“Ugh, I refuse to ask what’s all over that green dress.”
She knew.
My head was screaming with a headache on top of all the bitter self-loathing. I bent forward and put my elbows on my knees to cradle my head in my hands, dripping water onto the carpetshe’d helped me pick out for Sadie. I was grateful back then. Now…
“Go away!” I growled.
My feckin’ sister did not go away. “Ye’ve gone positively feral in here, Tygie.”
“Yeah…” My stomach churned, threatening to turn my regret into a load of vomit to join all the other filth. “You should leave me the fuck alone, then.”
“I would—except I just about jumped out of me skin when the Shadow King popped up on the digital wall in the babies’ room with that feckin’ whiteboard of his.”
I froze, looked up from my slump. “What?”
“Yeah. Lil’ Greggie’s still crying. Pretty sure he’s got the PTSDs now, so thank Jack feckin’ Skellingking for that.”
“Brigid.Brigid!” I stood up and grabbed her by the shoulders, this close to shaking her. “What did the sign say?”
“Oh.” Brigid sobered. “It said to check your messages. Sadie’s in some kind of trouble.”
Conversation and Other Threats
Sadie
“I miss Declan and Tadhg,but I also never want your turn to end.”
I confessed this to the Shadow King while we floated in the dark expanse of his throne room, curled around each other in lotus position.
Golden balls of soft light that he referred to as metaphorical knowledge orbited us like planets, along with an organic altar that he’d constructed himself out of stone, sticks, and moss after engaging the Irish Wolves to deliver me to the Tríbéirríthe, as the three bear kings called themselves in Irish.
I didn’t know how much time had passed since my arrival, but I had the terrible feeling it was coming to an end.
“Time is merely a construct of the Big Laptop,”the Shadow King answered.
“What do you mean?”I asked, not quite understanding, even over the mate bond.
“This sequence we’re in can last a paragraph or be split over several pages. It is not necessarily for us to know. Or remember.”
Our bond bites pulsed, glowing in the dark, and then I understood as he understood how easy it was for even the most meaningful of events to be montaged.
Milestones, pasts and futures, entire lives could be reduced into a single sentence. Or not even written down at all.
“You’re scaring me.”This had been the best, most mind-expanding week of my life. But… “Are you saying I might not even remember this conversation? Or everything else that happened here?”
“It is up to the godsnake.”
The godsnake. That was what he called the writer behind the Big Laptop.
Because whoever it was caused all our strife but was also responsible for all our joy.
I’d been going to church my entire life, but for the first time, it felt like I was actually receiving a true message. The true meaning of existence. At least ours.
My eyes filled with tears at the thought of not being able to remember this time. These feelings.“I don’t want to forget this conversation, but what if this entire week is reduced to a paragraph?”
The Shadow King reached out to snag the altar he’d built for me out of its orbit.“I thought for much of my life that I lived inside a sentence. That perhaps I was a side character in someone’s fantasy story.”
He positioned me on top of the altar he’d grabbed, laying me on my back.
