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Finally, after a few times hearing my name echoing from his lips, and given the ignorantly oblivious yet concerned look on his face, I nodded. “Yeah, zoned out.” My giddy laughter and playfulness that accompanied our time here was completely gone. I tried to pull out a smile but couldn’t.
“Are you all right? Are you feeling sick?”
The crease in Noah’s brow deepened as he looked at me, and it was as though I could feel the emotion and happiness from moments before fading from my face.
Noah’s concern was evident, but how could he not understand why I was upset? Was he that dimwitted? He couldn’t possibly be.
A click toward the back of my room snapped my thoughts away from Noah and his new fae love interest. The gate to my new mousetrap had closed and inside was a tiny white mouse eating a small piece of cheese. As the hungry thing devoured the bait, I saw a note tied to its paw, wagging as he munched.
It was time for Noah to leave.
“You know, Noah, I’m actually feeling a little ill. You should go so that I can get some rest.”
Noah sat in his cross-legged position on my bed for a minute longer, and then seemed to concede and buy my excuse because he gathered the cards strewn out before us without argument. When he laid a gentle hand on my shoulder, I flinched but didn’t pull away. He must have felt the hesitation, but the misunderstanding was still clear in his eyes.
“Sleep well.”
He crossed the room and shut the door behind him without questioning me at all. I waited five seconds before running toward the trap.
It took several weeks, but Nicole and I had trained one of the little mice in the palace to be a message carrier. We—well I, since I was the only one free to move about as I pleased—would go back and forth between our rooms. Each of us left a small snack in the traps at all times, and soon, the mouse found his way to both rooms, back and forth, back and forth. Now we just tied notes to its leg and had a new, easy communication system.
Well, not exactly easy, but we didn’t have many options and our ingenuity was an exciting moment for us both.
I stuck my hand toward the small thing that was snacking on the cheese I’d left from dinner and untied the note.
My sadness and sick feelings over Noah and what I’d been misinterpreting for weeks would have to wait. Because scrawled on the paper before me was something that Nicole had never written before or asked of me. Which sent a new wave of fear chilling my body.
Urgent. Come now.
