Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 72065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
“I’m going to call a hovercoach—can I stay in here until it comes?” she shouted.
“Oh—why of course, my dear! You stay right here. I just have to do something in the back,” he told her.
As he disappeared into the crowded back of the pawn shop again, Aleena shoved the velvet bag into an inner pocket of her skirt and nervously punched in the number of the hovercoach company that she’d been using earlier that day.
But though she’d gotten a quick response when she’d called for a coach at her palatial new home that morning, now the company was slow to respond. It took forever to even get an acknowledgement that they had received her request and even longer for them to dispatch a coach to her location.
Aleena waited nervously, watching the strange man in the shop from the corner of her eye. He still looked like he was browsing the assorted items on display, but he was slowly getting closer and closer to her. She couldn’t be sure if that was on purpose or not, but she didn’t like it a bit.
At last a hovercoach hummed up to the sidewalk outside the pawnshop. Aleena breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the one that had brought her here in the first place—the coach’s paint was scratched and its windows were dirty—but she didn’t care. At this point, she just wanted to get out of this shop and go to the Healing House as fast as possible.
She darted out of the shop and ran for the coach. She heard the bell over the door jingle again and from the corner of her eye she saw that the shabby man with the sharp looking eyes was right behind.
Feeling like her heart was in her throat, Aleena reached for the door latch of the coach…only to see it hover away at the last moment.
“Suspicious presence detected—you called for a single rider, not two,” it declared as it hovered away down the street. “This ride has been terminated.”
“No, wait!” Aleena exclaimed, running after it. But though she chased it down the street, it kept accelerating faster and faster until it disappeared around the corner and out of sight.
“Hey, pretty lady—what’s your hurry?” a man’s voice asked behind her. “Why don’t you slow down and we can talk a while?”
23
BEAR
Bear began to get a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach about halfway through the negotiations. He tried to ignore it at first—the talks were going well. The Karpsians seemed very willing to deal with him and eager to bargain with the Kindred.
But the feeling grew and grew until he couldn’t ignore it anymore.
“Gentlemen, please excuse me,” he said, at the next pause in the conversation. “But I fear I must take a short break.”
There was a moment of surprised silence—Bear knew from studying their culture that the Karpsians considered interruptions to official proceedings to be extremely rude. But he just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very, very wrong.
He excused himself from the large oval table he was sitting at with the Karpsian diplomats and stepped outside of the richly appointed conference room they’d been holding the negotiations in. He still had no idea what was going on but just then the communications device the Karpsians had provided him with gave a low, warning chime.
Bear pulled it out of his pocket and frowned at it. He was still learning to use it, though he had managed to put Aleena’s number into it that morning before they had parted for the day.
The minute he thought of his new wife, he became convinced that the feeling of wrongness had something to do with her. He looked at the device and saw that the screen at the front which displayed numbers had turned into a kind of grid. No—it was a map, he realized. And it had a small red dot in the center of it.
“Here, you—can you tell me what this means?” he asked, going over to one of the Karpsian guards who was standing at attention at the side of the conference room door.
The guard looked surprised at being asked but he glanced down at the device in Bear’s hand obligingly.
“Hmm—it looks like an alert that a female who is under your control is out in a dangerous part of the city,” he said after a moment.
“What? Are you serious?” Bear demanded. “Are you saying my wife might be in danger? But how would my device know that?”
“I’m afraid so.” The guard nodded. “Once you put a dependant female’s number into your device, an automatic alarm system is set up which warns you if she starts getting into mischief.” He frowned at the map on the device again. “That’s a pretty dicey part of the city—do you know what she might be doing there?”