Chapter 5
Tabby
“Is that it? Is that Last Stop?”
There are three squat, low-slung buildings crouching against the sunset, and a sort of spiky building that must be the church. Or maybe the candy store. Thorn has told me all about the various kinds of candy that can be obtained, and I am interested to try some before I inevitably escape.
“This is it,” Thorn yawns.
I pick up my pace, running toward the town.
My mates follow in my wake. They are tired, but they are conditioned through battle and stuff, I guess.
I don’t know exactly what they were doing before they came to get me, but the fact they wear uniforms makes me think they were doing some war stuff of one kind or another.
Thorn catches up, grabs me by the hand and leads me into town.
One of the buildings says Train on it. There’s metal tracks leading up to it, a and a big snorting metal creature standing outside.
It is black and shiny and the size of a…
nothing I’ve ever seen before. It looks like a building on wheels in some way.
I suppose it could be alive, animated by a working of magic I am yet to experience.
“What’s that?”
“That’s a train,” Thorn says. “You can get inside it and it runs along those tracks and you can travel long distances without walking.”
“Nice,” I say.
I know what trains are, sort of theoretically. My mother’s books had references to some non-magical things here and there, but seeing things for real is always different than imagining them based on text on a page.
“Come. The candy store is right here,” Thorn says, taking me by the hand and tugging me away from the train station.
He leads me into a building, which is a novel experience all of its own.
Walls have been constructed to cut out the view from the inside, and a roof protects the interior from elements.
Our pack dwells in caves, not in constructions.
So this is quite a fascinating experience.
I like the way the walls here have been amended so as to allow various wares to be displayed upon them.
Every inch of the place shows some kind of thought and delight.
A lovely-looking elderly woman with thick spectacles and a gingham apron smiles at us over her counter, which is almost taller than she is.
“Hello, dearies,” she says. “What sweeties would you like today?”
I am surrounded by food. Not meat food, but very human fare. There is no sugar in the mountains, except very rarely in packages that come from travelers. I can smell the sweetness so intensely it feels as though it is already inside me.
I don’t know what any of these items are, so I look to Thorn. He seems like the sort to know what to get.
“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.
“Okay, well, I don’t want to go to bed. I stay up late. And I slept earlier today.”
“You napped for a few hours. That is not enough rest. Come with me now,” Skor says.
I look him in the face, and find myself filled with pure rebellion. “Or what?”
“Or this,” he says, not skipping a beat as he pulls me up from the table and lays his palm across my ass three times in swift, harsh swats.
“Ow!”
“You have a lot to learn about behaving,” he says, releasing me. “We’re going to the hotel, going to get some real food, and we’re going to bed.”
“Real food?” Thorn cuts in. “What have they got?”
“There’s a stew on. Can’t you smell it?”
I rub my butt, then kick Skor in the shin. Hard.
“You don’t get to hit me. You don’t get to tell me what to do. You don’t… hey!” I shriek as he picks me up and throws me over his shoulder.
“You need to learn to behave yourself,” he says, smacking my ass again hard. “And you don’t kick me just because I spanked you. This is what happens when you disobey. You get punished. You know that. You grew up in a pack. You know how to obey.”
I obeyed my father because he is the ultimate authority in the land.
These three are nobody in particular. Sacrifices I saved.
Males who owe me their life. The sting in my ass only encourages me to escape.
We are not yet too far away for me to run back to the mountains overnight.
I plan to make my move once they all fall asleep, so I suppose I should at least pretend to submit.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
I let him carry me into the hotel. Unlike the candy shop, this place does not smell good. The scent of food is the least offensive thing about it. This place smells like… I don’t even know. I guess there was a faint waft of it in the candy shop, but here it’s thick and it gets in my throat.
“What’s that stink?”
“Quiet,” Skor says as he starts to carry me up rickety stairs.
“Why?”
He carries me to the very top, across a landing, and into a room, where the smell is even more intense. Now it is coming from the bed, a big thick oversized thing that looks about five times larger than literally any other piece of furniture I have ever seen in my life.
“I’m going to be ill if you do not open a window,” I say as he sets me on my feet. “This place smells like death.”
“It’s not death,” he says. “It’s the scent of people. Humans. You’re not used to them.”
“Oh, my gods, did they rub themselves over every inch of this place?”
“Effectively, yes,” he says.