WAIT FOR LOVE (Lovemark #4)

1. Olivander-1

1

Olivander

Where: High Cliff Palace When: Outer Realms Year 328I think the next time a friend asked for a favor from me, I was just going to punch him.

In the throat.

Because this was utter madness.

“Let me rephrase this in a language you understand,” the irate woman in front of me said, clasping her hands together flat and then pressing the sides against her mouth to accentuate the gravity of her anger, even as she kept her words calm. “I want to go home.” Then she pointed to the ground in front of her forcefully. “Right now.”

“Er…” I squinted in confusion. “I’ve actually understood you every time you’ve said that.”

Strangely, there’d never been a language barrier between us. A fact I found to be vastly interesting but she didn’t seem to care about in the least.

Balling her hands into fists and shaking them even more violently, she cried, “Then why am I still here!?”

Beginning to think maybe I, myself, needed to speak in a language she understood, I closed my eyes and sighed before pinching the bridge of my nose as a headache began. No matter how many times I told this woman—this Doria Baquet—that I couldn’t get her home, she just echoed her demand louder, as if she believed her volume alone could somehow alter my abilities.

And it really couldn’t.

Doria had literally landed at my feet from another world two days ago, and we had repeated this very same conversation about twenty times now. It didn’t seem to change much either.

Obviously, she didn’t believe me whenever I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to get you home. I didn’t bring you here; I’m not holding you here. I’m just trying to help you understand what transpired to get you here.”

And what had happened was that she’d been sucked here from an alternate dimension I hadn’t even known existed until the day before she had arrived. And if I’d realized exactly what I’d be getting myself into when Indigo had asked me to help assimilate the earthlings who’d be arriving to take his place when he left, I would’ve told him to f**k off.

I could only thank my lucky stars that just one of them had come through in the end—not the three people I’d been expecting. Because this singular female was a handful all on her own.

“Okay, then, fine,” she ground out, shooting me a death glare. “Help me understand exactly where I am. Maybe we can work backward from there.”

Lord have mercy, I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take.

“I’m not sure how else to explain our location to you beyond showing you a map of the Outer Realms again. But fine. You’re here, in Elaina.” I pointed to the little star on the map, signaling the capital of my kingdom. The cartographic illustration sat on the table between us in my private bedchamber in the High Cliff castle because I hadn’t known where else to bring her.

As a complete stranger to my land, Doria could be in danger anywhere she went, so I figured it would be best to keep her as close as possible until I figured out more suitable boarding arrangements.

If only I’d known how much torture constantly being in her repetitive presence would be.

“And you came through the portal, arriving here, in the village of Belle,” I added, telling myself—for about the millionth time—to give her the benefit of the doubt.

If I’d been minding my own business in my own land, only to be unexpectedly yanked from everything I knew and then tossed into a world I’d never heard of before, all against my will, I’d probably possess a much more irritable temperament than she.

Comparatively speaking, Doria was taking this quite well. I just needed more patience. That was all. I could handle this.

“Except we couldn’t stay in Belle,” I went on.

If I had remained absent from the palace for too long, it would’ve drawn unnecessary questions, which could’ve ultimately exposed secrets that would place not only Doria but also myself and my closest loved ones in mortal danger.

“So I brought you home with me,” I finished. “Which is where we are now.”

“Yes, I know all that. Duh.” Doria sent me an exasperated scowl. “But where is your entire Outer Realms planet in comparison to my homeworld?”

“I…” Okay, that one I had no idea how to answer. So I just shrugged. “How the hell should I know? Jesus. How do you explain where your Earth is compared to anything else?”

I lifted my brow reproachfully, thinking that a very clever question indeed.

But Doria lifted her eyebrows right back and snapped, “Easy.”

Because, of course, she did.

She liked to make me look like an incompetent fool with all her earthly knowledge. She had an answer to everything.

And for a scholar like me, it was growing quite vexing.

On the other hand, I was learning volumes by just being around her. So I pushed my bruised ego to the side and shifted forward to hear what she had to say as she grabbed my quill and dunked the writing end into my inkpot, way too liberally for my peace of mind. Then she leaned to the side of the chair she sat in and snagged a crumpled piece of parchment off the floor where I’d had it lying nearby.

“Here, I’ll even draw you a picture,” she told me as if she were addressing a child while she unwadded the ball and ironed it flat with her hand.

Worried she was going to read the extremely private missive I’d written on the sheet—before I had promptly discarded the idiotic note—I lurched forward to stop her. “Wait. Don’t—”

But she didn’t even give the hastily jotted words a second glance. She merely flipped the parchment over and slopped ink across the blank backside, where she started scribbling.

“This is Earth, okay?” She drew a circle or at least tried to. Half of the ink didn’t appear on the parchment while the other half came out in a thick, horrifying glob. But I got the gist of what she was attempting, even as she explained, “It’s a planet, spherical and round, shaped like a ball.”

