Page 35 of Bonded Ever After

“Okay then,” I say, blushing.

We’re only walking together for a short time when a stag leaps out onto the path. He can’t mean us harm if he’s able to go on the path, but still, Callum shifts to stand in front of me, and I’m left looking around him at the bright red stag. He has golden antlers, meaning he’s an elder, and he stands tall and majestic.

Leaning down, he touches the path in front of it, and it turns gold, moving slowly toward us. As it reaches our feet, I feel a tingling spread over me, and I look down at my hand to see that it’s turned to gold. Callum looks back at me, completely golden, and gasps at whatever he sees in me.

The stag leans down and seems to bow to us before leaping off the path and disappearing into the woods. We stare after him for a moment, probably both wondering what the hell just happened.

Callum turns to me. “The gold is fading.”

“Yours is too,” I say, touching his face, which is less and less golden by the second.

“What the hell was that?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No idea, but it was definitely weird.”

“Definitely,” he confirms.

We continue walking until we see a cabin in the distance, just in front of the Mist Realm, and we both speed up. After too many nights on the hard ground, a nice bed and a good stew sound almost too good to be true. I just hope our friends back home are doing just as well at their new universities.

FIFTEEN

Callum

We’ve been in the Mist Realm for days. How many, I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell here, since it always seems to be the same brightness through the mist. I’m doing everything I can to make traveling easier on Elora. Every inch of me is hyper-aware of the fact that the person I love most in this world is carrying the baby I love most in this world. I would do anything for them, but I know in Neverwood that’s not always enough. So, I’m on guard at all times. Ready for anything that might face us.

“You going to help? Or just watch?” Elora asks, and I startle, my focus having been on everything around us.

She’s sawing off one of the giant coconut-sized fruits that tastes like a cross between a pineapple and a strawberry. When we’d climbed to the higher branches in search of food, she’d been ecstatic to find them. Apparently, she’d been craving them all day.

The fruit gets sliced off the vine, and she cracks it open, drinking the liquid and eating the inside with an intense look of pleasure. I smile and get to work cutting off another one. If my lady wants these ridiculous fruits, she’ll get as many as she can handle.

“These are amazing,” she says as I crack open the one I sawed off and hand it to her. “Seriously, amazing.”

It’s hard not to feel good hearing that. There are so few tasty things I can give her. Watching her eat food that she gets sick from makes me feel like I’m not taking good enough care of her.

“Good,” I say. “You deserve it. Just keep growing that Little Bean. I want one with chubby cheeks.”

She laughs, then gets a thoughtful look on her face. “You know, I don’t know why, but I never saw you as the dad-type.”

I lift a brow as I start sawing off another fruit. “Yeah?”

She shrugs. “I honestly thought you’d be upset when you found out about the pregnancy.”

Guilt uncurls within me. “That’s because I was such an ass, treating you like shit just because I was jealous. Have I said sorry about that?”

“A lot of times,” she tells me gently.

But sorry isn’t enough. I need to spend my life making it up to her. I will never again give her a reason to believe that I’ll be anything but good to her. She needs to know that I’ll treat her like the princess she is, forever. No matter what.

I crack open another fruit for her, and she says, “Last one.”

So I get to work eating a couple myself. They’re good, but they’re not ‘roll back your eyes in the back of your head and moan’ kind of good, which seems to be the kind of effect they have on Elora. Not that I mind watching her eat and moan, even if it is putting me in the mood.

“Ready to go?” I ask, wondering if it’s too early to set up our tent on the path and have a little fun.

She nods, and I offer her my hand to help her stand, then get her backpack on her. As we head to the ladder going down from the branch, a massive creature comes leaping onto the branch. It shakes the whole thing so much that we both end up thrown to the ground.

The black beast, which looks like some cross between a wolf and a dog, growls low in its throat and starts toward us. I’m on my feet in an instant, yanking Elora to her feet beside me. This thing is the size of a goddamn house. The only thing we can hope to do is outrun it, but not on a tiny ladder going to the ground.

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