by Lucia Ashta
“Is that why the headmaster and the wizards are away at some secret gathering?” Dave asked.
None of them looked surprised about this “secret” meeting.
“Maybe,” Liana said. “We’re not entirely sure.”
“But the owl and wizards know about what’s going on with Selene,” Brogan added.
Dammit. The waves of colorful energy were becoming more subdued the more my mind tried to discern the possible implications of what they were saying.
“How could Jas”—Ky gestured toward me with his head—“have even done anything to your power? She never even knew you before today.”
“I don’t know how,” Selene said, “but there’s no doubt she has my power.”
“That’s not possible,” I started to say, when I noticed the way Selene’s attention trailed all across my body—until it zeroed in on the space between my breasts, the exact location of my pendant.
“Is the pendant yours?” I asked. “I found it and once I put it on, it won’t come off.” I rearranged Why so I could hold him with one arm and tugged on my pendant to exemplify my point. “I’ll give it back to you if it’s yours. I just hope you know how to get it off me.”
“No, the pendant isn’t mine,” Selene said. “The power contained within it is, however.”
“You’re certain?” Quinn asked.
“Absolutely. I’d recognize my power anywhere. It’s not the only magic inside that pendant, but it’s a large part of it.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again, unused to being at a loss for words. “How…?”
“How’s that possible?” Ky asked. “How could Selene’s power be inside Jas’ pendant?”
“No clue,” Dave said before Quinn draped an arm around Selene’s lower back and pulled her close.
“Her power actually didn’t leave her all at once. It was so gradual at first that I didn’t notice—though I should have.” He grunted a quick growl. “But her powers began growing weaker and less consistent. And then, worse, she started feeling weak and almost sick.”
Selene didn’t look weak or sick, but then again, I didn’t know what she looked like normally. Maybe she hid it well.
“That’s why we came to the water,” Liana added. “So she could replenish some.”
Ah. I was staring at freshly reinvigorated siren.
“That still doesn’t explain how her magic might be in my pendant,” I said. “It’s not like I took it or anything, and if you suggest I did again, I’ll kick your asses.”
Quinn scowled, pulling Selene even tighter against him, but the corner of Liana’s mouth tilted upward ever so slightly before she schooled her features.
“What are your powers?” Adalia asked Selene.
Selene reached behind her to run an absent hand along one of her wings. “I’m a siren, but besides that, I possess the power of the angels.”
My mind skipped so intently that I wondered if the effects of the trolls’ brew hadn’t left me as much as I’d thought. Finally, I got my mouth to work: “Say what?”
“I have the power of the angels. Or I did. I have it less and less now, so that I barely feel it at all anymore.”
My throat was suddenly dry and I swallowed loudly. “What exactly can you do with this power?” My voice was breathy, my heart pulsing noticeably in the curve beneath my throat.
“Lots of things. I can alter reality and create with my thoughts.”
“Really?” Rina gushed. “That’s so incredible. I didn’t even know something like that was possible!”
“Neither did I,” Adalia said, clapping her hands excitedly in front of her before realizing the moment called for a more subdued reaction.
Bringing my hand up to it, I rubbed the back of the pendant with my thumb. I hadn’t realized it was a magical object, lost to the appreciation of its pretty sparkling. I never should have put on a magical object without identifying it first. I’d been stupid, though I’d never admit that to anyone.
And what was all the secrecy between Sir Lancelot and crew all about? Did they know what was going on? I wished like hell I could understand.
I blinked as the realization of my possible mistake took a nose dive in my gut. Squeezing Why tightly against me, I reached blindly for Ky with my other hand.
But it was too late.
Ky was gone.
So was Selene and everyone else.
21
When I appeared in the midst of a different group of people, it was difficult to decide who was more surprised—them, Why, or me.
