Broke Bones: A Fun, Fast-Paced Urban Fantasy: Blood and Magic Book Three (Blood and Magic Series 3) by Lauretta Hignett

Author:Lauretta Hignett [Hignett, Lauretta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

I got Cindy out from under my bed. She was badly shaken. Isobel’s little tantrum triggered her; she’d been abused by her siblings, too. It took me a long time to calm her down, and she was still a little twitchy.

Eventually, I managed to talk her into helping me finish sorting all the books, but I noticed her eyes drifting towards the door every now and then. I had no alcohol in the house, and she knew it. Hopefully, I could get her to go to sleep, and a good night’s rest would take the edge off.

We worked in near silence for a while. A stack of smaller fae books at the bottom of one of the boxes occupied her attention for a while. “Look at this one,” she said, holding up a fabric-bound book, no smaller than a deck of cards. “I recognize this.”

“What is it?”

“It’s like…” She wrinkled her nose. “Like a first-aid book for fae. The gothflowers have something similar. It’s smaller, though. They’re meant to be small so the healers can carry them for easy reference.”

My eyes lit up. “Will it have fae birth practices in there?” I could get some information for Denise.

“Probably,” she said, flicking through it. “It’s in high fae, so it will probably only cover that species, though.”

“Are all the species different, then?” I asked, plucking the book out of her hand.

“The mechanics are the same. I’ve never really been interested in the subject,” she said, looking disgusted. “But I know that gothflowers procreate in the same way as most humanoid creatures. The sex,” she said in a low tone. “Apart from that, the required rites and rituals change the bigger the fae gets,” she explained. “Longer gestation periods, more painful births. The high fae like to think of it as bigger the magical container, the more hoops they have to jump through to birth the child safely.”

“Is it easy for gothflowers to procreate?”

“I guess,” she said sulkily. “We blink into existence straight after copulation.”

“Really? How come there’s not more gothflowers, then? I’d imagine your population would explode if it were that easy to breed.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. “Oh, right. The aphrodisiac thing. You were probably all hunted to extinction.”

“Nah.” She shrugged. “Most of us stay in Faerie, and no one hunts us there. Our dust doesn’t work on other fae.”

I frowned. “How come there aren’t a billion gothflowers chewing through all the resources in Faerie, then, if it’s so easy to breed?”

“Because none of us are particularly enthusiastic about sex,” she said. “It’s weird, and kinda gross. Whenever a baby gothflower pops into existence, you can hear the collective tribe go ewwwww.”

I laughed, and flicked through the pages of the tiny handbook. “If this book gives me information on high fae pregnancy, would that help Denise? She’s a half-half standard pixie.”

“I dunno.” She hitched her shoulders carelessly. “It might. Her species are far closer to high fae, so the rites and rituals might be similar.

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