“Not when you’re around,” she bit back.
Felix smirked. “I tend to have that effect on people. Or they drop their panties for me, it’s one or the other, really.”
Dropping the book on the table, she flipped him off, only for his smirk to twist into a devilish grin. She ignored him and tried to translate the first line of the riddle.
“To be freed is what you seek,”she said in the old language.
Her breath caught in her throat; Felix’s eyes widened as they locked on hers.
“I think you might be onto something, little witch,”he said in the old language. It sounded otherworldly coming off his tongue; he spoke it so fluently. Even better than her, and she had had countless classes dedicated to just the language.
She was always taught that shifters couldn’t understand their language. She tried racking her brain for anything else sheremembered being taught about shifters. They were dangerous, incomprehensibly powerful magical beings that could shift into animals. Involuntarily, she laughed.
Felix gave her a look. “What’s so funny, witch?”
That pushed her over the edge into full-blown hysterics. For the first time in a while, she laughed. Really, truly, laughed. The shifter looked at her like she was a woman possessed. He probably thought she was, and that only made her laugh harder. This whole situation was absurd. It was like the start of a bad joke. Shadows slithered out from him, wrapping themselves around her chest and squeezing. Not enough to take her breath away, but enough to stop her from laughing and focus on breathing instead.
“I’ll ask you one more time. What is so funny?” he said, punctuating each word.
A small giggle escaped. She couldn’t help it. “It’s just, when you think of a shifter, you think of a dragon razing a city, or a griffin terrorizing a village. You don’t think of a tiny cat.”
“I’m not tiny,” he retorted, crossing his arms.
“You kind of are.”
He rolled his eyes. “My tiny form could kill you.”
“Death by a thousand surface-level scratches. Sounds like a horrible way to go.”
A shadow slipped around her neck and yanked her forward, close enough to him that she felt his warm breath against her, the heat in her core returning like a catching wildfire. The shadow tightened against her neck, cutting off her air supply. “Does this feel surface-level to you?”
She didn’t know what stupid part of her possessed her to taunt him further, but she did. “Doesn’t...” She breathed in a strangled breath. “Count.”
Felix rose slowly, not taking his eyes off her as the shadows continued to writhe across her. His eyes darkened as he leanedon the table, claws lengthening and digging into the wood. A shadow forced its way through the small gap between buttons, tickling the fine hairs on the skin of her stomach. What she should have felt was fear. Maybe it was the lack of oxygen, but the shadows started to feelgood.
A small involuntary moan left her mouth as one made its way to her breast, lightly grazing the hardened buds of her nipple.She shouldn’t be enjoying this.Yet the wetness pooled between her thighs anyway.
Splinters started to pop up from the wood as Felix dug further into her favorite table. He looked as if he wasn’t even breathing, his eyes transfixed on hers as they met in a feverish dance of predator and prey. His nostrils flared. As if the moan hadn’t been enough to signal to him that she was reveling in the touch she had been starved of for so long, he could smell her too.
His shadows faltered, no longer as strong as they were a few minutes ago. Another moment passed, and they fell. He slumped back in the chair, his hands shaking as Avery’s ragged breathing filled the space.
He looked crazed and starved as he said, “I need food.”
Thirteen
Felix
The library had leftthem nothing but more questions. Felix, now back in cat form, the collar jingling, padded beside her to the dining hall. He gazed at the rows of witches all dressed in their pretentious red uniforms. Some had their familiars sitting in chairs, others were lying at their feet. A female witch closest to the front had a fox on the chair next to her. The bright orange fox had a white bib with “cute as fox” written on it, wrapped around its neck like a baby, while it happily awaited the witch to feed it a piece of steak.
Kill me now.
Other witches talked amongst themselves, their familiars obviously too large to fit in the dining hall.
A witch walked past them out of the dining hall, holding his head high. He just would be the type of guy to have a couple of buttons undone. His sooty wolf lagged not far behind, eyeing them with curiosity, at least at first. Suddenly, the wolf stopped in its tracks. The witch paid them no attention, but the wolf’s nostrils flared as it lowered its head, amber eyes dilating as if it had found its prey. Before Felix could react, it lunged towardhis rear and tried to sniff his ass to get a better scent. He hated dogs but one that close to his ass wasjusttoofar.
Twisting away, a hiss ripped from his throat as he bristled his fur to make himself look twice his size. There was nothing he could do in this form unless he wanted to give himself away. The wolf froze, and cocking its head, it studied him. It knew something was wrong. Of course, it knew. For a familiar, it was surprisingly quite smart. He primed his body to shift, ready to run if that’s what it came to.
The little witch put her body between them, even as the wolf snarled toward him, baring and gnashing its teeth at her.
