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I hesitate, then take a loop in the sky, backtracking so I can get a better look. When my focus returns to Ford, Beck is nearly on top of him. I part my beak to screech out a warning, but at that moment, Beck latches onto the back of Ford’s neck with his teeth.
A beat later, both wolves go under.
I scream a warning into the sky and swoop closer to the waves, flying in desperate circles as I search the surface of the water. But I can’t see them, can’t see anything but the whitecaps on the increasingly choppy ocean and more of the first wave wolves catching up and passing the place where Beck and Ford disappeared.
I screech again and blow fire into the sky, not knowing what else to do.
My Ford-dar doesn’t seem to work when I’m this scared. Or maybe it doesn’t work in my phoenix form. I haven’t had enough experience in it to know for sure, but I do know that diving in to save him when I have no clue where he is would be a losing game. For both of us.
No sooner has the thought passed through my head than a wolf breaks the surface. My heart leaps into my throat, but it’s a dark brown wolf that shakes himself briefly before swimming toward the seawall, not Ford’s silver-and-white one.
It’s Beck, and I want to kill him. I’mgoingto kill him if he’s killed Ford.
But I have to try to save Ford first.
Thanks to the blood pooling in the water beneath where Beck just emerged, I at least know where to start looking.
Pulling in a breath I press my wings to my body and plummet from the sky, plunging into the cold water with an audible hiss as my feathers slice into the sea.
Hold on, Ford. I’m coming.
Ford and Juliet’s story
continues in Savage Prince,
Book Three in the
Lost Moon University series.
sneak peek of savage prince
Please enjoy this sneak peek!
Ford
I’ve always loved the water.
As a boy, I’d jump in the creek on our property while there were still ice chunks in it from the winter thaw. Come summer, I knew every pond and swimming hole within a five-mile radius and spent the seemingly endless days riding my bike between my favorites, my hair always a little bit damp.
When Mom said we were moving to Washington to live with her new husband, it was the loss of the water I mourned the most.
My father had been dead for years and our connections with his pack had faded. I was excited by the thought of making new shifter friends my age but putting those swimming holes in the rearview ripped at something inside of me.
They weren’t just a way to spend a day. They were my refuge from the world, a place where the tears Alphas weren’t supposed to cry were easily disguised, and a solid source of free snacks. By the time I was six, I was a pro at catching fish as both a wolf and a boy and knew every edible plant that grew near the water.
And then the helicopter my new stepfather sent to collect us at the airport touched down on an island in the sea, and I knew the universe was looking out for me.
This was even better than a pond or a creek.
The sea was wild and beautiful and alive in a way I didn’t realize water could be until my first cliff diving session with my new friends.
I plunged into the ocean, felt the powerful currents buffeting my body, and came face to face with a harbor porpoise and her baby. The baby zipped around my torso, rubbing against my bare skin, while its mother chattered a scolding in a language the shifter part of me could almost understand.
I still remember the wonder I felt as my jaw dropped, and the sea flooded in.
By the time I broke the surface, I was coughing up lungfuls of saltwater, but I didn’t care. I rode the next wave to shore, stretching my body long to coast on top of the foam, feeling like I’d finally come home.
For the rest of my teen years, I spent every spare second that I wasn’t in school or training to be part of Hammer’s army as close to the water as possible. Swimming in the spring and summer, fishing in the fall, and stealing a boat to sail over to Seattle in the winter before we left for the mountains, relishing the cold spray on my face.
