Page 206 of A Soul to Guide

Her mother had wavy hair, whereas she’d gotten her tight corkscrew curls from her father. She had her mother’s nose and lips, but her father’s brown eye colour and round jaw and cheeks. Both were tall, both relatively skinny.

“I left someone behind,” Raewyn sobbed. “Someone who was supposed to come here with me. I promised him, and he’s the only reason I’m here now, yet Cykran just let him be left behind. When I argued with him, he couldn’t see past his... his...”

Face.Cykran, the terrible hypocrite, hadn’t been able to see past Merikh’s bear skull and horns.

Dear holy Gilded Maiden, how was she supposed to tell her parents she’d fallen in love with a monster? A Duskwalker, something completely unknown to them.

“I promised him our people wouldn’t turn on him, and yet they cut off his fucking head!”

Both her parents gasped, but she didn’t care that she’d sworn – although the word was a little different here, a littleworse.She did her best to translate the curse closest to it.

“Raewyn,” her mother whispered.

“There’s nothing wrong with her!” her father shouted as he slapped his hands together to end the spell. “She’s perfectly fine. All her vitals are as healthy as ever; she’s just acting immature for no reason. She gets it from your side of the family.”

“Excuse me,” her mother sneered, while narrowing her eyes at him. “You’re the one who let her be rebellious when she was a teenager, taking her to the fringes of the city to look beyond the ward.”

“You’re the one who has always practiced insane experiments,” her father rebuffed. “At least I move forward with my workcarefully,rather than ignoring everyone’s concerns.”

Just as they were about tolovinglybicker, Raewyn sat up between them.

“Just take me home.” She’d been wanting to lie in her own bed for many Earth months, and now, she wanted to sob on it. “I want to be alone.”

Despite what either of them thought, she was actually controlling the worst of her despair. She wanted to let herself explode, wear herself out, and once she was done processing, figure out a solution.

Because therehadto be a solution.

There was no solution, as Raewyn came to discover.

She didn’t even need to waste a lot of time learning that.

After crying for hours, then shovelling food she’d missed into her face as a self-soothing mechanism, she couldn’t sleep. Tired, irritated, and just physically incapable of producing another tear, like she was all dried up, she kicked her butt into gear.

It was doubtful her obsessive mind would allow her to sleep, even if she tried. Once she’d set her mind to something, she had terribly unhealthy habits of not caring for herself until she’d completed her task.

Cykran had carried her home one too many times after she’d fainted.

So, with that resolve in mind, she moved.

She’d marched her way through the central tree and bashed on Thorill’s office door. When she got no answer, she marched down the central tree’s spiralling main hallway and bashed on his front door!

The suns were gone, but she didn’t give a damn that it was late into the night.

When a stranger opened the door, the woman looked startled. Raewyn had been bashing on the wrong house and needed to go two homes down. Honestly, it just made her more aggressive.

Maybe Merikh’s behaviour had rubbed off on her. She was kind of pleased with it at the moment; she wanted to be big like him, massive and imposing, scaring people into giving her what she wanted.

When Thorill opened the door, one of the faces that had been on Earth to rescue her greeted her. It, however, wasn’t the one who pushed her through it. She slitted her eyes at him, rather angry he was part of the reason she hadn’t managed to get Merikh.

“Raewyn, dear child,” he muttered in a shaken, aged voice. He was almost seventy-five years old, with the wrinkles to match all his wise years. Although he sported no beard, he was fond of curling his long moustache. “It’s the middle of the night. What are y–”

“How do we open a portal back to Earth?” She would like to say she asked, but it was really a demand. She also shoved her way past him and into his home.

He furrowed his overly bushy brows. “Another portal? Impossible. The rest of my stones are depleted.”

She stood in the middle of his house, turned to face him, and folded her arms over her chest. “Then I’ll inject them with my mana.”

She barely noticed his home, despite taking in its details.

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