of your points of entries. Anyone seeking entrance into your territory should be questioned and searched.”
“Sentries?”
Myanin’s head tilted as she narrowed her eyes on the male. “Are you monosyllabic?”
“I… I’m not sure what that means.”
“So, now I need to give you a lesson on your own language as well as on how to protect your territory?” Myanin sighed. One minute the humans seemed ingenious, and the next they were like flies that ate dung. “Can you at least tell me where I can get some cotton candy?”
He frowned and looked even more confused. “Cotton candy?”
“Damn the hell of shit,” Myanin cursed. “Be gone.” She pushed him away from her. “I’m afraid your lack of sense might be contagious.”
She glanced up at the bright sign that was screaming at everyone, whether their intentions be ill or not, to come and do something with squares that had dots on them. “Why can’t all of their inventions be as awesome as cotton candy?” She shook her head and then started walking toward the bright lights of a street lined with tall buildings. The lights seemed to draw people in like moths to a flame. The humans almost appeared mindless as they walked with open mouths and bright eyes, hypnotized by whatever it was that the city offered. Perhaps the square with the dots was some kind of drug? They had drugs in the djinn realm that were coveted because of the effect they had on the mind. Some of their kind were known to go a little crazy from all the information they kept in their minds, and they gave into the draw of the mindless drug.
When she reached the first illuminated building, she saw lights moving in a running motion, up and down the height of the structure. Loud laughter and carousing spilled out from within. Okay, now she just had to see what had the humans in such spirits. She walked through the open doors, and her senses were assaulted with more lights, a cacophony of sounds, and a smell that shouldn’t exist. It was musty with a burnt undertone. She saw a burning white stick hanging out of a woman’s mouth. The end of it emitted a trail of white smoke that rose and hovered in the air. Myanin rushed over and grabbed it from the woman’s mouth, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it with her boot.
The woman gasped and then shouted, “What the hell, bitch?”
Myanin looked up from the burning stick. “I just saved your life, female. You would be wise not to refer to me as a female dog.”
“I can smoke if I want to. They’re my lungs,” the woman bit out.
“I care not for your lungs. That stick was on fire and would have lit up your face as bright as the lights in this place once it reached your skin,” Myanin said. Did she really have to explain this to this woman? “Human flesh is flammable. That means you burn up,” she added, because the woman probably didn’t know what the word flammable meant.
“It wasn’t on fire, you tall-ass freak,” the woman screeched. “Don’t you know what a cigarette is?”
Myanin frowned. “This word cigarette is unfamiliar. Are you saying you were holding the burning stick in your mouth on purpose?”
The woman raised her brow and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “It didn’t just jump into my mouth all by itself.”
“My apologies.” Myanin realized she’d just stomped on the woman’s property. “Regardless of the fact that I’ve never seen something so utterly dim-witted in my existence as putting a burning object in one's mouth, I should not have damaged your property.”
The woman looked taken aback and dropped her arms. “Uh, um, okay, well, whatever. It’s fine.”
Myanin watched as the female stomped off in shoes with a heel on them so thin and high that she wondered how on earth the woman was able to walk. She definitely wouldn’t be able to fight in them, unless she took them off and used the long part as a dagger of sorts. Perhaps that is why she wore them.
Myanin shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Burning sticks,” she huffed. “Stupid.”
She continued walking deeper into the raucous swarm of humanity. People were laughing, drinking odd-colored drinks, and more of them had the burning sticks, the cigarettes, in their mouths. They obviously weren’t concerned about burning to ash. Strange, these humans and their complete lack of concern for self-preservation.