Page 86 of Wings of Lies
I balled them up and chucked them at his face, keeping an arm around my breasts. “I said not to look!”
He dodged them and shrugged. “You yelped. I had to make sure you were okay.”
Had to make sure I was okay?I haven’t been okay since the moment he took me.
He pointed again. “I think you forgot something.”
The tail of the gauze wrapped around my ribs and floated beside me. I unwound it, curious about how well the wounds were healing.
“No blood. That’s good,” he said, nodding at the soppy fabric.
Yes, it was.
“Can you turn around again so I can check them out without your prying eyes?”
He did but didn’t look happy about it.
I inspected my rib stitches. They still had a little blood on them, but they seemed to be healing nicely. In another day, I bet they could come out. Now, I didn’t know about my thigh stitches. They were tender to touch, more so than my ribs, but I wasn’t about to ask Aspen to look at them, so I assumed they were fine.
While he continued to look the other way, I wiped down my skin and combed through my hair, wishing for a bar of soap and warmer water as I stared at the ruby gem glinting on his neck. I wanted to ask about it. I just needed to say a few words to figure out what was happening. But they stayed trapped in my throat, forced down there by all he’d done and hadn’t done in the past week.
“You have about two more minutes, then I’m turning around.”
After one, I yelped as something long and slimy slithered between my thighs, and he turned around anyway.
“What?” he asked.
Spinning, I looked for the creature that had my heart stuttering. After a few anxious moments of not seeing anything, my heart and breathing calmed, like nothing happened.
“There was something in the water.”
He relaxed his grip on the hilt of his sword. “Yeah. Fish.”
“I don’t like fish.”
His eyebrows rose.
“They’re slimy and have sharp dorsal spines,” I exclaimed.
I could see the difficulty he had holding in his laughter. But it burst out in a light chuckle, sobering me. The words caught in mythroat, tickling the tip of my tongue as I stared at his dimples and all they hid.
His smile flattened. “Get out.”
“No. Go back to your tree, turn around, and then I’ll get out.”
“Lucille, get out of the damned water!” he bellowed, pulling at his sword.
I swam as fast as I could toward the bank, nakedness forgotten. Movement splashed a few feet away, sending another rush of fear through me but doingnothing.Why did my purple powers work but not my Glory?
I tried to shove my fear away and latch onto my anger to bring my purple power to the surface, but my fear doubled. Whatever it was, was coming fast, and I wouldn’t reach Aspen in time. Inches from the bank, a slimy tentacle suctioned to my leg. I latched onto a root protruding from the water.
It pulled. I whimpered as my Hellhound wounds screamed at me to let go.
“Aspen!”
My hands slid against the decaying bark, nails gouging lines in the root. Squirming and kicking, I tried to dislodge it, only succeeding in making it squeeze harder. Then, the squeeze turned into a razor-sharp bite.
I cried out. It yanked. My hands slid.
