By the Orchid and the Owl (THE ESHOLIAN INSTITUTE #1) by Mariah Montoya EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Mariah Montoya
- Language: English
- Genre: Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The clock on my nightstand had ticked close to midnight when I finally
abandoned my sheets and hefted open my rickety window pane.
There weren’t many times I’d snuck out—especially on nights where I
damn well knew I needed as much sleep as I could get—but these rarities
always involved my best friend, Quinn. Whenever she left a little painted
rock on my windowsill, it meant meet me at the House ASAP.
The green-painted stone that squatted outside my window now had
appeared there nearly an hour ago, but Fabian’s and Don’s creaking
footsteps outside my door had only just faded into their own room.
My fathers wouldn’t punish me for sneaking out, not like Quinn’s strict,
Mind Manipulating mother would. But I still had no desire to watch their
faces sink into disappointment if they caught me dropping into our flower
garden the night before my world changed forever.
Like I was doing now.
Lifting myself from my crouch, I brushed soil from my bare knees and
eased my window shut behind me before creeping through the begonias and
onto the street gilded with flakes of moonlight.
My nightgown swished around my legs as I hurried down the street, but
it wasn’t the only sound. Frogs yelped to each other beneath waterlogged
storefront porches. Bats swooped and clicked. A constant torrent of crickets
reverberated off the canopies rising on either side of Alderwick’s line of
houses, and distant thunder nearly always moaned from some corner of the
island.
No lights were on, though, and I was confident nobody would see me as
I stuck to the shadows, taking a sharp corner right after I passed the town
square to sneak behind the apothecary and to a certain tree a few steps into
the jungle.
I could smell Quinn’s smoke before I could even make out her
silhouette, and I grinned despite myself as I climbed the rungs we’d nailed
into the trunk when we were ten. The House, as we called it, was nothing
more than some floorboards and a twining bamboo wall cradled within our
favorite tree, and there were always a few too many scarabs scuttling along
the bark. But we were still fond of the hideout even after all these years.
“What, no Lander?” I asked, plopping down beside her and curling my
arms around my knees.
Besides Quinn and me, Lander Spade was the only other eighteen-yearold in the village of Alderwick. The three of us had been fast friends since
the day we could play pentaball in the streets, but Quinn and Lander had
been… well, sucking each other’s faces off, to put it bluntly, for the last two
years.
Quinn angled her face toward me, her curtain of ruby-red hair parting
around her faint smile. As always when she snuck out, one of her mother’s
hand-rolled cigarettes (stolen, of course) dangled between her fingers, and
she exhaled smoke in a perfect oval.
She’d asked me if I’d wanted to try
enough times for her to know I’d pass, so she didn’t hold the cigarette out to
me as she said, “Nah. He’s sleeping like a big, dumb baby anyway. I knew
you’d be the only one still awake.”
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