Page 10 of Twisted Bonds

It’s how I found this room, which is supposed to be reserved for Sunder and me, anyway.

Sort of.

I glance back at them tangled in each other’s grasp over my shoulder and sigh contentedly before slipping out the open window. I’m happy here.

With Mira.

And Sunder, new as that is.

I’d do anything to protect them, which is why I’m out of my warm, cozy bed, prowling the streets of this town at an hour that is considered ungodly in any world.

My whiskers twitch as a faint aroma catches my nose. People don’t realize since everyone thinks of dogs as having amazing noses, but cats have just as good of a sense of smell. We just don’t use it on command, or to support humans, who simply have the worst noses I’ve ever witnessed. I take a minute longer to sample the air, my mouth open as I fully take in the scent.

But then I snap it shut against the awful odor. It’s familiar, and I work to place it.

The smell seems like it’s fine, but in reality it’s quite rotten; there’s an overlay of flowery magic so potent that it makes my eyes water, but underneath I can tell that it’s rotten to the core.

It smells like…

My eyes widen. Yurghen?

Fear rises in my chest, but that’s not possible.

Yurghen is dead. I saw the aftermath with my own eyes. Mira used Chroma and pummeled him to smithereens. He’s dead, he’s gone, and he’s never coming back.

The air shifts again, and there’s no doubt in my mind this time.

That is definitely Yurghen’s smell.

I pause, ready to sprint back and wake Mira and Sunder.

But curiosity gets the best of me. Instead, I turn toward where that stench is coming from.

We’re two kingdoms away from Yurghen’s tower. I know because, despite what Mira teases me about, I really have a fantastic sense of direction.

I catch my reflection in a glass plane window of a toy store. This is a nice town. It’s small, and I don’t know its name. But names don’t really matter, anyway. There hasn’t previously been much evil sorcerer activity here. It smells too clean, despite the obvious criminal activity in the area regarding the illegal human imports.

I shake my head to clear it. Right, yes. The smell.

What the hell is something that smells like Yurghen doing here?

Cautiously, I chase after it.

The town’s winding streets pass by me as I follow the scent where it twists and writhes through the air. The heavy darkness is still as I continue forward. This is the type of town where people go to bed at a wholesome time. They wake up and work at their wholesome jobs, and they go home to their wholesome families.

A scent like this has no business here.

I pad gently, sampling the air and the street to find the scent, until I reach the very edge of the town. It disappears into something that looks like an abandoned warehouse, half the bricks knocked out of one wall, clearly repurposed for another structure elsewhere. They’ve boarded up the holes with wood that one hard kick would go straight through.

In the human world, scary warehouses would have been a solid bet for nefarious deeds.

Here, it looks like they might make candles. There’s wax scattered on the ground, and a sign hangs from the side of the building that’s advertising the different scents the candles can come in. The perfumes of rose, oud, and a dozen other herbs that would, in fact, make a nice candle.

I wonder if they sell them. I bet Mira would…

Focus!

I need to find out what the hell smells like Yurghen. Sniffing the ground, I creep forward on silent paws and wiggle underneath one of the rotten boards.

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