Another Quickie…

Our baby boy had a sleep study on Monday to see if we could take him off of his apnea monitor. Unfortunately neither the boyo nor I slept very well – he didn’t like the sensors stuck on his face, and the hospital bed they had for parents to sleep on was all kinds of wonky. I was so tired yesterday I had to ‘leave’ work early and shut down my computer around 8pm, and then I nodded of while giving my son his last bottle before bed time!

Even though it’s been well over a day and a half since then, I am still exhausted.

So this weeks WIPpet is another quick one – and I’m only going to be able to share from that unnamed project the muses are so fond of since I haven’t had time to work on the Descendants. Here are 24 lines from whatever chapter this will eventually end up in (3+18=21-2=19 plus 5 because it’s 2015). It’s still a very rough draft, but I tried to catch as many typos as I could.

“Who are you?” The doctor demanded. His voice rang with authority, but underneath it was just a faint tremor of fear.

“Let her go.”

Norah froze. No, it couldn’t be. She clung to the side of the gurney to steady herself as her heart pounded against her chest. “Gareth?”

“I don’t know who you think you are, storming in here like this. She is a patient who is undergoing treatment. Your interference-”

“You know as well as I do that you weren’t planning on treating her.” He ignored her, his attention focused entirely on her so called doctor. “I heard the nurse before you snapped her neck. You had that abomination turned up too high.”

“I don’t know-”

“I can smell the stink of the underworld on you. Who sent you? Karel? Finn?”

The doctor laughed. “You think one of those idiots was involved in this? We were here long before they were even glimmers in their mother’s eyes.” There was a wet pop as he smacked his lips together. “If you are here, then the rumors must be true – she really is the chosen one.”

“Her? She hardly has a magic bone in her body.” Her savior laughed. “Her son however…”

The doctor snarled and ran at Gareth. Before he could complete his attack though, he was launched through the air at the wall across the room. He crashed into the heavy cement bricks with a sick crunch, and slowly slid to the floor leaving a streak of blood and other bodily fluids behind him.

His opponent disposed of, the man in the doorway crossed the short distance to Norah’s bed. She blinked up at him, but her vision kept swimming in and out of focus. “Gareth?”

“Sshh.” His rough fingers quickly undid the straps binding her wrists and ankles.

It looked like him, but… “You’re dead. They found your body…”

“They found a corpse and assumed it was mine.”

“You let me think you were dead.”

“I had no choice in the matter.”

“Really? You, the all powerful Wizard King, couldn’t drop me a note to let you know you were alive?”

He raised his eyebrows at her as he helped her sit up. “Someone just tried to kill you and instead you’re angry at me.”

“Damn right I am! We thought we had lost you! Marcus cried for weeks! He would only eat if I forced him.” She clutched at the blanket he wrapped around her trembling shoulders. When had the room gotten so cold?

“We will discuss this later. First, let’s get you out of here.” And then he kissed her.

It was chaste and simple. Just him pressing his lips against hers.

Norah wanted to smack him. How dare he think he could just hop back into her bed after all the grief he had put her through! But at the same time she wanted to pull him closer, to cling to him, to feel him breath and hear his heart beat against her ear. She wanted to reassure herself that he was real, and not a dream or a delusion like the doctors told her he was.

And then his lips began to move against hers as he whispered an incantation.

Her eyes snapped open and she growled at him. How dare he cast a spell on her? But before she could say anything, or fight back, the world began to dim around her. Her exhausted body felt heavy, far too heavy, and she slumped to one side. Gareth caught her before she fell back on to the gurney and scooped her up. Then, once she was secure in his arms, with her head resting on his shoulder, he carried her out of the room.

To see more WIPpet Wednesday posts, go here.

21 thoughts on “Another Quickie…”

  1. ReGi McClain says:
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    Ooooh, poor Norah. I hope you give her the opportunity to smack Gareth at least once. Or, you know, in some way make him regret being so casual about all this. Especially given her poor child getting so upset. 😦 He can kiss her and make her feel all lovely and wonderful again, of course, but he ought to get some kind of comeuppance. 😀

    This is a great scene. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  3. kathils says:
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    “Really? You, the all powerful Wizard King, couldn’t drop me a note to let you know you were alive?” Nothing like a bit of good snark to make me fall in love with a character. 😀 I’m liking this.

    Liked by 1 person

    • ceeleeolson says:
      Reply

      Thank you!

      There’s not much to the story right now since it’s being adapted from a fanfic I was working on. But the basics are that Gareth was trying to find his old mentor and ended up on our planet, where it turns out that he’s the main character of a popular novel series. He eventually meets Norah, and her son Marcus, and ends up falling in love with Norah and becoming a father figure to her son. Then bad stuff happened and he had to go back home.

      The snippets I’m sharing are from what will be the second book in the series. Even though the first one hasn’t been finished yet, my muse demanded that I write these scenes down. In them, Norah has been institutionalized and Marcus has summoned Gareth to break her out of the hospital.

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  6. shanjeniah says:
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    Gareth is a rather entitled type, isn’t he? I’d be furious to be sedated and manhandled without a how-do-you-do or an explanation…

    I hope the sleep study goes well, and your little guy and his mama get some high-quality rest!

    Liked by 1 person

    • ceeleeolson says:
      Reply

      Being a King will do that to you!

      All things considered, I think the sleep study went well. Now we need to take his apnea monitor in so they can pull the data from that. If everything is kosher then maybe we can go wireless. I’m excited but terrified at the same time! That monitor is the only way we get any sleep at night – without it we’d probably be checking on him every five minutes!

      Liked by 1 person

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