Page 63 of Crowned A Traitor
“I don’t know.”
“But you care about him?” Wolfgang asked, looking at his sister with deep concern. “How did you know it’s a him?” She frowned.
“You just told me.”
It was a simple trick, and Klara couldn’t help but smile.
“It doesn’t matter now, I’m sure he is somewhere safe,” she said, wondering whose side Frendall would be standing on. “Why are we even talking about this? I will never take over Malum or Hell,” Klara told him.
“Not even to protect someone else?” His voice low.
The thought of Frendall’s screams filling her Father’s corridors as the Torturers went to work made her bones ache.
“If it were your council surely you would keep some loyal to the King?” Klara didn’t know why he insisted on carrying on the conversation.
“Most are corrupt.” Klara thought of Lokey smuggling over the less fortunate. He might be doing good, but it came at a price. No good deed was free or went unpunished in Malum. If Abadan had found her at the River, it meant the High Queen could have found Lokey and his pregnant wife.
Lost in thought, Klara crashed into Wolfgang as he stilled. She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up his hand, his head snapping left and right as they waited in silence. They moved behind the bushes close by. Klara couldn’t see what he saw, not without using her powers.
Wolfgang held a finger to his lips, Klara was about to protest, when she saw them. A family. They were following the disengaged snatches. The Centaur at the front of the five, paused as the tracks ended.
Klara feared that Wolfgang would stop them from moving ahead into live snatches. Wolfgang went to stand, but that’s when Klara saw it. Klara gripped Wolfgang’s arm, she tried to project a message into his mind, but there was a block she couldn’t get through. Luckily without her magic, Wolfgang stopped as he saw the red vertical line that ran the length of the elder Centaur’s exposed forearm.
The silver-bearded Centaur was one of Abadan’s supporters.
Judging from the bags on the Centaurs' bare backs, they were fleeing. Klara crouched down further careful not to lose her balance with Lottie on her back.
“They must have used a Demon’s portal to get across the Styx,”Arthur whispered.
The family might be fleeing, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t turn her in for a price and a loyal supporter would know precisely who Klara was with one look.
The family hurried off in another direction. Klara felt her chest heave as she took a breath. “How did you know they were behind us?”
“I heard them, and I could smell the evil,” Wolfgang’s jaw tightened as they moved on at a quicker pace. The threat of almost being seen renewing the sense of danger around them.
The ability to smell evil. She could sense fear, danger and those with malicious intent, but she couldn’t blanket what she sensed as simply evil as Wolfgang had.Maybe he is biased from the red line of loyalty the Centaur bore.
“What do I smell like?” Klara asked, and Wolfgang rolled his eyes to the heavens as the group came out from their hiding place.
“You smell nice,” Lottie said, and Klara was sure that wasn’t true considering the amount of running they had been doing.
“You smell like sad flowers.”
Klara wasn’t sure how she was supposed to take that.
She might be part Angel, but that didn’t mean she didn’t sweat.
“I wouldn’t trust her untrained senses,” Wolfgang smirked under his breath, and Klara noticed the exposed dimples on his cheeks. Arthur clapped his shoulder for his comment.
“If not sad flowers, what do I smell like?” Klara wondered what she smelt like to other sensory Creatures and Lottie hummed for a moment as she thought it over.
“Clouds,” Wolfgang said before his sister, and Klara laughed, a full belly laugh that felt foreign in her body.
“Clouds? How do you know what clouds smell like?”
Wolfgang didn’t offer any further explanation.
“I didn’t realize Lycaons could fly.”
