Page 39 of Rory

“I take back every nice thing I ever said to you,” Harper muttered, turning her head into her right sleeve and then the left to dry her tears. “You’re a louse. A big, nasty louse. A huge, horrible, conniving, unsympathetic hairy louse who will never have sex with anyone for the rest of your life because no woman will ever put up with your crap.” She bared her teeth as he bent closer to survey her wounds. “Don’t you dare untie me, unless you want to die.”

Rory sat down beside her and brushed the hair back from her eyes. She looked so miserable his own throat tightened, and his eyes stung, but he didn’t untie her.

“Tell me about your first memories of the world before the world,” he murmured to her.

“Why should I tell you anything about that place? I can barely remember it anymore.” She pouted like a bairn. “I didn’t remember it at all until Ava showed me my mom crawling into that forest ditch and disappearing.”

Rory nodded and waited.

“It was someplace like this, okay? Weird-colored sky and plants that grew super fast and water that came out of nowhere and like snaked through the forest, like it was alive. There was a strange lady there with pointy green things for eyebrows. Mom was afraid of something and stayed there to have me.” She took in a shuddering breath. “Then after she didn’t want to let us out of there, so we stayed there a long, long time.”

Harper told him everything, starting from the way she became aware of herself and her mother before she was born. That awareness hadn’t faded after she’d been birthed in that small world with the green sky and endless forests. She described a beautiful melia with the green hair and strange spiky eyebrows who had taken care of her and Cheryl, cooking for her mother and caring for baby Harper.

“She was really nice, but not really.” She didn’t react to him untying her wrists, she simply stared past him with a faraway look as she spoke. “Do you know how wonderful someone can be when they also scare you half to death? That’s what she did to my mom when she said I was growing too fast and she wanted to take me back to live in our world. That green eyebrow lady got angry with her. She said because I had been born there it had changed me, and there were other special people who would know that I didn’t belong or deserve it or something. Those people would hate me and try to kill me if they could because I was dangerous to them.”

Harper recounted how her mother Cheryl had waited seven years for her chance to escape. The melia had been lulled into believing they were happy there, and one day told them she had to go and visit a friend. Cheryl took Harper and secretly followed her, escaping from the hollow before the door between worlds had closed. Waiting just out of the melia’s sight, Cheryl had run away with Harper in the opposite direction.

“We always kept on the move after that so that lady couldn’t find us,” she said, sounding exhausted now. “I made myself forget about her and the hollow, but Mom never could. That’s why she kept moving around with me. That’s why those things hunted her down and murdered her.” Weary-eyed, she met his gaze. “Will you hold me?”

He fetched the supplies he kept to treat his own wounds and gently cleaned and bandaged her wrists. Stretching out beside her seemed odd for all of two heartbeats, for when she shifted closer she fit perfectly against his side, as if she had always been a part of him that had gone missing long ago.

Mayhap ’tis why I love her.