Page 30 of Veil of Blood and Bone

I think I do. I want to say the right thing.

My thumb flutters over the handle of the ax on my belt. There’s comfort in steel.

“Then sit here. It’s the only place you’ll be out of the way.” Helene grabs a chair from the tiny aluminum table tucked into a neat vertex of the room. “You want some water? I can make tea or coffee too?

“Mead. Or ale.” I stare around the tiny galley. “Where do you slaughter your cattle? This place looks hardly big enough to skin them.”

Helene stifles a grin. “Sit.”

Audra laughs, big and loud. Something I said? “He’s too large. He'll break it.”

“Well, there's no room on the couch for him with your legs stretched out. Sorry.”

Helene moves around the ninety degree angle of the kitchen counter with practiced ease. A ceramic pitcher with faded wildflowers holds a bouquet of wooden spoons. She grabs one after setting the pot on the stove to boil, adding salt liberally.

It takes two steps to get to the refrigerator, the only behemoth in the space. She bends to open the door, her plump ass in the air.

My mouth waters.

How long has it been since I’ve tasted a woman? Since I’ve run my fingers along the curve of a hip, a breast, buried my cock in welcoming heat?

Desire stays lodged like a thorn in my paw through dinner. I manage polite conversation while the pasta cooks and soon Helene serves up a massive pot of sauce with round meatballs floating like survivors on the ocean.

She helps Audra into a chair at the front of the table and pulls it away from the wall slightly so I’m not pressed in the corner.

“Go on, eat.”

Without waiting for further permission, I serve myself, scooping out a heaving portion and sloshing it on the plate.

“Forest, how did you know about the troll? Do you teach history?” Helene asks once I’m finished.

She releases the barbed edges of the trap, her words deceptively calm.

Once I’m hooked, the undercurrent of tension is impossible to ignore. Calm and collected on the outside, seething on the inside.

I glance up, a strand of pasta trailing sauce in my beard, slurping the spaghetti. “History?”

“No, it wouldn’t be history,” Helene fills in, snapping her fingers to summon the term. “Mythology, right?”

Audra chuckles and serves herself next. “It’s not mythology if the thing actually exists, Hel. I mean it. The man is still covered in green blood.”

Helene sinks deeper into her chair. “I should have let him shower while the water was super-hot.”

“I hear your stomach growling from here,” I murmur through another mouthful. “Eat.”

There isn’t much left in the pot but Helene scrapes it clean and tops the meal with flakes of something white from a container.

The sisters naturally pick up the train of conversations. They bicker back and forth, words between them like a ball bounced off a wall. Helene slices her meatballs into tiny chewable pieces but the act makes no sense.

I shovel another bite to my mouth, the flavor bursting and filling part of the hole inside of me. The ones in my head remain no matter how much I eat.

The troll...

Not mythology, but history, truth. Was the veil always thin here? Is this the first time a creature has come through here, and if it isn’t, why has no one increased their protections?

I grunt at the migraine.

“So who are you?”