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“Youaregoing to mend his broken heart, right?” The look on her face told me she’d be crushed if I said no.
I heaved a sigh ofannoyance and grumbled, “I suppose, especially since Miki-Leopard is so happy about it. She keeps tossing imaginary confetti in my head and it’s keeping me from freaking out as badly as I might otherwise.”
Jasmine giggled. “That’s adorable.”
At that moment, Shadow came bounding out from under Kasi’s bed, leapt onto it and began wrapping herself around Kasi over and over again.
“Now,thatis adorable,” I said.
The sound of my voice caught Shadow’s attention, which was odd because I couldn’t remember a time when she’d ever really acknowledged Jasmine or me.
Kasi claimed she knew who we were and even had a special name for us, but I’d never seen any real evidence of it since she never engaged with us.
Now, though, she was staring right at us.
A moment later, she leapt across the gap between the two beds and landed between me and Jasmine, making her gasp.
Shadow began winding her way around me the same way she’d been winding around Kasi: rubbing her face against my arm, walking across my lap, brushing my torso along the way, before turning around and doing the same thing back the other way.
It was weird. She wasn’t really solid at all, just a bunch of shadows in the shape of a cat, yet I swear a small part of me could feel those shadows as they drifted by.
That was when I realized that Kasi and Jahrdran’s shadowshadn’t triggered me when they’d entered the room earlier, nor was Shadow triggering me now.
Perhaps we were making progress, Miki-Leopard and me.
Shadow-kitty.
Yes. She is a Shadow-kitty.
Play shadow-kitty?
Uh.I looked up at Kasi, who was watching us, a stunned look on her face. “Miki-Leopard wants to play with Shadow.”
A smile broke across Kasi’s face. “I think Shadow would probably like that.” Her eyes went unfocused as they always did when she was speaking with her shadow-kitten. A moment later, she said, “If you want to let Miki out, Shadow would love to meet her.”
“I’ve never done this on purpose before.”
“Just imagine you’re in leopard form and let go,” Kasi advised.
“Let go?”
“Of your human body. Stop holding it together and let it go.”
Okay, Miki-Leopard. Are you ready to play?
Yes!
Okay, so?—
Before I could visualize or let go like Kasi had suggested, Miki-Leopard lunged free, the way she’d done earlier that day, bursting from my human form with a raspy growl of joy.
Shadow froze in her happy pacing, then pounced on us in a move that seemed to emanate pure joy.
We wrapped around each other and rolled right off the bed onto the floor, where we kepton rolling.
We rolled beneath the bed and came out in the Shadow Realm, where we leapt to our feet and raced each other from one end to the other, chasing and winding and playing in the shadows, bursting from them back into the dorm room, where we chased each other in and out of the closet, through the bathroom doors into my room and back again, under the beds and into the Shadow Realm again, then back out.
Every moment was quite simply pure joy.
