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Daniel caught her looking, and frowned for a moment.
“Hunter cleaned everything up pretty good while you were out,” he started.
“How long was I out?”
“A couple hours,” Daniel said. “It’s pretty late now. Almost midnight.”
Learning that only made Charlie even more tired.
“Oh,” was all she said.
“I’ll be right back,” Daniel told her, and left the room again.
Charlie managed to prop her elbows on the table, staring around the room while they were gone.
For the first time, she really took the place in.
Thenshe began to wonder where on earth she’d found herself.
At one end of the room, which seemed to be some sort of combination dining room and sitting room, was the big, stone fireplace. It was beautiful and well-made, at least as far as she could tell, but she wasn’t an expert on fireplaces. There was something homemade about it, though. It wasn’t exactly uniform, the stones a little unevenly spaced, the whole thing not exactly symmetrical.
As she looked around, Charlie realized that everything in the room was like that: the wooden table she’d been on was beautiful, but the edges flowed with the natural grain of the wood, rather than being perfectly straight.
The walls themselves had the same quality, giving the cabin the impression that it had grown, rather than been constructed. The furniture was mostly wood and had the same organic, flowing, beautiful quality to it.
Whoever made this is very, very good at it, she thought. Well, maybe not at fireplaces, but who cares.
Opposite the fireplace were huge bay windows, looking out onto a small clearing, though it was too dark to see anything outside. Still, Charlie stared.
There could be wolves, she thought. Don’t their eyes glow yellow?
Her skin crawled.
Just in time, Daniel and Kade emerged from the kitchen, Daniel carrying two bowls of stew, Kade carrying one and a handful of spoons.
“We even got silverware,” Daniel said proudly.
It was kind of an odd thing to say, but Charlie barely noticed by that point. The moment that the bowl was in front of her, she grabbed a spoon and started shoveling the stew into her mouth, one shaking hand gripping the spoon in her fist.
She knew she probably looked like an animal, but if anyone was going to be okay with that, it was these guys.
They, on the other hand, seemed to be making an effort to be polite in front of her. Kade in particular was spooning stew into his mouth very delicately, making an exaggerated face every time he opened his mouth, doing his best not to get the soup all over himself.
“It’s really good,” she said as her spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl.
“Want more?” offered Daniel.
She did, but she shook her head.
“I better not.”
“Why?” asked Kade, bewilderment in his voice as he looked her up and down.
“I don’t want to get nauseous,” she said. “Remember?”
Kade just nodded.
Too tired to do anything else, Charlie leaned on her hands, her eyes beginning to slide closed almost instantly.
