I tense the muscles in my right foot and half-hop, half-skitter forward. Quick pause, then repeat. After a few steps I get the rhythm and the speed, and manage to climb the ramp with only a little bit of help from my wings, which too are clipped. This is an extra measure, because I am attached to a kid – they don’t want to traumatise her by having to use the disintegrating button. I have a few words to say about that, but my programming blocks them.
The things are finally quiet, and I glide down the corridors to the Egyptian room. I feel a bit nervous, so at one point I stop minding the cabinets and the walls and simply go through them. The benefits of being a ghost!
From my vantage point I look for any moving shadows, but they are always twigs or bushes, not even a stray cat. When I hear a rustling, I turn one-hundred-eighty degrees, but it’s just a chocolate wrapper carried around by the ecstatic wind, which seems to enjoy the empty streets. I wait and keep looking. They must be somewhere.
Their skin was a terrible orange colour. Still. If they could, they would peel it off and dump into the nearest trash bin.
Tamarak took the last vial off the distillation set and held the result to the light. Apart from a few tiniest sediment granules, it was perfect. Their alchemy wasn’t so much different to his chef’s duties after all. He poured the deflavoured, re-constituted, magicalised blood into the cupcake cream, stirred thoroughly and scooped a portion to decorate the bases.