Read Online The Girl With Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rossetti - Free Book Online Page A

particularly,” Sangris said. He was still licking his paw. Having clean paws was evidently the most important thing in his private universe right now.
    My smirk slipped away then.
    Not because of what he’d said. Not because of anything logical. No, I stopped talking and scrunched up my nose because it had just occurred to me how easy it would be for him to turn human right now.
    And the thought was more vivid than I would have liked. I had a mental image of Sangris grinning up at me through a screen of wavy black hair, eyes slanted and yellow the way they had been in my bedroom, and the way they were
now
. He was a cat. It didn’t make any sense, except . . . well, except for the fact that, at a moment’s notice, he could become something else, and—oh, gross. I thought the word loudly enough to drown out everything else. Gross. Maybe I made a noise, because he glanced up at me, and that made it worse. His eyes weren’t catlike at all, at least not as far as their expression went. They were intelligent and far too male. That look was almost enough to make me go back to the oasis and shut myself in my cage, never fly again, and allow the cords of heat to bind me down to the ground—just because Sangris happened to have a knack of making me uncomfortable. I glared until he looked down again.
    Then I had a cheering thought. He couldn’t have been talking about
me
; it must be someone else. I rolled over onto my elbows, preparing to be vindicated. I was up to my chin in the heather. “Who were you with at the time?” I said.
    His eyes flashed up at me from his self-appointed task. “What?”
    “I know it wasn’t about me,” I said. I tried not to sound hopeful. “What do you know about how soft, or how hard, or even how spiky I might be? I’m always swathed in clothes right down to my wrists and ankles. So who was that phrase really about?”
    A pause.
    “Um,” he said at last. “A girl I knew. Before.”
    There. My shoulders relaxed. I’d been right.
    “How long ago?”
    “Months?” He said it as if it was a question.
    I propped up my chin on my hands. He wasn’t telling the story very well, I thought. “What was she like?”
    “Beautiful, of course. She had fur like shining duckweed and big round eyes that almost popped out whenever anyone called her name.” (
There’s no accounting for taste,
I thought, but I was careful to keep my expression blank for fear of offending him. Duckweed, indeed.) “Her name was Loll,” he continued.
    “Loll?” I couldn’t help but sound a bit disdainful now.
    “Because of the way her tongue lolled out. She was a dog, you see. Sadly, she’d been spayed, but we decided that it was for the best . . .” He broke off, struggling.
    Startled, I said, “I—I’m sorry.”
    “You idiot,” he gasped out. He fell onto his side laughing. “It was you! I thought about orchid’s stems and swan’s necks and all sorts of other nonsense while you were cuddling me in your room, remember, because you thought I was a cat. You weren’t swaddled in clothes
then
. You weren’t even paying attention—you were reading
Of Human Bondage
. A tattered copy with a boring brown cover and so many pages that it was thicker than most religious texts. But you were absorbed in it for hours and hours, as though it was the most interesting thing in the world. I’d just woken up, and I had to wait there, held against your—ah—your nightshirt, until you finished the book and went to sleep, before I could try to sneak away.”
    I hid behind my hair. So he’d been conscious after all. I thanked my luck that he wasn’t in human form right now. It was disconcerting enough to have a cat speak to me in this way. “But you didn’t!” I said to the grass. “You didn’t try to leave until hours later. I went to sleep at midnight, and you woke me up around four.”
    “I fell back to sleep when you did,” he said, not laughing anymore. His gaze slid away from me. “You were—”