Read Banshee Worm King: Book Five of the Oz Chronicles for Free Online Page B

and pulled me in close so no
one would overhear what he was about to say.   “Talk to her.”
    I attempted to pull away, but his grip was too tight.   “I’m not very good at that kind of
thing.   You do it.”
    “People don’t look to me for things like that.”
    “What makes you think they look to me for that sort of
thing?”
    He squeezed tighter.   “Damn it, Oz.   You’re the
leader.   Get it?   We follow you.   We count on you.   April needs you. Understand?”   With that, he released me.
    I stepped back and shifted my gaze from him to Gordy to
April.   I ran a thousand reasons through
my head why I shouldn’t talk to April, but I couldn’t shake the one reason why
I should.   It was the right thing to do.
    When she turned her back and faced a wood-slotted window at
the opposite end of the room, I gave in and approached her.   I could tell by her body language that she
could hear me coming.   Without turning,
she said, “I don’t belong here.”
    “None of us do,” I said, staring at the back of her head.
    “No, not here in this world. Here, with you and the
others.   You would be better off without
me.”
    “What happened to Gordy wasn’t your fault.”
    “Yes it was.”
    “No it wasn’t.   It
was part of the story.   That’s the way
things work here.   The best I can figure,
we don’t have any control over what happens.”
    She gave my point some thought.   “That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “No it doesn’t, but that’s the way it is.   We are characters in a story.   That’s it.”
    “Characters?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you saying I’m not real?”
    “No, you are real.”   I stopped to gather my thoughts, to try to explain it to her in a way
she’d understand.   “We are all real...
most of us are, anyway.   We came from
outside the story.   The Storytellers put
us here.   They created this world we’re
trapped in.   They’ve written and drawn
every move we’ve made.”
    She turned to me.   “Every move?”
    “Exactly.”
    She put her hands on my face.
    “What are you doing?”
    Without another word she leaned in and kissed me. A deep,
lingering kiss on the lips.   I struggled
at first, but the longer it lasted the less I objected.   Eventually she slowly pulled back.
    “Did I do that or was that written by the Storytellers?”
    I stared at her in shock for several seconds before giving
her a one-word answer.   “Storytellers.”
    “You sure about that?”
    I nodded.
    “Then me trying to eat Gordy, that was the Storytellers,
too?”
    “Yes.”
    She let go of my face.   “Wow.   That makes me feel...”   She wiped a tear away from her face.   “That’s such a relief. It’s not my fault?”
    “No, it’s not.”
    She hugged me and then quickly released me.
    I turned to the stares of everyone else in the room.
“What?”
    Everyone but Lou looked away quickly. She held me in a
disapproving stare for a second or two before continuing her efforts to help
Gordy.
    Wes sauntered over shaking his head and met me in the
center of the room.   “I said talk to her,
boy.   Didn’t say nothing about kissing
her.”
    “She kissed me,” I said in protest.
    “Maybe,” he said, “but you didn’t put up much of a fight.”
    I attempted to explain myself without knowing what to
say.   Every time I got to the end of a
sentence I couldn’t think of the final word.   After the third or fourth attempt, I gave up and walked away.

 
    Four

 
 
 
    “The boy will be down for a while,” Bostic said sitting
down next to me on a homemade bar stool in the kitchen of the treehouse.   The kitchen was an open space with an island
in the middle that had a stove top and sink.   It looked modern, but the stove was wood burning, and the faucet was a
small pump that brought in water from a tank and filtration system on the roof
of the house.   “It’ll be touch and go for
the next twelve hours or so.   Me and the
girl treated as much of the