what it took to keep Costin from going feral. When she began to get tired, she could feel Decebel sharing his energy with her through their bond.
Food was brought to her and Thia, and Costin said they’d also been brought something to eat. There were no windows so they had no sense of time. She couldn’t guess how much time had passed since Sally had been taken. The minutes and hours seemed to run together. Thia toddled around entertaining herself with the rattle a fae had brought when they’d brought the food. A rattle? Did they think her kid was an idiot? She needed something more stimulating than a rattle.
“Dada,” Thia said as she shook the rattle in the air and laughed. Okay so maybe the trauma of the events had stunted her genius and a rattle was suddenly stimulating.
“Dude,” Jen huffed, “how about you say momma once in a while?”
Thia glanced at her and pointed. “Not dada.”
“I love you too, kid,” she sighed as she smiled.
“Hold on,” she told Costin at one point. “I’m going to knock on the other wall and see if Jacque’s over there.” She’d been so focused on keeping Costin sane that she hadn’t even thought to see if Jacque was next to her. She might be on the other side of
She utilized the same code Sally had used with her, the one they’d used when they’d snuck out as teenagers. That felt like decades ago now. After a minute, there was a response. It was Jacque. Jen smiled but then cursed. “Why the hell don’t you know morse code?” she spat at the wall as if Jacque could hear her.
“Hell, hell, hell,” Thia chattered as she knocked on the wall next to where Jen stood.
Jen looked down at her. “Really? Out of that whole sentence you couldn’t have chosen literally any other word?” The kid was too much like her.
There was no point in just knocking nonsense on the wall. Jen went back over to the wall where Costin was with mini-me following behind her all the while alternating between ‘dada’ and ‘hell’. Dec was going to be so thrilled. She knocked on the wall and told him that Jacque was next to her and at least healthy enough to knock back. She changed Thia’s diaper, fed her, and then rocked her to sleep, all the while responding to Costin or asking her own questions.
Thia seemed to know when to sleep, thanks to her schedule, despite the fact that there were no windows and no way to tell what time of day it was. Jen only knew because Decebel told her. She and Costin occasionally fell asleep, but inevitably one of them would wake up and start the tapping again, waking the other up.
“How long can we do this?” Costin asked her at some point.
“We do it for as long as we have to. We do it until we have calluses on our knuckles and we’re tapping out morse code in our freaking sleep. We do it until our kids know morse code better than they know English. We do it until our hands are so bloody that we have to use our elbows. We don’t stop. We don’t give up. We don’t back down.”
Costin tapped back, his knocks a little firmer. “Okay, Jen. Okay.”
Myanin had figured out that the city where Thadrick’s house was located was called Indianapolis, which she’d immediately decided was a ridiculous name for a city, or anything for that matter. And the city was located in the state of Indiana. The states appeared to be similar to territories in her realm, and the cities were like tribes. Once she’d figured out where she was on the map, and then determined where Arizona was located, it was a breeze to make her way in that direction.
For the most part, she simply walked. Granted, her walking speed was more like running for the humans. And if she ran, well, the humans couldn’t even see her. They’d just feel a breeze as she passed them by. Once she began to see all the colorful, interesting things in the human realm, she decided Ludcarab could wait. She was free. She’d rescued herself, and she wasn’t about to become someone else's slave, especially after discovering this wonderous food called cotton candy. How in holy djinn babies did they not have something as brilliant as cotton candy in their realm? They could keep the entire history of the universe, but they couldn’t make this delicious