Silver Blood (Series of Blood Book 1) by Emma Hamm (android e book reader .txt) 📗

his own. If she got robbed at this point then so be it. She was shaken, nervous, embarrassed, and angry of all things.

She made her way to the door that led upstairs to her apartment and resigned herself to using the emotions from this moment for Juice. Wren didn’t like to use emotions from her own memories, that was what dreaming was for. As a rule, she didn’t sell bad emotions like this in her shop.

But she would bottle this anyways and keep it in case someone wanted it for a high price. That was the only way she was going to feel better about this moment in time.

“Wren.” His voice made her pause.

Wren glanced over her shoulder to see him standing in the center of her shop. His fists were clenched, and there was still blood on his neck in streaks of faint blue. He was staring at her as though she was some kind of princess leaving him on the floor of a ballroom.

But she wasn’t a princess, and he certainly wasn’t a prince. She was being fanciful in thinking that he was looking at her in any way other than anger. That was how he should feel in this moment, and she wouldn’t have blamed him for it.

The smolder in his eyes was from frustration, nothing more. She couldn’t allow herself to even consider that there might have been something else as he looked at her.

“I need you to listen to me,” he said firmly.

Equally firm in tone, Wren shook her head and replied, “I’m sorry. We’re closed.”

She opened and shut the door to her apartment, locked it firmly behind her, and pressed her spine against the well worn wood. That was quite enough entertainment to last her for the night.

If not for the rest of her life.

Wren tried to dream that night. She wore herself out cleaning the small apartment and watering the hundreds of plants that hung in baskets and pots from her ceiling. It was a regular jungle inside the place where she lived. Wren would have it no other way.

Her apartment was a chaotic mess of books, plants, and fabric. The brick walls had seen better days, the wooden floors were scratched, and she was missing a couple window panes. But whatever was broken, she attempted to fix.

The missing bricks were replaced with bright colored fabric stuck into the wall. Said wall was now a patchwork of color and crumbling red dust. The windows received a similar treatment that made squares of color dance upon her floor during the day.

In the corner of the apartment was a bathroom hidden behind a folding blind, and the kitchen was on the other end with pots and pans hanging above the counters. It was a warm room, full of earth tones and hanging plants. The apartment was by no means opulent, or even safe, but it was Wren’s home.

She made certain that the plants were tamed at least. She kept them watered and rotated them every other day so that the sun could touch all of them in equal amounts. They were feral towards other people, but they appreciated her efforts.

One of her vines had crept out of the window and flourished. She should have snipped it then so that it didn’t take the building with it. However, every living thing deserved a little bit of adventure. So she told it as long as it remained in its pot, it could go wherever it wished.

Watering all of them took more time than anyone else would have devoted, but she so loved the smell of green things growing. She lived in the thick of what used to be New York where metal and concrete had still managed to beat back nature. It was good to have the smell of earth around her while she rested.

Wren had thought that sleep would have come easily. She had been pushing herself lately with work and producing more exotic emotions. The void of nothingness should have been easily attainable.

But it wasn’t.

Every time she started to fall asleep, something would hold her back from that dreaming place. She didn’t know if it was E annoying her or just that she had too much on her mind.

The strange man, Burke, she reminded herself, haunted her thoughts. He had so easily dealt in pain and acted as though it hadn’t bothered him. He had scared Rupert with just his name.

Who was this man that hadn’t let his eyes drift from her form the entire night? She didn’t know how to feel about that. If he was really not an agent of M.O.M then there was someone else telling him to meet her.

And offering a job? What in the world had that been? She had a job. It wasn’t a particularly easy job or one that was rewarding, but it paid the bills and let her do magic without consequences. Why would she let go of everything she knew for something he didn’t even explain?

The other tantalizing question was who offered the job. Definitely not Burke. He didn’t seem like the kind of man that tracked people down to work for him. He wasn’t a rich philanthropist who was gathering people to change the world.

She shuddered when she remembered how easily he had threatened death. No, not death. Death over and over again in the dreaming world until madness traveled from dream to reality.

He had been cold when he said those words. His eyes had been dead and his hands strong. He wasn’t the kind of man who she needed to be around or working for.

She sighed and rolled over on her mattress. It was on the floor since she didn’t have enough money for a bed frame, but that was perfectly fine with her. She had covered an entire corner of her apartment with old pillows and bunched up blankets.

When she was feeling sorry for herself, she pretended that she was a lady in a harem full of women. This was her corner of