“LadySoDivine”—Shinedown
Holy fucking shit.
I literally had to rub my eyes because I was certain I’d imagined what I was seeing. And smelling.
“What the hell is that?” she blurted.
I cautiously poked at the food. It wasn’t a fucking mirage, and it was hot. “Looks like bacon and eggs,” I replied in a stunned voice. I’d seen a lot of shit in my day, but I’d never seen a plate of food appear in front of me.
We blinked at each other. Then we both grabbed a piece of bacon and started eating it. As I chewed, I got up and went searching behind the bar for silverware. I found a single package of plastic utensils in a drawer.
Bringing it back to the table with me, I held it up. “Fork or spoon?” I asked her.
“Either,” she said, so I gave her the fork and knife, then kept the spoon for myself. I didn’t mind eating like a barbarian with my hands if I had to, but I wanted her to be able to eat properly. A spoon was better than my fingers, I figured.
I grabbed one of the bottles of water we’d left on the table and set it in front of her.
“Drink what you want.”
“What about you?” she questioned.
“I’ll drink what you don’t.”
We didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter how bizarre it was. We ate. Except halfway through her meal, she paused, fork halfway to her mouth.
“What’s that?” she hesitantly asked as she pointed to one of my rings.
A quick glance down confirmed which one she was asking about. “A ring,” I answered, tongue in cheek.
She rolled her eyes. “I can see that. What’s on it?”
Spinning it on my finger, I got lost in my thoughts for a moment. “Just an old family heirloom, I guess. It gets passed on to the firstborn male in my family when they turn fifteen.”
“Why fifteen?”
The memories of that year came back to me, but I shoved them away. I shrugged. “No clue. Just is. My dad always mentioned something about threes.”
She paused a moment and gazed into space as if she was thinking. Then she looked back to me, and a questioning crease appeared in her brow. “What’s on it?”
A chuckle escaped me as I absently spun the ring. “Runes. Supposedly it dates back to my family in Norway. That was a long fucking time ago, though, so I doubt it’s true.”
She set her fork down, and I swear her face went white. Her mouth moved, but she didn’t say anything, so she grabbed the bottle of water and damn near spilled it because her hands were shaking so badly. Once she’d swallow a good bit of it, she set it down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“May I…” Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat. “May I see it?”
My brow dropped in confused suspicion. “Uh, sure.”
Twisting the ring to get it off, I handed it to her. When I set the heavy silver ring in her outstretched hand, she jolted, then shuddered. Before she looked at it, she closed her eyes and took an extremely slow and deep breath.
As she opened them and stared at the ring, she abruptly exhaled. “Holy shit,” she murmured.
“What?” I asked as I watched her spin it, studying the marking on the outside, then the smooth inside of the ring.
“It’s silver.”
“Yeah, I was told that.”
“But there are no markings indicating that.”