Giulia claps her hands together. “Oh, this is fantastic! What a pretty way the threads intertwined. So you know where he lived in?”
I chew on my bottom lip. “More or less. We left for the border with the Cursed Realm, and then the boys rescued me and we ran blindly...”
Trevor waves a hand in dismissal. “I’m working on it. The car had a GPS.”
Blood rushes from my face. I snap my gaze to Apollo, his eyes wide. “Do you think they could trace us?” I ask, voice strangling.
“No, no,” Trevor goes on. “Not this kind of GPS. Not a tracker. Just a regular navigation system. I’ll get into it and read the history. Simple as that.”
Giulia smiles. “You think you can access it?”
“Of course.” Trevor sounds almost offended as he crosses his arms over his chest. “That’s simple, Giulia love. You’ve seen me doing much more impressive things.”
Giulia chuckles, taking his hand in her. Then she looks back at me. It’s funny how she can’t really see me, but she always finds me. “Are you willing to go back?”
“Sure.” There’s no hesitation in my voice. “Prince had these portal stones into the Collector’s house. I want to go there. Free the others and see if I can find a key for these.” I dangle the shackles, then remember she can’t exactly see them.
Giulia twists her lips. “The Collector’s shackles, is it? You have them in several threads. In some, you lose your hands. In others, they malfunction and kill someone besides taking your entire arms.” Her eyes widen. “There are several the bleeding actually kills you.”
My heart climbs to my throat. I push my plate away. I think I’m going to be sick.
“Giulia love,” Trevor says, bringing her hand to his mouth. “We’ve talked about that. Keep the gory details to yourself.”
“Oh, yes.” She grins. “Sorry.”
“Can you tell if it’s this one?” Ren asks, his voice thick with worry. His eyes are wide as well, and I can see Tristan looking between us. I bet he was so focused on the food he missed half the convo.
Giulia shakes her head, the corners of her lips tilting down. “No, sorry.”
“Can’t you take the shackles out either?” Apollo’s voice is much firmer now, almost threatening. I want to reach out and calm him down, but my hands tremble.
She shakes her head again. “The Collector does special keys. You’ll have to go after him. The good news is,” she smiles again, “if you go after him, there’s a good thirty-five percent chance you’ll find the keys and get out alive!”
Wow. Thirty-five percent chance. My stomach flips and flips, and I press a hand to it, nauseated. When Giulia puts it like this, I feel like we’re going on a suicidal mission. And I don’t want the others to get hurt. I don’t want this thread to be the one my men die because of me.
Giulia clucks her tongue. “I did it again, didn’t I?” she murmurs to Trevor and Alicia. My heart goes out to her, half-lost in the timelines, always locked in this place where things don’t make complete sense. She turns her eyes to me, forcing a smile onto her face. “Would you like a tour of the house? There’s so much for you to distract yourselves with until Trevor finds the place.”
I smile back at her, even if she can’t see it. “Of course. I’d love that.”
And I would love it even more if there was a way out of this trouble without getting anyone else hurt.
CHAPTER11
CASSANDRA
To be honest, I was never the brightest kid. I would like to tell the story of the underdog who was smarter than her peers, and who solved absurd math equations she wasn’t supposed to and learned nine languages before her twelfth birthday, but that’s not me. That’s just not me.
Maybe with a different childhood? If I was raised in a loving home with access to books and television and encyclopedias. If I was taken to museums during the weekends, and I had been to libraries whenever I wanted. Maybe with the right support, I could have been this child.
I’ll never know. The one thing I’m good at is playing poker and keeping a straight face and telling who’s lying and who isn’t. I make money, and with this money I find out what I like and what I don’t like. And perhaps because I’ve never been very smart, I find myself so lost here I have no words to describe it.
“What did you call this place again?” I voice at Giulia, standing next to me and staring at the weird bird in front of us. The brown feathers are short and its beak is huge. The bird itself is much taller than the birds I’ve met — but I’ve only seen pigeons, so that’s on me.
“A menagerie.” Giulia looks up at me with her white eyes, then back at the bird. She reaches out a hand and touches the gold cage. It’s not really a cage, the space between bars too big. And the animals aren’t alive either. They’re stuffed, but not that weird stuffing I’ve seen in BuzzFeed posts. These are so well made that, if you unfocus your eye or look sideways at it, you’ll swear they’re alive, about to blink and move. “This is not the correct use, of course. A menagerie is a private collection of live animals. Not stuffed ones. It could be a called a Dead Menagerie. It would make more sense.” And she smiles. “I keep here unique creatures of this thread of time. Just to make sure where I am.”
I shoot a last look at the bird next to us, a plaque pinned to the cage calls it a “dodo”, which I find an amusing name, then follow Giulia along, between tall ferns and golden bars. The boys and Alicia lag behind us. Tristan, the tallest, has put Oreo on his shoulder, and the hound is having the time of his life biting at the hanging ferns. Don, Alicia and Apollo were, last I checked, discussing which species require blood more often. Apollo swears for dragon shifters, because they produce much heat and need loads of energy, but Alicia and Don dismiss him on the grounds of vampires literally starving without blood. Ren is a couple of steps behind me, and he smiles when our gazes connect.
“So...” I turn back to Giulia, who takes a turn. “There are unique creatures to every thread?”