Page 111 of Threadbound

“Go,” he breathed.

His heart almost stopped when Jamie hesitated on the threshold, lower lip caught in his teeth.

“I—I’m sorry,” the half-breed said, the emotion in his voice regretful. “For whatever I did.” And then he was gone, and Bran’s speechlessness no longer mattered.

He answered anyway.

“You dinna do anything.”

Chapter

Forty

Time apparently didn’t move any differently in Elfhame than it did in the mortal world—which Jamie supposed was probably a good thing, since his landlord hadn’t evicted him in absentia and taken his stuff, and nobody had declared him legally dead yet, although hehadneeded to spend the better part of an afternoon in the office of a very annoyed police detective trying to explain why he’d gone missing for seventeen days without saying a word to anyone.

He’d made up something about having lost his phone and being in a remote part of the highlands without reliable service, staying with a friend’s family who were off grid. It wasn’t exactly a lie, since you couldn’t get more off grid than Elfhame, but it wasn’t something the police could verify, either. Jamie was fairly certain they didn’t believe him, but there wasn’t really anything they could do about it, and Jamie absolutely wasn’t going to tell them the truth.

But since Jamie wasn’t dead and didn’t seem to have stolen anything or otherwise violated the law, the police let him go with nothing more than a strongly-worded warning to not do something that stupid again. Jamie said he wouldn’t, but some part of his brain couldn’t help speculating that he very wellmight. Especially since he missed Bran and Patch a lot more than he’d thought he would.

Especially Bran. He’d known he was going to miss Patch.

But it wasn’t like he could bring agealach marcaicheback with him. A six-legged furry pug-faced moth-creature the size of a koala was not something you could just hide in your apartment. Or put in a cat carrier.

Was it?

Lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, Jamie was sorely tempted to buy a carrier and go back to the Kirkyard to see if he could ask Bran to let him bring Patch. Assuming the poor thing wouldn’t die of starvation or poisoning or something if he took it away from Elfhame. But it was hard not to lie there and think about how Patch must be wondering where he’d gone and why he didn’t come back. Which made him feel horrible.

Jamie sighed into the darkness.

He’d also had to do an epic clean-out of his fridge, and he’d had to grovel to his extremely nice and tolerant landlady while holding out a check that was at least only a handful of days late. And he’d done even more groveling to both Rob and Trixie, thanking Trixie for the tapestry of lies she’d told their boss at the Surgeons’ Hall Museums about a family emergency.

Jamie’d also told Rob and Trixie a lie—ish. He’d said Bran was really sick and that he’d asked Jamie to come back home with him, and that his family lived in the northern highlands off grid and that he’d totally forgotten his charger, not that they’d had power or internet anyway. It was roughly the same lie he’d told the police, so at least there was some consistency there.

The difficulty came when Trixie asked if Bran had come back with him, and Jamie’d had to admit that he hadn’t. And that he wasn’t going to. Or, at least, that Jamie didn’t think he was. Which led to Trixie trying to take him out for a consoling drink over his ‘breakup,’ which Jamie was doing his best to avoidbecause it only compounded his guilt. Because he and Bran hadn’t ever been dating, really, which made his actual upset about it even more ridiculous.

It wasn’t even like Bran had asked him to leave—that had been Jamie’s decision. It just… had been really obvious that Bran didn’t want his company. That whatever it was that had originally drawn Bran to him was now gone.

Jamie still kept an eye out for ravens, though. Just in case.

So far, not a one. Not even a normal-sized one, although Jamie felt compelled to look closely every time he saw a crow or a blackbird.

What he had seen were the bookas who lived in his apartment, one of which had come out to wave at him and make odd chirping sounds his first night back, and he’d apologized for having gone missing, which the creature dismissed with a wave. After throwing out almost everything in his fridge—some of which was disturbing colors and textures—he’d gone to buy the absolute bare minimum of groceries, but made sure to include milk. Thankfully honey didn’t go bad, so at least there was that.

It was a little depressing going back to his impoverished-student defaults of packet noodles, cheap bread, and a jumbo jar of peanut butter. It may not have been terribly Scottish, but peanut butter had a lot of calories.

Salty noodles and peanut butter toast was about all he could afford after having not worked for a few weeks, and it was a far cry from what he’d been eating in Elfhame. But he washome,and that was more important than some tasty-but-mostly-unidentifiable food.

Right?

Jamie sighed and prodded his noodles with a fork. The mortal world was not doing a terribly good job of recommending itself right at that precise moment. He’d gotten himself back on the work schedule—Trixie’s lie about a family emergency meanthe hadn’t been fired, and he was absolutely going to buy her an amazing dinner anywhere she wanted… just as soon as he managed to save up enough money—so he’d be back to work in the morning.

It all felt completely ordinary.

And absolutely boring.

Nothing like discovering the existence of the fairy realm and spending weeks there surrounded by the beautiful and bizarre to make your mundane life seem extra dull in comparison.

Jamie sighed again, then forced himself to eat a mouthful of noodles. He just had to get back into his rhythm, that was all.

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