The pandacorn startled with a muffled snort, popped a colorful mohawk from the top of his head, and scrambled to turn around in my arms. His claws tangled in my bikini top as he burrowed into my chest, scratching the shit out of me until it was impossible for him to get any closer. In his haste, he nicked my collarbone with his horn before realizing it and pointing the swirly, ivory ice pick away from me.
Ouch.
The band of people—no, shifters, based on their oversized, hulking bodies—stared between Why and me with wide eyes and open mouths. We’d appeared in the middle of a large, dark, musty, cavernous room. Shifters surrounded us on all sides, illuminated by a series of electric camping lanterns laid out haphazardly around the ground. The scent of moist dirt clung to the air.
I took a step backward, clutching Why to my chest. Only there was nowhere to retreat to.
I glanced downward. Sure enough, the floor was dark, hard-packed dirt. I suspected we were underground, which meant our chances of escape weren’t particularly good.
There were eight shifters, most of them crowded around…
I gasped. “Fury?”
“Who the hell is this?” some blond dude asked the rest of them with a snarl, like it was somehow their fault I’d popped up in the middle of their clandestine … well, whatever the hell it was. It certainly wasn’t a tea party.
Fury, the shifter who’d been at the heart of the kidnappings and power snatching the previous three terms, was bound with thick rope to a chair that looked like a throne sculpted from one solid piece of earth. Coil after coil of rope wrapped Fury so that the shifter looked like a mummy who’d gotten the dress code wrong.
They weren’t taking any chances on him escaping.
But hadn’t he lost his shifter magic entirely when Rina took her power back? No human could break free of a fraction of that amount of rope. Yet they were treating him like a serious threat…
“Well,” Blond Asshole snapped at everyone without bothering to address me. “Who the hell is this and how the fuck did she get here?”
He turned a murderous stare at each of his comrades in turn, injecting a certain craze into it that had random thoughts of Hitler and Stalin coming to mind.
“What’s with all these fucking unhinged shifters thinking they have the power of gods?”
One by one, they all pointed their attention at me—even Fury, whose visage was smeared in blood like it was face paint.
“Oops. Did I say that out loud?” I chuckled nervously.
Thank goodness the shock of appearing in the middle of the Fearsome Fucker Gang appeared to have fully dispelled the effects of the trolls’ brew. I needed every one of my wits about me.
Blond Asshole marched over to me and stopped a body’s length away.
Smart cookie. In the supernatural world, appearances deceived on a regular basis. Just because I looked like a petite woman didn’t mean my magic couldn’t kick their asses from here to next Sunday.
“How’d you get here?” he snarled at me.
“Whoa. Didn’t anyone ever teach you manners?” Cheeky given my own dubious manners, but the fucker could ask nicely. This was probably close to the very last place on earth I’d ever want to go, and I was taking into account such options as the bottom of an active volcano and the middle of the ocean without a life raft.
I smoothed Why’s brand-spanking-new mohawk. It was fuchsia and violet, fading from one color into the next in a seamless blend.
I had no idea why he suddenly had it, other than it seemed fright had popped it right out of him.
Running my fingers through it, I accepted that it could’ve been much worse. He could’ve peed on me or something. I would’ve been caught in the middle of some kind of war zone with pandacorn pee all over me.
Perspective.
While I was busy freaking out and having useless thoughts, Blond Asshole had been busy studying me. As had the rest of his crew. Even Fury, with one eye swollen shut, trailed the open eye up and down my body.
Asshole’s leer suggested all this looking might have had something to do with my skimpy bikini. I’d dressed to impress Ky, not any of these jerks.
“How’s he here?” I pointed toward Fury with my chin. “Last I saw him…” I trailed off. I really should learn to filter my thoughts before speaking.
“Where’d you see him last?” Blondie was quick to press.
“Never mind. I must be confused.”
How the freak was Fury here when I’d last seen him in the secret meeting with Sir Lancelot, the wizards, Sadie, and all the others?
