresser.
“What the hell is this about?” The paper crinkled where I gripped it.
Fate, aka my nighttime cuddle buddy, had insisted on taking care of it only to completely cut me out. My name wasn’t anywhere on there. Didn’t spooning give me any privileges? Shouldn’t there be some adjusted rate, even if there wasn’t any sex, like benefits times half?
I looked around the living room, wondering where Fate—aka cuddles—had run off to this morning. Bet he’d love me calling him that next time he was about to blow some guy’s head off.
I was utterly alone in the room, which was miraculous considering we were packed in like sardines. Well, except for whoever had watch duty currently and was stomping around on the roof.
I was about to grab my phone off the table, planning on alerting Fate to my disgruntlement over his scheduling, when Paddy popped up in front of me. I jerked back before my head collided with his kneecap, his cane nowhere to be found.
“You seriously need to work on your entrance. It’s borderline rude.” I leaned back, checking out his golfing plaid. “Late for tee time?”
“Where is he?” Paddy asked, searching the room and ignoring my critique and question.
“Fate? I don’t know.” I narrowed my eyes, looking up at him. “Why?”
“Get up,” he said, waving his hands in an effort to hurry me.
“You haven’t said why yet.” I leaned back into the couch and put my feet up on the table in front of me.
“We’ve got to go meet people.” He reached down to grab my arm, but I yanked it away.
It was an action I was coming to find more and more annoying. It was ranking right up there with being treated like an idiot because I was a transfer and Malokin making all the humans crazy. “I don’t know if I want to meet those people.”
“You need to meet them, and we need to go before Fate comes back.”
Fate didn’t want me to meet Paddy’s “people,” and I wasn’t sure I disagreed.
“How do I know I’ll walk out of there?” Wow, even having to utter that sentence aloud really sucked. That I was on a speaking basis with someone that I feared might leave me for dead would’ve been bizarre to me when I was human. But due to Paddy’s past, he was starting at a deficit. He’d already left me hanging out to dry before. I understood why but couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t do it again if things got hairy.
I trusted no one with my life. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. There was one person I had complete faith in to keep me alive but he was currently trying to use me for sex. Thinking of it like that made it clear I might have made some wrong turns along the way.
“You’ve got my word,” he said, putting a hand over a heart I wasn’t sure he had the anatomy for, not with all the glowy stuff going on inside.
I clucked my tongue, still doubting. “I’m not sure that counts if you’re not human.”
“It does.”
I let a loud undecided sigh escape as I thought it through. He might have screwed me up in some places but he’d dug me out of some holes too.
“Okay,” I said as I stood, and he grabbed my hand.
“But, how long…”
Is this going to take faded from my lips. One second I was standing in the living room and the next I was standing under the stars of what looked like the entire universe, complete with nebulas and gas clouds.
The floor beneath my feet had a pattern similar to marble but was unlike anything I’d ever seen on Earth. The veins running through it glowed intermittently, as if the light were coursing through it. Grecian columns ran the length of an expanse too huge for my eyes to see or my brain to comprehend. It didn’t look like there was an end.
“Paddy, where are we exactly?” I tried to keep the awe in my voice to a minimum.
“Home.” There was a reverence in his voice that was so un-Paddy-like. He was standing with his head thrown back and his arms out to his sides. His eyes were closed and a smile warmed his face. I watched as he took a long deep breath. He looked like a man who’d just been let out of jail and couldn’t get enough of the open air flowing through his fingers.
Watching as he stood there like that for a moment, I realized I was seeing the first hint of who Paddy was. Not what he was made of, but what made him. We weren’t so much different from humans, if I thought about it. We were all simply organized energy. If you broke it down far enough, what defined everything was what mattered to you—what you cared about and what you would sacrifice for, work for, live and die for. This place was something he would die for.
His chest rose and he exhaled in a way that made me imagine him shedding some horrible weight. He opened his eyes again and turned to me, seeming somehow brighter. “Come, it’s time.”
I followed after him and had a feeling he was slowing his pace for my benefit. We walked and walked, and I started to wonder if this place would ever end.
At first, they were a speck of white against the stars behind them in the distance. As we got closer, I could make out a raised dais with four massive and intricately carved thrones upon it, one of which was empty. Paddy’s seat.
The other three were occupied by two women and one man. I’m not sure why I assumed they’d look older, like Paddy, but I was horribly mistaken. All three had perfect forms, which appeared to be in the prime of a human life, just so much better.
I glanced over at Paddy and looked him up and down.
“What? We can’t all be beauty queens,” he said defensively, and it made me wonder if I’d ever really know him.
I was fairly certain Paddy wasn’t his real name; I didn’t think his true form was an old man at all. But whatever Paddy and these three were, that they weren’t human was obvious. There was a sheen to their skin that seemed to glow slightly and a gloss to their hair that didn’t seem human. Or maybe it was the exquisiteness of their features—I wasn’t sure—but I knew if I’d seen them walking down a normal street in the afternoon, surrounded by a crowd of shoppers, I’d still know they weren’t human. They had a certain perfection that I’d never seen.
Or maybe just not quite to this extreme. I had seen something similar on someone quite close to me, and I’d be having a chat with my cuddle buddy as soon as I got back.
The interest wasn’t one sided. They seemed equally as intrigued by me but perhaps not quite as impressed. Or at least one of them wasn’t.
“Closer,” the woman on the far left said, vast amounts of coiled dark hair shimmering as she raised her chin with the command.
I hesitated, not really caring for the order or the tone it was delivered in. A please would’ve been nice.
Before I could decide whether I’d comply or not, the man seated in the center started laughing. “She’s got spunk! She doesn’t care what you want her to do, Fia.”
“Silence, Fith!”
“I don’t need to mind your wishes, Fia,” the man said, not losing any of his humor, his temperament as light as his coloring.
“Come,” Fia barked out toward me, a trembling undertone accompanying the order.
I felt a compulsion start to sneak up upon me then. It was odd, almost like moving my legs forward was an itch I wanted to scratch. No pain, just a feeling that I’d gain great satisfaction if I did step forward.
My legs didn’t move. I didn’t want to go to her. I didn’t care who she was or how powerful she might be. If they were that great, the world they were in charge of wouldn’t be falling apart. I wouldn’t be the one dealing with Malokin. There wouldn’t be a Malokin.