Chapter 333. The Giggling Drunk I

Chapter 333: 333. The Giggling Drunk I

Maisie

I hopped about in a circle, slipping into my socks. A nervous excitement cramped my stomach as I watched the time again.

Past eight.

I hummed a nameless tune as I browsed through the scents stowed away in my small dresser. Citrus? Freesia? Champagne? Strawberries? Which one did he like better, I thought?

Having a too sharp sense of smell, I wasn’t often keen on perfumes, but I threw caution to the wind and dunked the sugared blackberry and vanilla.

I smiled at the mirror, feeling all gooey inside.

My skin was freshly shaved. I smelled like a little cone of delicious ice cream flavours. I had light make up on. And I was running the brush through my hair for the sixth time.

I was getting ready for bed.

Sort of.

Who was I kidding? My sleeping shirt was hanging off my shoulder invitingly, showing off the length of my neck. My shorts were shorter than regular shorts, barely covering my ass. I hadn’t bothered with any underwear. I’d even applied some lipstick.

If Regina was here, she’d say I was getting ready to have my shorts ripped off. And I could’ve feigned innocence, if I wasn’t in Soren’s shirt.

I didn’t know who to thank but I’d found a pile neatly folded in my bedroom when I returned from class, clothes from Soren, Quinlan and Jericho. They had been worn, at least, once, possibly plucked out from their most recent laundry, but that made them even better for my sudden need to smell them all the time. Clean clothes simply wouldn’t sate me.

Maybe I was going into heat again.

That’d explain why I did jumping jacks in the soft silk when I first put it on, mixing my sweat with Soren’s cool scent, giggling darkly because it went against every rule out there.

If you didn’t want to get knotted.

I promise, I’m really not a bad girl.

Content when I fluffed my hair to the left, making my neck look even more appealing, I slid into my study chair and cracked open the large tome Ms. Aimee had let me take from the library, to continue my translations from this afternoon.

She had specifically said not to let it get in the way of my school work. But I was the kind of girl who did her assignments immediately they were dished out. I had more than enough free time on my hands to look the part of a studious and occupied student when Soren eventually showed up.

I couldn’t very well look like I had been waiting for him all night.

I flipped through the pages, passing time as I scribbled down notes into the official journals, going through line after line with painstaking scrutiny.

In the event that I made a mistake with the meaning of the words or phrases, I had to start over. By the time I got through to the seventh page, there were more crumpled sheets in the trash than there were leaves left in the journal.

It was a book of recorded species that existed beyond the rift, as well as their family lines. Ms. Aimee had said that it was best we started from the origins, before we delved deeper into more complicated stuff.

I hadn’t wanted to, believing it a waste of time. Translating and drawing family trees would take a hell lot of time, and I wouldn’t get the answers I needed.

But Aimee had been adamant, and while the school’s librarian was often a meek, soft-spoken woman who often hid behind a pair of glasses and bookshelves, she became scary very quickly when you pushed her.

"Deep understanding comes from listening, Adams," she had said. "Learning. Reading between the lines. You may be right that this is just be a boring book of useless progeny, but you would be pleasantly surprised what you could learn from a person’s bloodline. And you will come to learn that everything in this world comes back to a full circle. Knowledge, especially."

Well, she hadn’t been wrong.

No. Not about the last part. I had yet to learn anything that would lead to a full circle moment, but I was pleasantly surprised.

So far, so good, I was brimming with small excitement, fingertips blotted with ink as I drafted down names that existed before rifts did, names as old of dirt.

It is mind-blowing, really, to think of the creatures that the Goddess had created when she had been bored enough to explore. The Sidhe Folk, like the Fae, the dryads, nymphs and naiads, the merfolk and sirens, the spriggans and redcaps who were considered malicious enough to not be included into the family of sidhes. The Fiends, or the demons, like the Succubi and Incubi, the Ghouls, Wendigos, Dream-Eaters, Psi-Fiends, and Ash-demons. There were a ton of subclasses under them and I zoned out, wondering what kind of demon Gruer was.

All he cared about was money. And if he wasn’t looking for whose pockets to drain, he was causing mayhem somewhere. He didn’t seem like a demon to me. He just seemed like a very troubled individual.

My gaze snagged on the Beast-Kin, commonly referred to as Hunters. Lycans. Bear-kin, Panther-kin, Centaurs, and lesser avian creatures...and I giggled. They had pegasi. And unicorns!

And then, a strange wave of sadness hit me.

I wondered how many of them still existed after all of this time had passed. How many of the races had starved and died. Culled like a herd.

I remembered Elara. I remembered Florian. And the five other men. I remembered their love. And I remembered their lack of fear. How none of them had hesitated to sacrifice themselves for her.

How could something so pure come born of cruelty?

In a way, I felt sorry for the creatures beyond the rift. I wondered if this world was any different from theirs. In the same way there was cruelty everywhere on earth, there was some good, too.