“I’m fine. I can keep going,” I say.
We’ve been driving for more than a day.
“We’ll be no help to Perri if you crash us into a ravine.”
I frown. “I won’t crash us.”
“Stellan. Stop the truck.”
He’s using his kingly voice and I find myself putting my foot on the break. The others stop behind us, too. Alastair is watching me with his creepy eyes. They seem to glow in the dark, reflecting the little light there is. Unwilling to keep his attention on me, I sigh and get out of the truck to switch seats.
As soon as my feet land in the dust, I aim my flashlight over the cracked road. Perri’s tracks are still visible. I would recognize those anywhere; I changed the tires myself last week. It appears that his journey through the mountains has been uneventful.
I won’t admit it out loud, but as soon as I relax in the passenger’s seat, I realize that Alastair was right. I’m exhausted. I’ve been driving for hours. We wait for his mercenaries to switch seats, too.
“Drink,” he tells me, throwing a bottle of water on my lap.
I glare. He might be my king, but he needs to stop giving me orders. I let the bottle fall to the floor. Alastair laughs quietly.
I settle over the seat and pull the blanket over my lap. I close my eyes, hoping that sleep will find me, even though I know that Perri’s absence makes it impossible. I just can’t relax knowing he might be in danger somewhere.
“How did you two meet?” Alastair asks suddenly.
My eyes shoot open. His attention is on the dark road ahead. There are a lot of potholes and rocks to avoid. It makes our journey extremely slow at night.
“He never told you?” I say.
The King shakes his head. “It never came up. We didn’t get enough time to talk.”
Let me guess, you were too busy fucking like rabbits?I almost say out loud. But I keep it contained. He’s helping me find Perri; I need to keep him on my side. On both our sides.
I’m not a jealous person. At least, not when it concerns Perri. What we share is special and I never felt threatened by anyone. I have all of him, even when sharing him with others. But I’ve always found his tastes in men to be dubious. It makes sharing a little difficult sometimes.
“It’s not really a secret, but Perri doesn’t talk about it often,” I say. “It’s still very traumatic for him.”
“Then you don’t have to tell me,” says the King.
But I decide that I should. If they’re lovers, Alastair needs to know. If only to avoid hurting or triggering Perri by accident. One of his lovers once tied him to our bed while I was working in the hangar and left him for an hour alone, thinking it would just make Perri desire him more. I heard Perri’s screams eventually. By the time I untied him, he was shaking. Even though he was in our home, some primal part of him expected to end up trapped there forever and die of thirst. I found the man sipping a beeroutside and threw him over the rope bridge. He broke both his legs on impact. He tried to appeal to the King the next week to get us thrown out of the Market.
Alastair took one look at the merchant in his crutches, then at me, and asked, “Why?”
“He deserved it,” I said.
He had just nodded, and that was it. The man left the Market the next day, never to be seen again.
Alastair needs to know what he’s getting into. For Perri’s sake.
“I found him in a sinkhole when he was twelve, and I was fourteen,” I say.
Alastair’s head whips towards me for a second. “A sinkhole?”
I sigh. “It was back in the day when my mothers and I were still nomads. We were crossing the wastelands south of California during a heavy rainstorm. The roads were flooded, and we were trying to find higher ground to save the engine.” It rarely rains in the wastelands. But when it does, the ground is hard and permeable, making it dangerous when it pours. “We almost fell into a sinkhole that had taken a good part of the road with it. My mother backed up in a hurry. But just as we were about to go around it, I heard a small voice calling to us.”
Remembering that day, I still get chills. What if I hadn’t heard him and we kept going? What if we had left him to die in that sinkhole?
“Perri,” Alastair says.
I nod slowly, lost in painful memories. “He was standing on the roof of his family’s camper van, half buried in the mud. He was the only survivor out of five people. They had all been sucked into the sinkhole and suffocated in the mud and rain. He had managed to pull his little sister’s body and free the others’ faces from the mud, but they were long gone. He dug with his bare hands, and his nails were broken and bloody. It had beenfive days since they fell into the sinkhole. Perri spent five days alone with the dead.”
