Page 48 of Bonded Ever After

“What does Little Bean think?” he asks, studying me carefully.

I smile. “Little Bean… finds it tolerable. I think.”

He grins. “Then I’ll become the best spider hunter you’ve ever seen.”

“Yay,” I say, but I sound tired, even to my own ears.

He moves our packs away and shifts behind me so I can lean on him, then continues to break legs off the spider as we eat.

“This is pretty romantic,” I say.

“Oh yeah, I know how to treat a lady,” he teases.

I look back at him. “You’re going to be a really good dad, you know that?”

He smiles broadly for a minute before it fades. “I hope so, because I have no idea how to do this dad thing. Archer wasn’t exactly dad of the year.”

Thinking about the cruel way he spoke to Callum, I understand. “He was always so angry.”

“He wanted a life different from the one he had. He didn’t like being married to my mother. He’d married her because people wanted him to marry her, and she’d married him for the power. His title meant he didn’t have any real friends in Paradise Falls, and he resented having to go to Neverwood to help people he didn’t care about. I honestly don’t know anything that he actually cared about, including me.”

My heart aches for him. “I can see why you don’t care all that much about finding our dads.”

“That’s not true,” he says, surprise in his voice. “Your dad loved you so much. He loved you with his whole heart. I saw that, every time I looked at the two of you. I want you to have your dad in your life. I want our child to have your dad in their life. I just… I just want to keep you safe. Walking into the unknown goes against just about every instinct I have.”

I kiss him again. I can’t help it. He used to approach me with this big ball of possessive jealousy, but now it’s a more tender possessiveness, like his sole focus in breathing is keeping me safe, and it’s so, so sweet.Our child could do worse than him for a father, that’s for sure.

We finish the spider legs and go for the body. The stuff inside it isn’t nearly as tasty, but we finish it and actually feel full for thefirst time in awhile. Both of us know it’s unlikely that we’ll meet traders again, so we fully need to find a way to live off the land until we get out of here. If we can.

“Do you want to rest for a while longer?”

I shake my head. “We should keep going.”

“We don’t have to be as careful. There’s no world in which the Council could follow us this far into Neverwood.”

I smile. “Yes, but I don’t want to stay in this realm one day longer than we have to.”

“Fair enough,” he says, standing. He puts his backpack with the crystal chest tied to it on. He’d abandoned the one the traders had given him once it was empty. Then he offers me his hand. I take it, and try to pretend that I’m not as exhausted as I feel.

“We just have to keep going. We have to keep hoping we’ll get out of here soon.”

“I just wish there was a cabin,” Callum says. “One night sleeping in a real bed with a roof over our heads would be amazing.”

“Agreed,” I say, suddenly daydreaming of a cabin out in this lava world. “But I bet the lava would burn down a real cabin.”

He winces. “Probably.”

We keep going, climbing one hill after another as afternoon gives way to evening.Soon, we’ll be able to rest for the night, but not yet. Not when there’s still daylight.

As we get to the top of the next hill, I inhale deeply and take a step back. On all sides of the path spreading out on both sides of us are glowing blue creatures that are flying, just like the little girl we saw. For now, they all look like something close to jellyfish, just glowing and bobbing in the air.

I take Callum’s hand. “Don’t trust anything that flies.”

His hand tightens around mine. “This will be easy. We just keep walking, one foot in front of the other. We don’t leave the path for any reason.”

“Right,” I say, and then we start walking.

As we draw near, the creatures shift shapes, looking like lost kids, looking like the people we traded with, even looking like cuddly-looking animals. They beg and plead with us to come save them, to help them, but we just keep moving.

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