Page 42 of Burdened Bonds

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong with him?”

I wish I knew the fucking answer. But I’ve spent my life harming not healing and fuck me if I know. Something tells me imparting that piece of information to my little rabbit is not going to help our current situation.

“Yeah, he’s been hit by a spell,” I say confidently, ignoring the pathetic look the pig throws me.

“Is he … is he going to be okay?”

“Just fine,” I tell her, lifting the little man gently into my arms. “Just going to need a bit of time to work the stuff out of his system.”

“Oh Pip,” she says, resting her palm on his brow. “Is there anything we can do to help him?”

Her voice sounds less panicked now. She fucking believes me. Guess I should feel guilty or something, lying to her like that. If the pig dies, she won’t be happy. But instead, I have to suppress the corners of my mouth from pulling upwards. She believes me, my little rabbit – though I bet she’d deny it – she trusts me.

“He needs rest. Come on. Let’s get moving.”

I stride back the way I came, my little rabbit hip hopping beside me like I’m the Pied fucking Piper.

The little pig’s body is hot in my hands. He’s burning up with a fever. She uses her magic to blow cool air over him as we walk, whispering soothing words in a voice that makes my skin fucking tingle.

“How old is this pig?” I ask her, staring down into its feverish face.

“Pip?” She screws up her face thinking. “I don’t know ten, eleven, maybe twelve years old. I remember I was small when my aunt found him wandering the forest on his own.Deduced his mom had abandoned him, the runt of the litter. He was too adorable to leave, so we kept him.”

“Huh,” I say.

“What?” she says, stroking the pig’s cheek like she’d done mine earlier behind the bush, something I want her to do again. Over and over again.

“Ten’s old for a pig, right? Little man doesn’t look old.”

“No,” she says, “unlike the rest of us, Pip never seems to age, lucky rascal.”

“Huh,” I say again, looking down at the small pig in my arms.

He doesn’t look like a wild pig to me. He doesn’t look like an old pig either. The pig manages a feeble grunt as if telling me to leave well enough alone.

We walk some more, right to the edge of the forest and the foothills of the mountain, ignoring the paths and climbing the first slope as day breaks behind us, our shadows endlessly long on the ground in front of us.

“Are we nearly there?” she asks, her eyelids heavy.

“Nearly, little rabbit. Look there it is.”

She lifts her gaze and finds the shepherd’s hut nestled in the crag of the mountain, invisible from the sky and to anyone walking from any other direction than the one we’re walking.

“It’s safe?”

“I think so,” I tell her. The shepherd that used this hut is decomposing under some rocks in the stream in the valley over yonder. No one’s claimed the hut since he met his untimely end. And by end, I mean me.

Still, my little rabbit approaches the wooden building cautiously, searching with her senses for anyone nearby and even though she senses no one but us, she pushes back the door like someone might jump out and pounce on her.

The hut isn’t exactly some five-star hotel. Its one room houses a single wooden bed, its mattress stuffed with straw, a chair, and a shelf with a kettle, a cup, a plate and some dried meat in tins. I lay the little pig out on the end of the bed and my little rabbit pulls one of the threadbare blankets over his quivering body, whispering to him some more until his eyes drift shut.

The place smells of rotting wood and damp. That’s never bothered me before. But I want her touching me again and I don’t know if she will when the place smells like shit. It’s why I’m guessing girls like candles. I remember Marcus was always lighting the things whenever he had some girl round sucking his dick.

I wish I had one now. I’d light it. Ask her to touch me again, touch me a whole lot more, suck my cock.

It’s a hell of a lot warmer in here than it is outside but she adjusts the blanket under the pig’s chin anyway, then peers up at me.

“Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”