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Deep shame blanketed me, and I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing in Pario City. I should leave. Whatever had once been there for me was no longer.
Abby is still here, and I built this city.
The whisper of determination wouldn’t let me throw in the towel, not yet.
I rose for what must have been the dozenth time since Abby had left me. She couldn’t have been gone an hour, and I was already climbing the walls, but I had made her a promise, and I was not leaving, not without a proper plan, at least.
How did a man reclaim a lost life without resources or an army? I didn’t even have a base where I could work.
I paused my pacing, my mind racing.
And why is that?
My eyes flicked toward the door, then to the pile that Abby had brought from the house for me. Among the blankets and pillows she had collected to make the bedding more comfortable were some books to read and a notebook.
Please let there be a writing utensil.
Digging among the items, I landed upon a pen and exhaled with relief, throwing the book open to the first page.
As if I were possessed, I began to write, my left hand scrawling with more speed than I had ever written before in my life, the contents of my mind falling onto the page. It was a chronology of my life from as far back as I could recall, leading up to the moment I had been buried alive in the dirt… without a coffin.
I stopped, sweat dripping from my forehead as I pondered that thought alone, neck stiffening.
I was dead. An immortal being, an Original shifter, killed on the battlefield, but how? Why had Ash, my best friend and closest ally, believed I was dead?
All immortals had some weakness, but I didn’t know mine—at least not yet. Something could theoretically kill me. I had appeared dead enough to everyone for them to think me gone. Why, then, was I buried only in the dirt and without ceremony?
My skin rose with gooseflesh. It wasn’t sitting right.
Closing my eyes, I put myself back on the battlefield, the last engagement. I saw the chaos around me, heard the snarls and yelps and slashes. Blood streaked the air and ground, metallic tinges of sulfur and plasma in the atmosphere.
But then nothing.
Nothing but darkness and silence.
Who had attacked? How had it ended?
It was all too blurry, too inconsistent.
“Again,” I growled to myself, putting the pen back to paper. “Write it again.”
Drawing in another breath, I started from the beginning, the real beginning, two thousand years ago, when I had been nothing but a human boy serendipitously linked to thirty-five other souls who fought to become an Original—the first of the shifters, fairies, vampires, and other enchanted beings.
We battled that entity then,I thought grimly.And none of us ever really stopped fighting, did we?
Chapter14
Abby
Istayed in my wolf form all day, even at the drops, not bothering to shift back when dealing with the clients. Most of the customers were put-off by my animal form, but I didn’t care. It spared me from having a conversation with them and saved me time. I just wanted to unload the drugs and get home to ensure that Elijah had remained in the shed as he’d promised.
I wouldn’t have questioned his intentions before, back in the days when we’d been together, when I thought I’d known him better than anyone.
But back then, he hadn’t rejected me either. I would never have believed he was capable of turning me away and sending me on my own. I wouldn’t have thought he could forget our time together. I couldn’t have ever imagined that Elijah was the kind of man who would disappear for two hundred years, leaving me to think he was dead.
That’s not fair,I argued with myself as I padded back across the desert terrain, head low, snout to the ground.He didn’t intend to die—well, be buried alive.
That tale alarmed me, too. How did his unit believe he was gone? What had made them bury him, and how had Elijah managed to claw his way out?
