A Pack of Misfits

Chapter Four - When the Moon hits your eyes it's a-Worry

As I sat myself down on the porch, I turned my face up to the sky. At this moment, the air was fresh and cold, but carried with it a promise of summer and warmth to come. I closed my eyes and breathed for a moment, allowing crisp forest air to fill my lungs and rinse my olfactory senses with the delicious flavours of trees and flowers and forests, stretching out for miles for all I cared. When my senses cleared, I opened my eyes and looked up towards the bright blue morning sky, streaked with thin white clouds and rays of dawn.

Having eased my mind slightly, I decided that I could make an attempt at my now ice-cold pancakes. Well, that was no problem for me. I held a hand over the plate – and close to the pancakes – which rested in my lap, and closed my eyes, summoning heat into my palm. I held my hand there for a minute, reheating my food to feel as warm as if they had barely left the pan. With that done, I dug in, rolling one up into a burrito and taking a bite.

I couldn't hold back the moan that rumbled through my throat at the sweet, fluffy taste in my mouth. Delicious as always, Sunny, delicious as always.

Without hesitation, I took a second bite, then another, then another. Each mouthful barely made it down my throat before I was chewing on another. Before I even realised it, the first piece had been consumed entirely, leaving me with the second. I paused for a moment, taking a deep breath.

Then it hit me – a wondrous smell of vanilla drifted through the air and immediately overwhelmed my senses. I absolutely adored the scent of vanilla, there was just something about it that made my mouth water immediately. I looked down at the remaining pancake in confusion. Where these vanilla? Like, specifically flavoured to be vanilla pancakes? Sunny had never made pancakes like this before, sure she had made chocolate and strawberry and banana, but never vanilla. No one else in the house seemed to think that it would taste good, so she never made it for me. I leaned in and sniffed the solitary pancake. It was hard to make out its smell past the vanilla that made me swallow in eager enjoyment.

No. I sat up in surprise. No. These pancakes were normal. Perfectly normal.

So then where in the hell was that delectable scent coming from? The kitchen again? Was she cooking something else? No way, I was sure that I had only seen the remaining pancake batter as cooking prep on the counter inside. I breathed in again, but it was impossible to pinpoint where the smell came from, because it seemed to fill all my senses, my entire mind. My hearing felt like it was dulling out, like my ears were stuffed with cotton or water, my vision felt like it was swimming, my mouth was watering uncontrollably, and my sense of smell was filled with nothing but the sweetness of the alluring vanilla scent. I knew only one thing, and that was that I wanted to find the source. It was an urge that gnawed at my bones, one I wanted to follow with no conscious thought.

"Why are you being weird over there Loki?" Artemis' voice shocked me back to the present.

"I'm not being weird, I'm eating breakfast." I gestured to my pancake. "By the way, is Sunny cooking something else in there? I smell so much vanilla outside."

"What are you talking about? I don't smell anything."

And like a string had snapped, I realised that the smell was gone. Then I realised that I was no longer sitting on the porch with my plate in my lap, but halfway towards the treeline from where the house stood.

A frown crossed my face, and I looked down at the floor, then into the trees, before giving up on my search for...something? I turned back to Artemis, who was leaning against the guard-rail that stretched across part of the porch.

"Never...Never-mind." My voice came out cracked, so I coughed to clear it. My mind cleared entirely, and, confused, I walked back over to where Artemis was standing.