Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
When it’s over, I let out a breath and the world starts turning again, the tunnel vision fading.
They are all playing different songs now and the square has become a commotion of sounds mixed in with the gregarious talking and laughter of a people who have already put the day behind them.
I spy a cart serving lamb, order up two meals, which are packed into a tin bucket that I pay a deposit for, and then I head back to the inn. Trying not to think about Pressia and the way she insists on haunting me through this curse.
When I get back to the dirt street where we are staying I immediately look up to the terrace. I fully expect to find Callistina up there, flaunting herself. But it’s empty. And dark.
I suddenly have a bad feeling. Like things have gone terribly wrong. Like Pressia was just waiting for her chance to get Callistina and my little foray into the square was the perfect opportunity.
The perfect trap.
I rush up the stairs—ignoring the snake-man’s greeting and the whores making offers—and grab the doorknob. But it’s locked. I pound on it, ready to break it down, when it opens and Callistina greets me with a cavernous yawn. “Why are you being so loud?”
She was sleeping. Everything about her says sleepy cat. Which, again, I find quite sexy.
And now I feel even more foolish than I did standing transfixed in the square. Pressia. Why does she torment me like this? Why must she haunt me?
What did I ever do to her? Nothing. In fact, she is the one who wronged me. I am the one who should be haunting her. And if, by chance, I stumble upon her in my travels, and I am given the opportunity, I will kill her.
“Well?” Callistina snaps me out of my introspection. “Are you coming in?”
I haven’t moved or acknowledged Callistina since she opened the door. “Yeah,” I manage, blowing out a breath. Then I hold up the pail. “I got lamb. I hope you like lamb.”
The food makes Callistina smile and take the pail from me. Then she turns, leaving me at the door, and walks over toward the terrace. “We’re going to eat outside now that you’re home.”
She says this, and does all this, like she hasn’t got a care in the world. And I wonder, for a moment, how it might feel to have no cares.
But I just don’t have the imagination required to conjure up that kind of far-fetched fantasy.
The food is good. Better than anything I’ve had in probably a hundred years. And I make a note to myself to give that dog-boy another coin for his excellent advice.
Callistina and I are still out on the terrace. This quarter of the city isn’t quiet. I doubt it’s ever quiet. Maybe in the hour just before dawn, when the drunks are passed out and the whores are counting their money, but even then, it’s probably more of a low hum than a quiet. And it’s starting, that hum. Just as Callistina gets up and does her now-trademarked feline stretch. Arms up, back arched. Then the long legs. Paws flexing claws.
She lets out a breath and stares at the city.
I’m sitting in a chair behind her, next to the one she was occupying just a moment ago, so I get a nice view of her velvet-covered ass.
She was beautiful even when she was insane and wearing spray-painted antlers tied to her head. Chimera are holders of magic, so many of them—perhaps even most of them—alter their appearance with the talents they genetically inherit. Or pay a friend, or a professional, even, to do something special that they can’t manage to conjure up.
They can give themselves wings—with or without feathers—just like a god. Antlers, of course. Though many chimera are born with horns or antlers. The deer, the bull, the antelope are all common species to crossbreed with humans. The bulls make the men big and formidable. Armies recruit bull chimera as soldiers almost exclusively. The deer and the antelope make lovely nymph crosses, leggy and graceful, like dancers. Though the nymphs are their own species and can be crossed with just about anything to make chimera more attractive.
But Callistina has not been artificially altered. This is her true genetic form and it’s… stunning. Even without the antlers.
It’s very rare to find a gryphon chimera with velvet covering their whole body the way it does hers. It’s a trait cultivated by the House of Fire. The lioness, as they call them. Second Daughters from the same breeding pair are the most desirable because First Daughters have mistakes. And they are cataloged and corrected in the Second Daughter.
Callistina was a firstborn and so her future was in academics. She would’ve been taught the techniques and spellings for her own vivarium filled with lab rats. Though she would not have been wasting her time with rats. She would’ve been using chimera from the start. Not anything sentient, really. Just the base code of gryphon chimera to which she would add and subtract things over several generations.