“I’m not going to keep repeating myself,” Blondie snapped at me, and he waved his hands at a few of the grisliest of the shifters. Three men and one woman, who’d apparently been guarding Fury, and who apparently ate small children for breakfast, turned their backs on Fury and prowled toward me.
Gulping, I took another step backward. But behind me there was only a long stretch of dirt wall and a lone shifter. Though the shifter was smaller than those stalking me from the front, the hungry gleam in her eyes made me just as wary of her as of the others.
I suspected sanity and socially acceptable behavior were not requisites of joining this crew.
“Tell me how you got here,” Blond Asshole growled. “Now. This is your last chance…”
I flicked my gaze between him, the four grizzly shifters stalking me like I was prey, and the one at my back.
I couldn’t decide where the greater threat lay. All I was sure of was that I was shit out of luck. No one would help me here.
Fury cleared his throat and started coughing so vehemently that I wondered if it was possible for a person to cough up a lung. Worse, once he finished hacking, a single word croaked from his split lips.
“Run.”
Surely he had to realize there was nowhere to run to. Not without going through a whole bunch of beefsters first. I met his one good eye with the full extent of my desperation. Last I’d seen Fury, I’d considered him my enemy, in league with the rebel faction of the Shifter Alliance that’d kidnapped me last term. I might be missing something. Though he was beat to shit, Fury still managed to look sorry for me. Like I was in for as much shit as he’d endured.
Adrenaline spiked through me. I clutched Why so hard that he squirmed. For the first time since he’d laid eyes on our surroundings, the cub peered backward, then snapped back around and buried his face in my chest, right in the middle of my boobs, and directly over my pendant, hiding it from view.
“I feel ya, buddy,” I whispered, my mind galloping a mile a minute.
Blond Asshole’s tenuous patience was apparently exhausted. He stomped forward, occupying my personal space, at least as tall as Ky, and his shoulders and chest far wider, pure muscle; dude had to weigh at least two-hundred-fifty pounds. Think the Rock with rabies and a blond crew-cut and you’d get close to this guy. I was five-foot-two, and weighed around a hundred, depending on the time of the month and how much chocolate and potato chips I’d recently eaten.
Blond Fucker leaned down into my face and sneered. His breath hinted of rotting meat, and I shivered, drawing my face as far away as I could without moving my body. I wouldn’t retreat. Hunters liked to chase their prey, and this guy was sure to get off on the chase.
“My name is Jas,” I said after a brief deliberation about the wisdom of sharing my real name. But since Fury probably remembered it, I figured one bit of truth might help as I geared up to spew a bunch of lies.
“And why are you here?” he ground out. He was obviously about to blow his lid.
“I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Bullshit,” he growled. “You’ve used some kind of dark sorcery to enter our lair,” he said, like we were in a comic book.
Only this lair wasn’t comic-book cool. Not at all.
“Who did you contract with to discover our secret?” He leaned so close to me that his breath slithered across my skin. Why wheeled his little hind legs in an attempt to climb further up my chest, until I held him tightly.
“Was it that traitor Laredo?” Asswipe hissed. A murmur of rage circled his crew of roided-out shifters. They probably spent a fortune on food every month.
“Did he tell you where to find us?” Blondie shook his head as if he were disappointed in the sorcerer whom I’d last seen in the secret gathering with Fury. Before then, I’d seen him being carted away to the Magical Arts Academy, where I’d figured he’d be dumped in a cell to rot somewhere far out of sight.
“I told you I don’t know how I got here,” I said.
“That’s bullshit!” he roared.
“Yeah, I heard you the first time,” I snapped. “You don’t need to bust my eardrum, jeez.”
Faster than his bulk should have allowed, he muscled Why to the side and whipped his forearm up to my throat, choking me.
Since there was nothing directly behind me, I leaned back. When I stumbled, he chased me all the way back to the wall, where he pinned me against it.
“By delivering yourself to me, you’ve become my prisoner. You’ll do exactly as I say, when I say it. Am I clear?”
