Page 42 of A Soul to Guide

The giggle that came from her was light and airy, full of mischief. “No, you won’t.”

He peeked back to see she’d literally stuck her tongue out at him like he’d seen children do to each other.

Merikh disliked that the truth of her words was so obvious; he didn’t have a hope of convincing her otherwise. She was more irksome than he’d originally anticipated.

I should have just eaten her...

Even after another day of travel, Raewyn kept her lips mostly shut. Merikh was still irritated, and he’d limited his responses to her as short grunts.

She wasn’t interested in annoying him further.

She did feel bad he’d gone through all that trouble for her, and it probably seemed as though she was ungrateful. She wasn’t. She appreciated his attempt to feed her.

Raewyn wasn’t so disillusioned as to believe they were friends. In reality, she was his captive, and she was allowing it because she needed his help.

I shouldn’t have assumed he’d understand I can’t eat meat.She was just so used to that common fact among her people that it had skipped her mind.

There was a lot going on. She was in a strange place, with a strange...something, having to go on a strange journey just so she could skip to another world. There were so many variables, and she felt lost in a forest filled with sharp teeth.

Saying she was overwhelmed was an understatement.

Raewyn was also tired, physically exhausted from constantly walking, and she’d been hungry the entire time. Her stomach often quivered from emptiness, soon to start loudly gurgling. She’d been rationing her food when she realised days ago things were taking longer than she’d estimated. Since then, she’d eaten as little as she could, filling herself with water rather than food.

She wasn’t at her optimal thinking capacity. Would anyone be in her position?

It didn’t help that she didn’t fully understand what he was. Okay, so he had a skull for a face. What else? What else was different about Merikh, other than the oddity of his exterior?

As Raewyn had done all her life, when given a subject of interest she knew little about, she poked and prodded her subject until it cracked. If she’d had paper and the magical ink that created her elbraille, she would have begun writing a thesis.

Instead, she was mentally categorising everything she learned about him and classifying it as research. She wanted to be able to catalogue what he was so she could inform her fellow councilmembers of what was happening on Earth.

She’d share the horrible state of the humans and how they were being forced to live because of their actions. She’d share that the Demons had completely overrun this world, and that Merikh’s kind seemed to be more dominant than them. She needed to tell them as much as she could about Weldir and what he was doing, perhaps even speak to a prophet who had the rare ability to speak to their gods – currently, out of thousands of Elysian people, there were only three.

A prophet for each deity that remained, a horrible story for another time.

She wanted to explain everything she could about Duskwalkers, and Merikh in particular, especially since she was still so unsure of him.

His personality was churlish, and Raewyn had been constantly testing his boundaries to see if she could figure him out.

She’d been surprised by his honesty when she asked him questions about what he was and how to kill him. She expected him to keep anything pertaining to himself a secret, worried she’d try to off him the first chance she got.

It either meant he was an idiot for telling her, or he was as awesome in strength as he said he was.

Still, even if he was a little... mean, he’d gone out of his way to try to feed her. Instead of ‘follow prisoner, or else,’ he’d allowed her to have a few minutes to quickly bathe so she felt cleaner, healthier, better.

It was obvious he was spiteful. Not towards her, but at something else entirely, and she wanted to know what that was. Why did he hold hate so dearly that he was brash and callous with his words and behaviour?

She was realising the Merc she’d come to know was completely falsified, and that Merikh was someone else entirely.

From what she’d touched on the outside, he was a monster. Raewyn wanted to know if he was a monster through-and-through. Was he something unholy and evil all the way to his core, or was there perhaps a goodness beyond his self-centred goals?

She would only learn these things if she was open about her people, about her world, about herself. She needed to be the one with few secrets if she had any hope of understanding him in the short time she would be with him.

Right now, she could sense she just needed to remain quiet after the whole fishing incident.

He seems to be in more of a hurry to leave this realm than I am.It was hard to imagine with how homesick she was, to the point her heart and stomach felt as though they wanted to switch places.

No, it was he who didn’t want to deviate from their path unless necessary. Yet, he was heading to this farming town for her sake.

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