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“What?” she asks with a wry smile. “You don’t even know my name.”
Ulara sometimes talks about shifters she doesn’t like. I rack my brain trying to think of the latest complaint.
What was her name? It started with a B…
“Bianca,” I remember aloud with a sense of triumph.
Her eyes widen as she finally leans in a little more. “All right. What does he say?”
Shifters only speak one language.
And I’m happy to show Bianca how well I’ve learned to converse in hers.
I take my chance and use my blunt teeth to clamp down right on her nose.
She screams, but I lock my jaw and don’t let up.
“Get her off me!” Bianca screams.
One of the other shifters grabs my jaw and attempts to force me to release.
A pop sounds, followed by a sickening wave of nausea that hits me like a wall.
I know something is broken, but I have an edge that these shifters don’t. I’m used to functioning with high levels of pain.
Vivid memories of my brother and his friends tormenting me flashes over my vision.
“Hold her down.”
“She’s such a slut!”
Nothing actually ever happened in those instances, but I was terrified, and it was my fear that gave them the most entertainment.
But I’m breakable. I always have been, so just being held down sometimes broke my arm or dislocated a rib. I’d have to hide it from my parents, or else my shame would come down on the family.
A scream sounds, and then the hands holding me are gone.
I can’t work my jaw anymore. Blood fills my mouth as I manage to open my eyes.
The water is red. Two shifters are dead, both with arrows sticking out of their chests.
The third—the leader I had bitten—is scampering down the rocks that surround the spring.
Dizziness swarms over me, and the world tilts on its side as I begin to fall, only I don’t land in the water.
Someone catches me.
And it isn’t Godric.
CHAPTER 20
I blink up at my Outcast and wonder why the hell he’s here and not somewhere deep in the forest. I try to speak, but he places a finger over my lips and shakes his head, and pain swarms through me.
It seems both of us can’t talk now.
He carries me down the rocks and heads toward Godric’s tent. I don’t ask how he knows where it is or how he even got inside the encampment. He’s never crossed the wall, but then again, he never had a reason to.
Until now.
