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I raised my eyebrows at her. "Physically?"
"I can't grow older while I'm here. I'm stuck being a child forever." Sadness filled her voice, along with a hint of bitterness.
“How old are you really?” I asked, horrified by the thought.
“Forty-two. I think. Although it's rude to ask someone their age, you know." She grinned at me to show she was kidding. "Last time I saw you was when you were a baby. Celeste brought you here briefly to meet everyone before taking you back to Earth. Now, look at you, all grown up. And with red hair too! I like it."
I shook my head, trying to wrap my brain around what she was telling me. Larkin looked like a gawky kid about to become a teenager, and yet she was old enough to be my mom. This could have been me, I thought. Stuck as a child forever.
"I'm glad you're back," she continued. "Though I've always been jealous you got to grow up on Earth. You're lucky Celeste could hide you there so you wouldn't share my fate. Trust me, it's miserable being trapped in a kid's body with an adult mind."
"Why couldn't she hide you too?"
"Celeste did offer to try to find me a human home, but I wanted to stay here with her. She was the only family I had left. Besides, the Sun Witches already knew what I looked like and had felt me use magic. If I'd gone back to Earth, they would have found me eventually and I would have put another family in danger."
I was starting to understand why Celeste had made the difficult choice to hide me with my father. I couldn't imagine being in Larkin's shoes, stuck as a gawky twelve-year-old for decades, unable to ever truly become an adult. No thank you. Suddenly my life with the Cancer pack didn't seem so bad anymore. At least it had turned me into the adult I was today, and made me stronger emotionally and physically. But Larkin? She would never get that sort of growth. My heart ached for her and all she had missed in life.
She took my arm again, her touch light on my skin. "Come on, let me show you around Crescent Cove. It's the main village here in Lunatera." We headed back toward the stalls and she gestured at them. “We make everything ourselves here. We have to be completely self-sustaining, since going to Earth is so difficult and dangerous for us. We have fields beyond the hills with farms, and of course, the ocean also provides for us. We don't have money, so we barter and trade instead, or just share whatever we can. We all try to look out for each other.”
I studied the market with a frown. "If there's no time here, how do you grow food? Or catch fish? Wouldn't they need to be born and grow and all that?"
Larkin shrugged. "Selene provides for us. We don't question it."
“You don't need anything from Earth?” I asked.
"We do sometimes. There will always be things we can't get here, so we take turns volunteering to go to Earth for supply runs. I volunteer as often as I can. We have a few stores we've partnered with where we can sell our handmade goods for money to buy what we need.” She gave me a wry smile. “I'm always surprised what humans will pay for a crescent-shaped pendant or a box with the moon and stars painted on it We don't even put any magic in them! I personally make bath bombs that sell like da bomb." She laughed at her own joke. "Hey, do people still say that?"
"Um, no." I couldn't help but smile at her. "What do you use the money for?"
"Me? I buy books. I would go crazy without them. We don't have TV here, so as you can imagine it gets pretty boring at times. I read every genre, but romance novels are my favorite. I need my daily fix of trashy romance, or I'll die.” She paused as if realizing she had said too much. “Do you like to read?”
“Sure, but I'm mostly into photography. Most of the books I read are to help me be better at it.” I glanced around at the market with a pang, remembering the camera Kaden got me. I sighed and said, "I wish I had my camera now so I could take photos of this town. I bet I would get some really interesting shots in the half-light."
Larkin perked up. "I'd love to see some of your photos from Earth. Do you have any with you?"
"No, I didn't exactly get to pack a suitcase before being dragged here against my will."
"Oh, right."
I sighed as we headed toward an area with knitted sweaters and scarves. "So if time stays still here, do you always go to the same day on Earth? Celeste said she could send me back to the moment I left."
"No, we go to the current day on Earth, even though time is frozen here in this realm. It's sort of like looking through a window at the world outside. You can see storms gather and rain begin to fall, and if you go outside you'll get wet, but while inside you're sheltered from it. The same is true here of time. At least that's how it was explained to me. But sometimes, with strong magic and a lot of prayers to Selene, we can perform miracles. Like sending you back to the moment you arrived here."
"It's hard to believe." I gestured around at the different stalls. "All of this."
"I bet. I'm happy to answer all your questions though, so fire away."
I sucked in a breath, trying to figure out what to ask first because my brain was just screaming WTF? over and over. I settled on a pretty basic question. "I don't see many men here. Why is that?"
"Ah, so you've figured out the other reason we need romance novels here," she said with a grin. "We do have some male Moon Witches, but they're rare and usually not as powerful as the women. Many of the men here are simply humans who fell in love with a Moon Witch and decided to come here. My dad was human too."
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