AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ken gives me a coy look. “So, how about those climbing skills, eh?”
I crack a soft smile at him, grateful for the normalcy that’s taking over.
“I wasn’t trying to. There’s—there was something over there.” I point to the wall, the reason for my fall coming back to me. Now that the pain is gone, and I’m healed, fear seeps back into my heart. “Something dark, like a shadow. It called my name then morphed into a bigger shadow and—”
I realize how insane it all sounds, but Ken’s smile melts away, replaced by a serious look. “Like the one you and Rainer saw a couple weeks ago?”
I nod, surprised that Rainer told him about that. But then again, Ken does guard the woods.
The two of them share a glance, and Viv nods in a sort of silent understanding.
Her dark skin begins to glow. In a few short seconds, she shrinks down to a smaller form. The beautiful, strong, warrior no longer stands before me. Instead, she’s a snow owl with dark eyes, standing about two feet tall. The owl inclines its head at me—and I swear it winks—before flying up over the wall.
“Whoa.”
I remind myself to breathe. This is a normal thing here, I can’t freak out. But it is incredible to witness.
“Beautiful, innit?”
“Can shifters just… change into anything?” I ask.
All this time, and for some reason, I naturally assumed that both Ken and Viv were bear shifters. I hadn’t realized there were other…forms.
He laughs, scratching his beard. “No. We each have a single animi form.”
“She’s an owl!” I laugh, covering my mouth with a hand. “I just—I hadn’t expected that. It’s still unbelievable to me.” I pluck a twig out of my braid, trying to smooth back some stray hairs. Eoin had sad something about the cost of using magic. “What’s the price of your magic?”
“We can’t stay in our animi forms indefinitely. We need to spend equal time out of form as we do in form. If we stay too long, we lose sense of our faemanity—get it? Like humanity?” I smack my forehead playfully at his pun. “And if we don’t turn back in time, we risk getting stuck in our animi forms.”
It’s hard to wrap my brain around. “Has that ever happened?”
“Not to me.”
“Would you ever be able to return to your fae form again?”
He chuckles. “I would rather not find out.”
A few minutes pass as we wait for Viv to finish scouting.
“Is it normal for the woods to call to us like that?” I ask, thinking of the night Rainer saved me from—whatever it was.
He gives me a contemplative look.
“No. It’s not the woods.” His honesty catches me off guard, and my brows raise. “This has nothing to do with the wood’s curse. The trees make you hallucinate your fears. Things no one else can see. But the shadows? You both saw them that night. It wasn’t a hallucination. It was a—well, we're monitoring the situation.”
A chill overtakes my body and I brush it off. “Whatever it was, can it get in here?”
Ken shakes his head. “The grounds are warded. You’re safe within the walls.”
“Do you know what it was?”
He cocks his head. “We have an idea, yes.”
“So it wasn’t my friend,” I whisper.
He rubs his beard, glancing at the wall guarding us from the forest. “Don’t worry, little human, it’s under control.”
“What about the curse? Can you break the wood’s curse?”
