A Big Shiny Blue Marble Ch. 05

He smiled, "I can even understand it, from what I know happened here a few years ago."

He got to his feet, "I had more to tell you, but I can see that you don't believe much of what I say, and only wish for me to be gone. I can do that, I guess.

Just so that you can laugh when you tell of me in a tavern, I am obviously not an elf, or even a Drow, as some would say. To you and others like you, I am something much worse, aren't I? My mother is a Merren demon, you wouldn't know the difference, but my job is to hunt and kill the other kind - the ones who do things such as what happened here. My father was a human. They even loved each other."

He stepped past her and began to walk to the barn. Selena watched him go as she stood up and pulled the wet material of her pants away from her skin. As he walked, he began to change back to the way that she'd seen him before.

"Where are you going?" she asked him quietly.

"My horse is in your barn," he said over his shoulder. He opened the doors and found his horse to lead him outside before closing up the doors again. She watched him mount up and canter over.

"If, by some slim chance," he said, "you find that your brain can piece a few thoughts together without judging me, it might come to you that no matter what you might think, I didn't hurt you. If that thought ever arrives, then you ought to think about what else there might have been for me to tell you. Now you can live your life in the ignorance that I see on your face. Just remember that I did try to tell you.

But if you ever want to know everything that I know about what really happened here, then I leave it up to you to find me. I have made my attempt to tell you. You are just not ready to listen.

Do not ever try to steal my horse again -- or I will kill you." He spurred his horse and rode off.

Selena stood for a time, watching until he was out of sight. She waited until she felt the tremors of her fear leave her before she unloaded her horse, bringing everything inside. The horse was led to the barn and fed. And then, Selena walked back to her house slowly. She was thinking, and had quite a bit on her mind.

She lit the fire and ate the leftover food and drank the last bottle of ale. She was almost through the last of the bottle when she remembered that she'd had nothing and he'd brought it to her. When she got into her bed, she found that sleep eluded her for a long time.

The next day, she thought about hiding the bounty money. It took her a while, but then she thought about her mother's room. No one had been in there since that awful day. Selena pulled back the bolt that she'd put there herself, wanting to hide from everything or to deny it all. She didn't know which it had been anymore. She thought that she'd find a good place there. She expected to find a roomful of cobwebs in there, and she did.

She just wasn't prepared for all of the toys and dolls that she found on the bed. Her brother's toys, her dolls, long ago forgotten by their first owners.

But all of them were there, right on the bed, in a large jumble with a few on the floor. The covers were filthy, and they were built up into a little mound, almost like a den.

She had to hold on to the doorframe for a moment as her thoughts came to her. She wondered why there weren't piles of waste everywhere if some animal had lived in here. But there weren't any. There was only a slightly open window. She ran out of the house to look up, and then down again. The old garden was there, behind a fence. The gate almost came off its hinges when she tried to open it. When she got it open at last, she saw the fur and feathers and the waste.

Selena had a lot more trouble getting to sleep that night.