Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55109 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 276(@200wpm)___ 220(@250wpm)___ 184(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55109 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 276(@200wpm)___ 220(@250wpm)___ 184(@300wpm)
“What’s your name?”
“Elise.”
“Pretty name,” Nina says. “Come with us, Elise. We will make sure he doesn’t hurt you anymore. Bryn’s thrashing him right now, I bet.”
“He’s a very bad man,” Elise whimpers. “He’s a very, very bad man.”
“Extra cream,” Mrs Crocombe declares. “That’s what you need. Feeding up.”
If only cheerfulness, a stiff upper lip, and lashings of cream were enough to fix the mess Cosmos has made with his careless, brutal behavior. I have the sense there is a tangled web here that will be more difficult to unravel than anybody suspects.
Cosmos
“Let me go, you moron,” I curse at Bryn. “I’ve brought you the head of Fleisch and saved one of the angel lines. You could try a ‘thank you, Cosmos, good job, Cosmos.’”
“You married a woman against her will?”
“I had to.”
“Why?”
“Because she didn’t want me to marry her with her will, and obviously we had to marry so I could protect her bloodline, so…”
Bryn’s glaring at me. I hate this man at the best of times. He’s so overbearing, and believes himself beyond reproach, when in reality he is one of the worst of us. I knew he’d get his knickers in a knot as soon as he saw the head, and of course he has to pretend he cares about Elise without even knowing her.
“Do you try to be as unhinged as humanly possible, is that it? Or does it come naturally?”
He has a certain biting Englishness that has always gotten under my skin. I could take a punch in the face and laugh it off, but these snide comments are almost more than I can take without punching him in the face.
“I killed their leader, I destroyed their offices, I found their target, and I saved her. You might not like how I did it, but I did it. While you were holed up here with your wife, I claimed mine.”
Bryn draws in a breath, then sighs. “You’re right.”
“I am?” I try not to sound surprised.
“A hundred percent. I asked you to do something, and you did it. Just tell me you didn’t… hurt the girl.”
He doesn’t mean hurt. He means something so much worse.
“No. Bryn. I’m not a rapist. Thanks for checking.”
“Alright,” he says. “Then we don’t have a problem.”
Elise
I have been embraced by two young women similar in age to me. It’s a warmer welcome than I expected.
“Cosmos is intense,” the redhead says.
“I’ve known him for all of five minutes and I can say he’s crazier than a demon,” the dark haired one says. I know that I should know their names. I think one is called Anita, the darker, shorter one. And the other one, the beautiful willowy supermodel type…. oh, that’s right. Nina.
They’ve hustled me off to an old stone kitchen. This place is astonishing. I have been in a lot of older buildings, but this place is charged with history in a way like no other place I’ve ever been in.
Mrs Crocombe is waiting for us with a fresh batch of afternoon tea. She looks like she stepped out of a fairytale. She has an apron and an old-fashioned hat that helps pin down her graying hair. There’s warmth to her, but that warmth is not without edge.
She presents a spread of food I can only describe as a small banquet and bids me eat.
“Thank you,” I say, being polite out of force of habit. “It all smells wonderful.”
“I’ll get you a plate,” she says. “Don’t worry, you’ll feel much better after you’ve had something to eat.”
I don’t know if that is true, but I am starving. Whether I’ll feel better or not, I have to eat.
“Tell us what happened,” Nina says. “I know it will seem strange.”
“He believes in angels and demons,” I blurt. “He’s crazy. I don’t mean he believes in them as a harmless religious abstract that could be tolerated by the general public without much in the way of concern. I mean he straight up seriously believes that I have the blood of an angel in me. He needs to be committed.”
There’s a silence following my outburst, a silence in which I feel a deep awkwardness come over the room. Oh my… what if they all believe in the same thing? He did basically tell me he was taking me into the heart of a cult.
“I know, it’s fucking weird.” Anita has an attitude, and a local accent. Nina seems to be like me and Cosmos, American, or at least, American enough to have an accent that sets us apart from Europeans.
“But?”
I can hear that word.
“Well, it’s true,” she says, bluntly.
“I thought it was strange when I first heard it too,” Nina says. “The idea that I could have angelic blood in my veins, my real father cuckolded by an angel…”
Folie a deux, or in this case, Folie a everybody. They’re all suffering under the same shared delusion. I know I’m not going to be able to argue them out of it. You can’t logic people out of a place that logic didn’t get them into.