Page 21 of Brutally Mated
“One hot chocolate, and two peppermint twizzles,” he says.
The lady bustles about happily, pouring a big mug of some kind of beverage from a large urn. She slides it over the counter to Thorn, who immediately hands me the mug full of a rich dark brew, and gives me a little stick that is hard and sort of sticky and has red and white stripes on it.
“You can drink the drink,” he says. “It’s delicious. And if you like, you can dip the twizzle in it, and then sort of lick the twizzle, and it will taste like hot, sweet, chocolatey mint.”
He takes the mug from me for a moment, holding it while I experiment with the stick. When I put it in my mouth, I taste mint, sweetness, and something so delicious I feel as though my entire body is being suffused with pure oral joy.
“Oh, my!” I feel instantly energized after a big day of traveling and fighting evil and then fighting my mates and generally planning to escape. I didn’t know there was a kind of food that could make everything instantly better.
“Could I please get a ten gold mixture,” he says. “I think we’re going to want to sample all your wares.”
“Of course, dearie. It’s so sweet of you to be treating your lady friend, and what a pretty dress you have on, dear. I’ve never seen anything like it, not in recent years.”
“Thank you. It was my mother’s,” I say, pleased by the compliment.
We go outside the little shop and sit at a rickety old table and chairs that are set there for the purposes of enjoying the sweets. Thorn now has a big brown paper bag jam packed full of what looks like at least one or maybe even two of everything in the store.
“Thank you,” I say as he offers me a soft chewy round disc to eat. I put it in my mouth and feel it full of… I don’t even know how to understand it exactly. It’s sort of soft, and it tastes of pink somehow. I didn’t know pink had a flavor, but it definitely does, I realize. Maybe like berries? But most of the berries in the mountains are bitter and there’s no bitterness in this at all.
Krall
The boy is spoiling our mate. I do not know if a big bag of candy is enough to make up for the horrors of the night, but it seems to be making some inroads on the affair.
“The next train does not leave until the morning, so we need to get a room overnight,” Skor says. He’s already been in the hotel and made the reservations. I have been scouting the town, making sure it’s safe. There is always a lot to do when we arrive in a new populated area without real law enforcement.
“I think we should share the one. She’s going to try to escape,” I say.
“Yes, of course she is.”
“She’s probably never slept inside before,” I say, anticipating further problems already. She is not going to make this easy for any of us, and Thorn hyping her up on sugar won’t help, though I appreciate the distraction.
“Probably not. She’ll get used to it. She is young. She will adjust.”
“She is young, and we are old.” I am tired. My bones ache and my mind is still trying to process all we saw in the mountains. There was true evil walking those lands, actually incarnate. Usually evil is much harder to discern. It lurks inside people and leaps out when you least expect it.
Tabby has lived her entire life in an environment more dangerous than any I have experienced. I assumed we would be taking on a female mate who would look up to us as her protectors. But she is the only reason we made it through the night intact. She was our protector, and now we are carrying her around like a hostage. Thorn’s little treat is the only good thing we’ve done for her. It’s time we started providing. Started showing her how she can benefit from being with us. If we cannot be more appealing than a murderous mountain then we are truly a sorry pack indeed.
Tabby
We finish our treats, and I feel a certain sense of sort of… vibrating. It’s as if my body is absolutely deluged with energy that I could use to do any number of terrible things. It’s intoxicating.
“The sun is starting to set,” Skor says as he approaches us. “It’s time to get to bed. We need rest.”
“You need rest. I have so much energy!” I declare. I feel like I could run right back up into the mountains this very moment. In fact, that is precisely what I plan to do sooner rather than later.
“You won’t in about forty minutes,” he says. “A sugar high doesn’t last that long, and then you have the crash.”
“A sugar high?”
“It’s when you feel good after having sugar,” Thorn says. “It’s not a real high.”
“What’s a real high?”
“Ketamine,” Thorn says.
“Cocaine,” Skor says.
They speak at the same time, then snort-laugh as if they said something very funny.
