Page 5 of Aberrant Monsters
“You should eat first,” my uncle said.
I shook my head. “I’m already late. I’ll take a plate with me.”
Nandi followed me out of the kitchen. “We need to detach you two and fast.”
I paused at the bottom of the stone steps that led out of the servants’ quarters and up to the main house. “Don’t you think I know that? Uncle Fred is doing all he can. We’re just not having any luck.”
He’d been surfing the mystic web for weeks now, posting my problem as a theoretical conundrum, hoping someone would throw us a solution, but we’d had no luck.
“I don’t know what else to do.”
She pressed her lips together in a classic Nandi expression that said shedidknow what to do and was going to share that information with me. “The Order of Yaga knows everything there is to know about the eldritch realms and the creatures that live there. I doubt that you’re the first person this has happened to. Why else would they have these rules?”
She had a point, and I knew what she was suggesting. “We can’t go to them. It’s too risky.”
She held up her hands. “I know. And I’m not suggesting we do that,butthere has to be someone aside from Freddie who used to work for them, someone who had more of aninvolvedrole.” She arched a brow.
“You mean someone who maybe got kicked out and despises the Order enough to help us out of spite?”
She nodded eagerly. “Exactly.”
My pulse sped up, because that could work. But then another thought had my heart sinking. “If Freddie knew of someone like that, he would already have contacted them.”
“Maybe not,” Nandi said. “You know how protective and cautious he is. Freddie doesn’t take risks.”
That wasn’t strictly true. “He does, eventually, when he realizes risk is the only way.”
“But in this case, by the time he realizes we need to take a risk, it might be too late to save you.”
I didn’t want to be reminded about what the bond with Telarion was doing to me. The nightmares. The hunger. The rage. Being connected to him was changing me, and one thing Uncle Fredhadbeen able to find out on the mystic web was what an arcane binding to an eldritch creature could do to a human entity.
It turned us into that which inhabited us.
A monster.
“I’m sure he has records,” Nandi continued, gnawing on her bottom lip. “Contact information for his old colleagues, if we can find—”
“No.”
I didn’t want to become a monster, but betraying Uncle Freddie, going behind his back, breaking into his office…I couldn’t do that to the man who’d taken me in.
“Dammit, August.” Nandi’s eyes glittered with fear and determination. “I will not lose you to this.” She made a sound of exasperation. “We don’t even know what Telarion really is.”
She was right. Telarion wasn’t the most forthcoming about his origins. If I pressed him to talk about it, he shut down, in a totally scaryI will rip out your throat at the first opportunityway.
“August,” Nandi prompted. “We have to do something.”
“Let me…Just let me think about it.”
She sighed and nodded. “Fine. Go get changed. If Jacob sees your bloody shirt, he’ll have a heart attack.”
“Ha, ha, real funny.”
Because there was no way Jacob could have a heart attack.
He was already dead.
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