Page 98 of Cherish

“Yes, I did see her. She’s okay,” he confirms immediately, and my heart soars. “She’s just a little, umm…slobbery.”

“Slobbery?”

Instead of answering, he points toward the counter—toward the lavender baby Marian is now cooing over. My eyes go wide. “That’s…”

“Marian is Gillie’s mother,” Hudson confirms. “This is her bakery.”

“Gillie’s timeline reset to when she was a baby, just like Smokey,” I say, and my heart aches at the realization that I won’t get to talk to my good friend. But Hudson squeezes my shoulder comfortingly, and I smile up at him.

“At least she’s alive. That’s all that matters.” He presses a kiss to my curls.

“Agreed.” I sip my tea, letting the warmth seep through me. “Though personally, I wouldn’t go through my tween years again for all the money in the world.”

He grins, and I do, too.

“Midnight is still several hours away,” Macy says to the whole group, glancing at the large cookie clock on the wall. “And Hudson said Nyaz doesn’t come on for the night shift until even later. So what do you say we fill those hours with a tour of this place?”

“Yeah, but not one filled with tourist spots,” Heather adds. “I want to see the places you hung out when you were here.”

My stomach clenches just a little bit at the thought. Not because I don’t want to show my friends those places but because this whole trip is hurting more than I thought it would.

There’s a part of me that was excited to come back here, excited to see the town where Hudson and I lived, where we fell in love.

But I just got those memories back. I haven’t even had a chance to go through them all and think about them, really think about them. And yet here we are, back in Adarie-turned-Vegaville, and it’s like none of those things actually happened. I haven’t even had a chance to sort them out in my head, and they’re changing, morphing, being taken from me.

It’s a very weird feeling.

Still, my own issues aren’t anybody else’s, and I can see why my friends want to explore this place. They were worried about me and looking for ways to save me the whole time Hudson and I were here—is it any wonder they want to see what our life was like when they were so convinced that something horrible was happening to me?

So I shove down all the weird thoughts ricocheting through me and ignore the discomfort I just can’t shake, focusing instead on giving my friends the best tour of Adarie that I can give them.

And maybe at midnight we’ll even get lucky and find a chupacabra who can answer once and for all if I’ve still got time magic in me—if I’m going to be stuck here forever, in this place that forgot me.

53

Wherefore

Artist Thou?

“So what do you want to see first?” Hudson asks after we’ve managed to put a dent in as many of the free pastries as we can.

Jaxon shoves back from the table. “I don’t know. What did you two do for fun here?”

“The same things we did for fun at Katmere, I guess,” I say as we head for the door.

“Oh, really?” Macy raises her brows. “There are a lot of snowball fights in the Shadow Realm, are there?”

“Not quite.” I laugh before looking at Hudson. “I know where we can take them.”

He grins. “The Mark, right?”

“Exactly!”

“What’s the Mark?” Heather asks as we head away from the bakery to the outskirts of town.

“You’ll see,” I tell her as excitement thrums through me.

Hudson and I found this place after we’d been in Adarie several months. We were wandering around town on our day off, looking for something fun to do, when we ran into the old warehouse. And while I wouldn’t exactly call us regulars here, we came enough that we got to know the place fairly well.

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