Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 109878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 440(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 440(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Chapter Fifteen
Saylor
We step out into the gray afternoon, and I’m immediately struck by how different the town feels with Blue beside me. People don’t just notice us, they acknowledge our movement with genuine warmth. An elderly woman spinning yarn on her porch gives Blue a respectful nod. Three teenagers smoking behind the fountain wave cheerfully and call out greetings. A man walking a dog the size of a small horse crosses toward us with a friendly smile and tips his hat.
“They really like you,” I observe.
“We look out for each other here,” Blue says simply.
“So about this party Duffy mentioned,” I say as we start walking. “Should I be concerned that I’m apparently the guest of honor at an event I knew nothing about?”
Blue’s hands are tucked into his pockets, his stride unhurried as people go about their daily routines around us. “I host them regularly. It’s better to control the narrative than let it write itself.”
“Control the narrative?”
“You’ve been in Grimlock for less than twenty-four hours and already people are curious about us.” Blue glances down at me, his eyes wry. “By dinner tonight, that story will have grown into a full romance novel with elaborate backstories about how we met.”
I can’t hold in the laugh. “So you’re putting me on display to satisfy their curiosity?”
“I’m introducing you to the community before they decide you’re either my next girlfriend or my secret accomplice.” He pauses beside a shop window filled with clockwork contraptions that tick and whir in hypnotic patterns. “Grimlock is a community of people with . . . complicated pasts. They need to know you’re one of them before they’ll truly accept you.”
“One of them? What does that mean?”
“You’ll see,” Blue says, his tone suggesting he has something specific in mind. “I have my ways of making things clear.”
“Why do you care if they accept me?”
The question seems to catch him off guard, and Blue goes very still beside me. For a moment, the only sounds are the mechanical symphony from the clockmaker’s window and the soft murmur of conversation drifting from nearby shops.
“Because I want you to have the option to stay,” he says finally. “But that’s a conversation for after you’ve given this place a real chance.”
His tone makes me look at him more carefully. There’s a tension in his shoulders that wasn’t there before, a tightness around his eyes.
We continue walking, and I become aware of how seamlessly Blue navigates Grimlock’s maze-like streets. Where I would be completely lost without Hans’s guided tour, Blue moves with the confidence of someone who knows every shortcut, every hidden alley, every building’s history. When he nods to the woman tending a garden of black roses, she beams back like he’s just made her day. When he raises a hand to the man repairing ornate ironwork outside a Victorian townhouse, the gesture is returned with obvious respect.
“You really do know everyone here,” I observe.
“Small town. Everyone knows everyone eventually.” Blue steers us down a side street I haven’t seen before, this one lined with workshops where the sounds of hammering and grinding drift through open doors. “Besides, most of the people who end up in Grimlock are here for similar reasons.”
“Which are?”
“They needed somewhere that doesn’t ask too many questions about where they came from.”
The comment hangs between us as we pass a forge where sparks fly through the doorway and the smith inside waves a gloved hand at Blue. Next door, a woman with silver hair braids leather into intricate patterns while humming something that sounds like a lullaby written in a minor key.
“Including you?” I ask.
Blue grins. “Especially me.”
We turn another corner and emerge onto a street that looks designed by someone who collected postcards from European villages and decided to re-create them all in one place. Narrow buildings with steep gables press against each other in a rainbow of weathered colors—sage green next to dusty rose next to deep amber. Flower boxes overflow with herbs that perfume the air with scents I can’t identify, and hand-painted signs creak gently in the ocean breeze.
“This is the artisan quarter,” Blue explains as we pass studios where painters work at easels visible through tall windows and a weaver’s shop displays tapestries that seem to tell stories in thread and color. “Most of Grimlock’s artists live and work here.”
“It’s like a whole creative community,” I observe, watching a potter shape clay through her window.
“Painters, sculptors, musicians, writers. People who make beautiful things.” Blue pauses outside a studio where a man with paint-stained fingers is working on a canvas that shows Grimlock’s harbor during a storm, the waves captured mid-crash with such detail I can almost hear the thunder. “They come here because Grimlock doesn’t care if you’re successful by conventional standards. It only cares if you’re authentic.”
The word authentic sits heavy between us. I think about my jazz singing, how it felt like the only genuine thing in my life before everything went to hell. How performing at the White Note was the closest I ever came to feeling like myself.