Page 7 of Winter Princess
Crispin cringes slightly. “How much do you remember of last night?”
“Nothing really after the …ehm… earthquake.”
Arc roars from behind me. “She’s calling it an earthquake. That’s so cute!”
“Shut it, Scottie,” Crispin shouts over the laughter. “Wynter, there’s not much left of your house. Your parents are staying at a hotel for now until they can be recompensed. They were both rather upset, so we decided- “
“You decided!” Frost interrupts.
“Yes, I decided to put them out of their misery- “
“You killed my parents?!” I shriek, launching myself at Crispin.
“What? No, I put them in a coma- “
I growl, trying to rip Crispin’s head off his shoulders. Let him try to heal that, asshole. He’s gripping my wrists, trying to keep my clawing hands away from his face while I fight against the seatbelt stopping my legs from kicking him.
“Stop it, Wyn,” Storm’s deep voice booms through the car, “what he’s trying to say is that they’re sleeping for a day or two to recover from the shock of seeing their daughter burn down their house.”
That hurts. I sink back, leaving Crispin to lick his wounds (a few scratches on his face, nothing major).
“Are they… mad at me?” I ask in a small voice.
“They’ll be ok, lassie,” Arc says from behind me and puts a large hand on my shoulder. “You cannae forget, they’re human, so it was all a wee bit too much for them.”
“So it’s all gone? The house?”
“Pretty much, aye. Some things may be salvageable from the ground floor. And the shed is intact, ‘s far as I could see.”
“Thank the Gods,” I sigh. “Mum would have been furious as hell if her paintings got destroyed.”
“There is no hell,” Frost remarks. I see what he is doing and follow the change of topic.
“Then where do bad people go after death?”
“The really bad ones are usually snatched up by demons just before they die, and are taken to the Demon Realms as servants. The ones that die are judged and then sent back to Earth.”
“Why would they…? Seriously? Reincarnation?”
“Yes, guess you could call it that.”
“So I could be reborn as an ant?”
“No, you’re not bad and you only get reborn as a human so you can make amends.”
“Clearly you don’t know me yet,” I snicker. “But who judges us?”
“That would be telling,” Crispin says, his eyes twinkling.
“Come on, tell me,” I plead, fluttering my eyelashes.
“He doesn’t know,” Frost interjects. “None of us do. And it’s not something all that interesting to us anyway.”
“Why not? Don’t you want to know what happens to you in the afterlife?”
“Oh, she dinnae ken,” Arc grumbles in his broadest Scottish.
“Well, then tell me!”
