I don’t even know how to process that sentence. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Cooking,” Tomas explains.
“I don’t cook.” And did he just change sides? Because he’s acting like I will be cooking for them in the near future. And I don’t even cook for myself, I am certainly not cooking for these cursed people.
“You’re a woman,” Tomas says.
“Women cook,” the beast adds. Like this is a logical sequence of critical thinking.
I snort. So that’s where we are? Some monster version of the good woman at home? I snort again. “I am not the maid.”
“Technically…” Tomas holds up a finger of protest.
“Whose side are you on?” I blurt.
“There is only one side here,” Pell says. “Mine.”
For fuck’s sake. If there is a god, please, please, please wake me up from this nightmare. Soon. I turn away from them and mutter, “This isn’t real. This cannot be real.”
“It is real,” the beast says. “And I was explaining the facts of the curse to you for a reason. If you want out, you must get me out first. I wasn’t talking to hear myself. I was explaining—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tomas interrupts. He walks over to me. “Listen, your bird is fine. She probably can’t leave the sanctuary. Not without you, anyway. No one can leave without you.” He pauses. “Well, I can’t ever leave. But Pell can. You won’t mind the errands. It will get you out of the house. That’s what Grant used to say.”
“The rules,” the beast says. “I’m going to make this easy for you.” He turns to Tomas. “Where’s the rulebook?”
Tomas nods his head to a massive three-story bookshelf just inside the apothecary that has a precarious ladder attached to slide rails. Above the ladder is a small catwalk that lines the perimeter of the room with another, even more suspect, ladder, presumably so you can search for books on the second floor. This goes on for yet another level and if one were actually inclined to search for books three stories up using those deathtraps, they would find themselves a good forty feet in the air.
There are thousands of books and the thought of going through them all to find answers about a curse suddenly makes me weary.
The beast walks into the room and over to the bookshelf. He scans it for several long, silent moments, and then plucks a book off the shelf and turns back to me.
I’m already shaking my head. “Nut-uh. Nope. That is not the rulebook. It’s like two thousand pages long. There cannot possibly be that many rules.”
The beast is not deterred. He walks over to me, thrusts the book at me, and waits. Expecting me to take it.
I salute him with my middle finger. Then I turn on my heel, walk down the staircase, through the doors, outside into the night, down the hill and past his stupid cemetery, and go inside my cursed cottage.
CHAPTER FIVE - PELL
“I don’t think I like her.” I pace back and forth across the room, trying to force this night to make sense. I am not prepared for this change. Fifty years is a long time for Grant to be stuck here with me, but if he’d just held on for another ten, he wouldn’t have been able to walk out. There would be no escape because there would be no life waiting for him beyond the walls of Saint Mark’s.
“That feeling seems to be mutual.” Tomas says this absently. He’s stretched out on the lounger flipping through one of Grant’s notebooks. “I like Pie though. And I’m pretty sure she likes me too.”
“Pie?”
“That’s her name.”
“Meat pie? Shepherd’s pie? Fruit pie? What kind of pie is she? And why is she named after pie when she refuses to cook?”
Tomas ignores all of my questions. “How far do you think Grant got?”
“What?”
“I bet we could find him.”
I’m failing to see the logic here. “Why would we want to find Grant? He left. He’s not coming back. Why the hell would he?”
Tomas thinks about this for a moment. “I think he will want to talk to me. He didn’t get to say goodbye.”
“Hold on a moment.” I put up one clawed hand to halt this train of thought. Because Tomas needs to be set straight. His kind are dangerous when you let them run with a delusion too long. “Where were you when he left?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you missing? Were you lost in the forest? Were you locked in a tower?”
“What the hell are you going on about? I was here. Working out on the second-story balcony.” He flexes his biceps at me. “I got a little lost in the hallways coming downstairs so he left before he could say goodbye.”
“Where did the girl come from? The back gate?”
“No. She came in the front gate. Grant met her out in the hall.”