“Clear as a fucking bell.” Not that I planned to obey, but it was impossible to ignore his message when he was all bulging, enraged eyeballs and fiery breath.
“I’m going to ask you one final time, and then—”
His ultimatums were getting old. Besides, he hadn’t carried through on any of them—yet.
“What? You’re going to feed me to the sharks?”
“Worse.”
He smiled, dark, sinister, and ugly as fuck. Blond Asshole had all the building blocks to be handsome, but with his megalomaniac nature unleashed as it was, there was no chance of it. He was the kind of person you’d cross the street to avoid.
“Tell me how you breached our defenses before I make you regret your silence. I have a team of mages upstairs that I pay handsomely to make sure no one finds out about this place. Did one of them tell you about us?”
The four shifters he’d assigned to intimidate me flanked us evenly. The woman, who would have given any bodybuilder a run for their money, hunched her ginormous shoulders. “It was one of them,” she drawled in a country bumpkin voice. “It’s gotta be. Want me to go kill them all?”
She smiled at me when she caught me looking at her. She was missing one of her front teeth—probably knocked out in a fight. A certain segment of shifters wore any surviving marks of battle with pride. With advanced healing, it wasn’t easy to scar. That it did suggested the shifter had taken a beating and survived—and often their opponent hadn’t. Bumpkin hadn’t replaced it on purpose.
“Lemme do it,” she told Blondie. “It’s gotta be one of them. The sooner we’re free of them, the better.”
“Cool your jets, Linda,” Blondie said, making me smirk at her name. “We still need them.” He pressed his arm into my throat so hard that I choked. I attempted to swallow around the force. When that failed, I gasped, trying to pull in a full breath of air. “When they’ve done what we need, they’re yours.”
Bumpkin actually licked her lips.
“They’re working hard on our secret plans right now. Darla, go check on them.”
Darla turned out to be the more average-sized shifter at my back. Without hesitation, she moved to carry out Blondie’s orders.
Though subtlety wasn’t my forte, I tried not to let Dickwad realize that I was registering her path out of here: she passed the four linebackers behind Blon
die, passed Fury and the two guards stationed on either side of him, and faded into the darkness.
Now all I had to do was get out of rabid asshole’s grip, overpower six other shifters, and find the exit—upon which I’d likely have to face off with a bunch of dark sorcerers doing this guy’s bidding.
A wave of fear bucked through me before I got it under control. Then I let out a muffled groan.
“Ew,” Blondie exclaimed, jerking back. “Did the panda just pee on you?”
I tried to answer. In my mind, I unleashed all sorts of scathing shit on him for making fun of Why for being so scared he peed himself. Besides, he was a panda-fucking-corn, not a simple panda.
Hello? Spindly horn.
All I did was manage a cough, making my already sore throat hurt even more. I clutched Why to my chest, not even caring that warm pee was sliding down my stomach and soaking the waist of my bikini bottoms. The cub trembled in my arms. I ran a soothing hand down his back, cooing to him just as my friends always did. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
I hoped I wouldn’t have to add lying to a pandacorn to my resume.
Blondie was busy scrunching up his face and waving his hand in front of his nose like there was no greater offense than the smell of urine. Like he and his crew shat roses.
It was an opportunity I wouldn’t waste.
My skunk might not be powerful enough to take on whatever kinds of animals these beasts of people shifted into, but my skunk was three times the size of a regular skunk, and wicked fast.
If Why and I could follow the trail Darla had marked for the exit, we’d have a chance.
Hold on, Why, I told him in my mind. He wouldn’t hear me, but I figured some attempt at warning was better than nothing. I won’t leave you behind. I’m taking you with me. Be ready to ride.
And with that, while Blondie’s lackeys went on about how this wasn’t a latrine or some bullshit, and how even Fury was made to pee in a bottle, I reached for my skunk magic.