Forgetting about the royal mess she was making on my tabletop with the staining splatters, I blinked curiously and leaned further over the table to watch.

“So that’s what planet means,” I murmured, shaking my head in awe.

I’d seen Indigo mention the term planet in his writings, but I’d been unable to truly envision it before. I hadn’t even thought to picture something rounded.

“Fascinating.”

“Seriously?” Doria’s jaw dropped as she gaped up at me. “You didn’t even know what a damn planet was? Is there no study of astronomy here at all?”

I ground my teeth, already hating myself for having to ask, even as I said, “And what exactly is astronomy?”

“Oh boy.” She blew out a long breath before deciding, “Fine, let’s start smaller.” Then she pointed toward the window. “What do you call that big, blindingly bright, shiny thing in the sky outside that provides light throughout the day?”

I scowled before dryly answering, “You mean, the sun?”

She honestly believed I was an imbecile, didn’t she?

“Yes!” She clapped her hands in pandering excitement. “Great!” Dipping the quill again, she scrawled more circles onto the sheet, ink going everywhere. “At least we’re on the same page there. We both have a sun in our separate worlds.”

“You know, you don’t have to dip the quill that deep into the...ink,” I said, trying not to cringe too badly as she ruined a perfectly good writing utensil.

“Sorry,” she said distractedly as her mad drawing grew increasingly more agitated. “People stopped using these things in my world, like, two hundred years ago. I’ve never actually tried writing with one before. And why the hell can’t I make a single, complete circle? Argh!”

“Because you’re trying to write up,” I explained, curious how she could be so wise in the ways of astronomy—whatever that was—yet had no clue how to use a simple quill. “You have to pull down and move from left to right on the chiseled edge in order to deliver the ink. Otherwise, it won’t work properly.”

“Oh.” She tried my suggestion, slowly dragging the tip of the quill down and then lifting it and bringing it back to the top to finish the other half of the circle. “Hey, wow. That actually worked.”

“Shocking,” I murmured in my typical, phlegmatic way. “You could also use the writing table there, if you like.”

The slanted surface helped keep the quill horizontal when writing, which also assisted with ink delivery, but Doria remained seated at the flat table that I usually ate my meals on, littering it with more dark, oily splatters as she mumbled, “No, thanks. I’m good. Anyway…” She looked up at me and pointed to what she’d drawn. “Here’s my sun, okay?”

“Okay,” I said slowly, squinting at her picture that consisted of different-shaped balls lined in a row.

“Maybe it’s the same sun we see from here, or maybe a different one,” she went on.

“Wait.” I held up a hand. “I’m already lost. Are you suggesting there could be multiple suns?”

“Could be? Dude!” She blinked at me as if I’d gone soft in the head. “Most of the stars you see in the sky at night are a different sun to some other solar system far, far away. So, yeah, there are probably about a hundred million suns out there. In our galaxy alone. Er, in my galaxy, anyway. I don’t know about yours.”

“In your what?” I murmured, feeling suddenly light in the head.

What in heaven’s name was a galaxy?

Gads, this was going to be a long day. I could already tell.

And I wasn’t wrong. From there, Doria taught me about galaxies and solar systems, planets, moons, asteroids, and comets, then linked them all together with terms like magnetism and gravitational pulls. By the time she was done, most of the day had passed and my head hurt, but I was beginning to maybe believe her stories about all the different planets and worlds out there.

“So to get back to answering your original question,” she concluded, “my Earth would be here in this solar system—the third planet from our sun—which is located on the Orion Spur spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Now…” She looked up at me. “Where the f**k are we?”

I met her quizzical gaze, then looked back down at her diagram. We could be absolutely anywhere in there. Or somewhere else entirely.

I suddenly felt very small, knowing so much more vastness existed beyond the Outer Realms than I’d ever fathomed possible.

Swallowing thickly, I offered her an apologetic wince before admitting, “I have no idea.”

Closing her eyes with a groan, she slapped a hand to her brow and shook her head in disappointment. “How did I know you were going to say that?” Dropping her fingers, she squinted at me tellingly. “And you’re supposed to be, like, the smartest guy on this planet, right?”

Feeling more like a complete moron at the moment because the information she’d been telling me was so far removed from my wheelhouse that I was beginning to question what I did know, I sighed sadly. “I wouldn’t say I’m the smartest. But I am a scholar, so I should at least know whose writings to study whenever I wish to learn about a specific topic. And this…” I shook my head, motioning to her circles. “I truly do not believe anyone in the Outer Realms has written about this before, aside from Indigo, and not even he covered the location of the two worlds this extensively.”

I really needed to get a message out to Indy’s friend, Bison, who’d also come from Earth and was currently living in Far Shore. Maybe he could help us in a way no one else could.

“Perfect,” Doria muttered, blowing out a long, exhausted breath as she wiped a bead of perspiration off her brow with the back of an ink-stained hand. “I’m doomed. I’m f*****g doomed.”