“I wash my hands of this. All of it. I will not be responsible for any of it.”
“Good. You do that,” Tomas says. “Go home then, I will take care of everything else.” The he grabs a piece of scrap paper and a pen off the truck’s dashboard, writes down the word ‘money,’ and hands it over to the salesman.
The salesman beams a smile because even though it’s just a piece of paper with the word ‘money’ on it, it’s magic money. So he thinks it’s real. “Very good, sir! It’s been a pleasure doing business with you!” And then he drops the truck keys into Tomas’ waiting hand and walks off, looking down at the piece of paper in his hand, grinning at his good luck.
“We’re really doing this?” I ask.
“We need to feed them, Pell. We need the truck. I know this will make Pie angry, but she will understand.”
I know he’s right, I just don’t want him to be right. Pie hates that she has to work for Tarq. She’s probably having a terrible day and the moment she gets home tonight I will have to break the bad news that she’s now even further in debt than ever. Magic money. It always comes with strings. And the strings right now are not acceptable.
And where does it end?
Will it end?
How?
We will always need more things. We will always have more debt. And now that we have fifty new monsters to take care of, there is no end in sight.
She’s a slave.
Not only that, she’s worse off than any other slave in the history of Saint Mark’s. No other caretaker had to provide so much.
Tomas jumps down out of the truck and places a hand on my shoulder. And he must read my mind because he says, “She’ll understand.”
“I know that, Tomas. Pie isn’t going to complain about taking care of the new monsters. She will see it as her duty. Not as a slave caretaker, but as a human. Which is almost funny, since she’s not even human anymore.”
And now everything that has happened over the past month sinks in.
Nothing is the same.
Everything is different.
And life as I know it—as we know it—will be different forever from this point on.
Thirty minutes later Tomas waves to the strawberry-haired girl as he climbs into the truck, the bed now fully loaded up with a hundred bales of hay. We didn’t even get grain. That was out of the budget, even for Tomas. “See you next week!” he calls to her. Then he smiles at me and yells, “I’ll follow you!”
This is going to be a disaster.
CHAPTER EIGHT - PIE
Tarq leads me through the bustling room towards a large staircase. I want to ask all the questions but he’s very focused on our destination. We climb up the stairs, turn left and then we’re facing a set of translucent glass double doors. They are open, so beyond the doors I can see a large laboratory with windows on the far side that overlook the city outside.
He walks forward and I follow. Once inside, he turns to look at me. “This is your space.”
I eyeball the room. It’s a very serious room, filled with scientific shit I’ve never seen before. “This is not an apothecary.”
“No,” Tarq agrees. “It’s not. Like I said, we don’t do herbs and spells here, Pie. We do science.”
I press my lips together. “Mmm-hmm. Well. I’m not sure what part of this you’re failing to understand, but I’m not capable of”—I don’t even have a word for what happens in laboratories, so I land on—“any of this.”
“You say that, and yet you come here with a magic talking bird.”
“I don’t know why people automatically assume that my magic bird means I can do witchcraft—”
“Science,” he corrects me.
I point at Tarq. “You do realize that expecting me to do science is even more ridiculous than expecting me to do magic?”