“What? No executions?” Quill stared at the kids collected around her. “What is even the point of being a princess, then?”
I gritted my teeth behind a big smile for the kids. “You promised,” I hissed.
“I don’t recalling saying, ‘I promise to be a simpering idiot to fool the naivest of your kind,’” she said.
“Just try, okay? Smile or something.” I watched her lips spread wide in what I assumed was supposed to be a smile but looked more like an expression you would see on the clown from It. “Okay. Not that like.”
Her face relaxed into her usual haughty expression. “I am here to entertain you, children. Feel free to ask me about my life in my amazing castle.”
“What’s your favorite food?”
The answer, as anyone who’d spent any time Googling Princess Palollipop knew, was cotton candy-flavored lollipops. But of course Quill had neither done any research nor cared to get the answer right. “Insect larva,” she announced.
Luckily, the kids took it as a joke, bursting into the kind of laughter only kids are capable of.
“Do you know how to make balloon animals?” one little girl asked.
“I do, but only from the bladder of a hippopotamus.” Quill peered coolly down at the child. “Do you happen to have a hippopotamus bladder on you, by chance?”
More giggles. Boy, Quill was really killing it with the kids.
As long as she didn’t, you know, start actuallykilling, we’d be okay.
“Do you have servants?” Andi asked.
Quill looked directly at me. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Very many.”
There was no reason for a chill to run down my spine.
But it did.
***
Princess Palollipop was a hit, and by the time she said her goodbyes and escaped back to my apartment, we were halfway through the party and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
It looked like Quill wasn’t the only one killing it. Roger was right. I could overcome hiccups. I had this in the bag.
And then I walked into the first cat room, the one closest to the café area. The one with the rat cage in it.
I froze, my mind desperately trying to process what I was seeing.
Because one of the doors of the rat cage was standing wide open. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, the cage was empty. No rats at all. Which meant I had fifteen rats loose.
In a cat café.
During a little girl’s princess birthday party.
There really wasn’t a glitter bomb big enough to tell Roger how I felt about him at that moment.
