Free Web NovelChapter 247: Today Was A Lot
By the time Yuche carried me back through the front door, Meilan was already starting to scream.
I gave it three seconds of attention and to appreciate the fact that Lingyun was just that good.
Well... that, and the fact that she was loud and really hard to drown out.
Then I saw the blood smeared across my entryway floor, the scorch marks crawling up the wall, and the long crack splitting across the ceiling above the foyer like the house itself had decided to develop stress lines. All my attention immediately changed from Jiang Meilan’s final contribution to the world and toward the much more personal offense in front of me.
"Absolutely not," I grumbled, shaking my head. "We are going to go back outside before coming in a second time. In that time, I expect this all to be a nightmare and to have woken up."
Yuche stopped walking as he looked down at me with a concerned look on his face.
I was pretty sure that, for one terrifying second, every man within hearing distance seemed to think I was talking about Meilan.
Yuche’s arms tightened around me, Zhenlan’s gaze sharpened, Chenghai turned from the broken doorframe, and Commander Li looked as though he was preparing himself for another unreasonable command from the injured woman currently being carried like a dramatic sack of rice.
Even the baby vine, which had been slithering happily along the ceiling near the open doorway, froze with something that looked disturbingly like a hand wrapped in one of its smaller tendrils.
I stared at the cracked ceiling.
"The house," I clarified. "I’m not happy about the house."
No one relaxed, which was honestly the right choice in this situation.
Besides, it was fun when you could keep a bunch of guys on their toes like that.
Outside, Meilan screamed again, and the sound rose high enough that the baby vine almost dropped the hand it was licking like a lollypop.
Lingyun laughed once, bright and delighted, and then the scream cut off in the middle before starting again in a lower, uglier pitch.
I did not turn my head. I had already given Jiang Meilan more attention across two lifetimes than she deserved, and at this point, her suffering was Lingyun’s problem. My problem was the blood, the soot, the broken glass, the splintered door, the cracked ceiling, the scorched walls, and the fact that my house looked like someone had dragged an apocalypse through it by the throat.
Hell... I knew for a fact that a small horde of zombies in the house didn’t do this much damage.
No.. this was all the guys measuring each other’s dicks for the fun of it. At the expense of my precious, precious house.
Yuche started walking again, slower this time, as if he had realized that moving too quickly might cause me to start issuing instructions before anyone was emotionally prepared to hear them.
It was really considerate of him. I mean... it wouldn’t be enough to save any of them, but it was considerate.
"Put me down," I said, pointing to the couch.
"No."
I turned my head enough to look at his jaw. "I’m sorry. What part of that sounded like a suggestion? I’ll change my tone next time."
"Change your tone all you want... I still refuse."
I stared at him for a moment, then looked toward Zhenlan. "Is he allowed to do that?"
Zhenlan glanced at Yuche, then at my leg, then at the blood-smeared floor beneath us. His expression remained calm in the way that made me want to throw something at him on principle. "At the moment, yes."
"Traitor," I hissed.
Zhenlan nodded his head sagely. "I will live with the shame," he assured me.
"You sound like you already packed it into a labeled folder."
His mouth twitched. "Several."
Chenghai made a low sound that might have been amusement, but when I looked at him, his attention had already moved back to the house.
He was not watching Meilan, the soldiers, or even Lingyun’s extremely questionable entertainment outside. He was studying the damage with the kind of focus that made my irritation hesitate.
His gaze moved from the shattered front door to the cracked frame, then up to the ceiling, then along the wall where the drywall had split near the corner.
"This entrance will not hold," he said. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Nothing outside did this," I pointed out to him. "It didn’t have to keep anything out. It couldn’t do shit against what you did to it."
"No," Chenghai replied, blunt as a brick through a window. "That is different. This entrance won’t be enough to keep anything out. The front doorframe is holding on by only wishes and prayers"
I opened my mouth, closed it again, and decided I hated him a little bit for being right.
The worst part was that he did not sound smug. If he had sounded smug, I could have dismissed him as annoying and moved on with my life.
Instead, he sounded practical, which was much harder to argue with because practicality had a nasty habit of standing there with evidence.
Commander Li stepped inside after us, his boots stopping just before the blood smear crossed the threshold.
He looked around the foyer and wisely kept his mouth shut.
The baby vine lowered from the ceiling with the hand still wrapped in one tendril like it wanted to drop on the commander and freak him out. I pointed at it and narrowed my eyes "Outside," I hissed and the vine paused in mid-motion.
"Do not look at me like that. I know exactly what you are doing, and the answer is no. We are not bringing snacks into the house." I paused as I finally heard the words coming out of my mouth. "Wait... snacks are allowed... as long as they aren’t still bleeding."
The vine drooped in a way that had absolutely no right to look disappointed, then slowly dragged the hand back toward the doorway.
Tan Wei made a strangled sound behind him that I decided to ignore.
If the military wanted to judge my parenting, they could start by explaining why their safe places kept falling apart while my murder plant at least listened to simple instructions.
Another scream came from outside even as Sun Ming closed the door behind my baby.
Yeah... today was... a lot.
