Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 62620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
But in my defense, I don’t expect anyone to be there, let alone on lookout. I’m still operating from the naïve assumption that I have one bad egg on my hands and that the chop shop stuff is a small potatoes operation that will be easy to shut down.
I’m about to find out how wrong I am about that.
I barely have time to glance through the window—or register the fact that both Gage and Norman, two of my most trusted employees, are busy loading my collection of antique bikes into a trailer parked at the front of the shop—when I hear footsteps behind me.
I start to turn, but before I make it all the way around, something comes down hard on my head. Pain explodes behind my eyes, filling the world with fireworks for a beat before the world goes dark.
Chapter Nineteen
STARLING
I wake up a little after midnight with an unsettled feeling stirring in my mid-section. I feel like I’m missing something…
Or have forgotten something…
After a beat, I remember falling asleep in Christian’s arms and sweep my hand out to the other side of the bed only to find it empty and the sheets cool to the touch.
He’s clearly been out of bed for a while…
Maybe I snore? Maybe he had a hard time sleeping with someone else in the bed and decided to head out to the couch?
Or maybe he got freaked out by how needy and clingy I’m being and decided he had to dip?
I’m about to get upset about that when I remember why I’m needy and clingy in the first place and my throat gets tight.
Kyle. He’s gone.
Maybe forever.
I might never cuddle with him on the couch or watch him zoom down the slide in the backyard or take him for a Sunday walk in the park wearing his favorite sparkly pink bow tie ever again. He might end up on someone’s dinner plate this Thanksgiving and it will be all my fault.
I got too careless, too trusting. I should have remembered that he’s a very smart animal, but he’s still an animal and a slave to his instincts. If he heard a sexy lady turkey gobbling in the field behind the house, he would have been biologically compelled to try to go to her. He has no awareness of how dangerous the wild can be for a bird who’s used to being treated like a pet.
Even when I first adopted him, Kyle was having a hard time making it on his own. The vet said his cognitive abilities could have been negatively affected by all the toxic grain, or he simply might have grown so accustomed to an easy meal that he’d forgotten how to forage. Either way, the end result was the same.
Kyle was failing to thrive. He’d dropped a lot of weight and had been on the losing end of at least one fight with a bigger, meaner turkey. He had ugly wounds on his neck and chest that I had to treat with salve for the entire first week I fostered him in the dorm.
The reason for the fighting, I later learned, was likely another male bird who was pissed about Kyle competing with him for mates, which didn’t surprise me for a second. Kyle is one horny customer. He practically pushed down the fence last spring, warbling his best mating song as he tried to get to the lady turkeys on the other side. If he encounters other turkeys while he’s out and about, he will try to score a girlfriend, and could end up getting killed for his trouble.
Basically, there’s nothing out there in the big bad world for him but death. I have to find him. I just have to. There’s not a moment to waste. There has to be something I can do to keep searching now, even if it is dark. Maybe I can troll Minnesota hunting websites and see where the locals are having luck with their turkey hunting this year.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and down to the floor, yipping in surprise as my foot brushes something soft and warm. Heart racing, I glance down to see two glowing eyes peering up at me in the dark.
“Bella?” I ask in a sleep-rough voice, earning myself a soft chirp from the creature at my feet.
My lips curving despite my Kyle-induced sadness and stress, I reach over and flip on the light, revealing a blinking little skunk. “Hey there, cutie. How did you get in here? I know I closed and locked the door.”
She snuffles something that could be an admission of super-secret skunk witchcraft powers—or allergies—and jumps up to brace her front paws on my shin.
“You want to come find Christian with me?” I collect her from the floor, adding in a whisper as I start toward the still closed and locked door—she really is a little Houdini. “He has to be here somewhere. He wouldn’t leave you behind.”