Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls Read Free Page A

for sure was that I didn’t wantto risk losing the element of surprise.
    “I know I should get some sleep, but I can’t.” Sarah sat down at the table. “I want to get Courtney right now.”
     “Sometimes right now is the wrong now,” I said. Our chances would be a lot better after dawn, and Sarah knew it. “I don’t know if it helps, but she’s probably entranced.”
    “She’s still in what your stories used to call durance vile .” Sarah almostspat.
    “My stories?”
    “Knight stories,” Sarah elaborated. “Men stories. They’re all about how brave the rescuers are. You never wonder how badly all those damsels in distress were traumatized. “Happily ever after,” my ass.”
    “Ending a children’s story with “… and she had night terrors and never again suffered the touch of another ” would have its own problems,” I observed mildly.
    She didn’t hear me. “You never really think about how evil those monsters are either. What do you have to be to rape something you think is beautiful? Or to hold someone against their will because you claim to love them?”
    “Aren’t you the one who’s against monster killing?” I wondered.
     “No,” She looked so miserable and uncomfortable then that I regretted baiting her. It’s just hard,sometimes, being looked down on by people who have everything I want. “I just think calling things evil is too simplistic. I heard that thing’s music, and it was so lonely. I can see someone going insane from that kind of loneliness.”
    Her face hardened. “And I’m going to kill it for what it’s done to Courtney. But that’s what I mean. Calling me good might be a little simplistic too.”
    “Sarah,we’re going to be fighting for our lives in a few hours,” I pointed out. “There’s a reason football coaches don’t call the players into a locker room before the game and ask them to talk about their feelings.”
     Sarah gave a small reluctant laugh and shoved the box of Bonaparte Bites forward. “You might as well eat these. They’re past their sell date.”
    I popped one of the pastries in my mouth.It was a bit stale but went well with the coffee I was drinking. The slip of paper I had to negotiate around was a little annoying, and for a minute I wondered why Sarah didn’t just make fortune cookies. Then I reflected that fortune cookies taste like crap. The slip of paper said something vaguely profound about happiness.
    “Why aren’t you afraid that I’ll poison or drug you?” Sarah asked.
    Because I have an extremely enhanced sense of smell. “I trust my instincts.”
    Sarah wasn’t buying it. “You’re not like any knight I’ve ever met.”
    “Well, you’re just like all the other cunning folk I’ve met,” I said. “Always trying to sniff out secrets, and it doesn’t seem to much matter what kind. Physical. Psychological. Magical.”
    “Truth is truth.” Sarah’s eyes went somewhere far-off and sheabsentmindedly picked up one of the pastries and bit into it. Then she froze when she realized what she’d done.
    “What is it?” I asked suspiciously. Was there something extra in the pastries after all?
    Sarah slowly removed the slip of paper from the pastry and looked at it. Her hands were trembling slightly. That’s when I knew.
    “Not all the fortunes are fake, are they?” I asked.
    Sarah sat downin a chair after all, fumbling it away from the table and dropping down into it a little too rapidly. She seemed to need the extra stability. “Sometimes things come to me while I’m baking. They’re not visions, exactly, but they are messages. They itch inside my skull until I put them down on a slip of paper and place them in those powdered pastry balls.”
    “You’re an aleuromancer,” I said,more to let her know that she didn’t have to waste a lot of time explaining than anything else. Aleuromancers can read the future in sifting flour.
    “Among other things,” Sarah agreed shakily. “I have to put fake fortunes