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Grunting in frustration, I slammed it down on the other pile of drawings.
A few of them blew to the floor, and I reached down to pick them up. Not one of the drawings was the same. They all focused on her incredible eyes, so full of life…but some were of her flying through the air, showing off her bright, resplendent wings. In others, she was sprawled on the couch or walking in the forest. Sometimes I forgot to draw her wings, but it didn’t seem to matter. It didn’t change how she looked at me. If I finally found her, I wouldn’t care whether she had wings or not…I’d be too busy finding out what it felt like to hold her in my arms. What her lips tasted like. And what sounds she made when in the throes of passion.
2
ISLA
Being turned into a Valkyrie would have been a heck of a lot worse if I didn’t live in a town where so many others were monsters as well. At least I still had friends who didn’t consider me too inhuman to spend time with, unlike some of my former acquaintances who’d distanced themselves after that fateful Halloween night when everything changed. Not that I could really blame them when my colorful wings were impossible to hide.
Luckily, that was something I didn’t have to worry about as I walked into Il Diablo, an Italian restaurant owned by a vampire named Lorenzo Bianchi. Being a monster—or falling in love with one—was perfectly normal in Screaming Woods.
I headed directly to a big table in the back of the room that my friends and I always used when we met for a girls’ lunch. I was the last to arrive, and they all looked up to greet me.
“Sorry I’m late,” I murmured.
Isabeau blinked up at me, her brows drawn together. The tiny imp waited until I sat down to ask, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, really.” My shoulders slumped as I sighed. “Just a stray thought about the night we all drank the Frankenpunch that Dr. Karloff brought to the Halloween party.” Although Izzy hadn’t been a resident then. She was born half demon/half imp.
“Ah, you mean the moment when our world shattered?” Maggie asked, turning her hand over to stare at her green skin. “And we emerged as monsters?”
Even after all these years, I still remembered the screams of pain from friends I’d grown up with mingled with my own when my wings broke through my back. It was utter pandemonium as we all tried to understand what was happening and why we had been cursed with such a monstrous fate.
Before I’d even realized that the pounding in my back was because of the colorful wings that had sprouted from my spine, I was soaring in the air. I almost crashed into three other flying monsters before I figured out how to control my flight. It took weeks before I realized that my wings could lie flat against my back when they weren’t used.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
Juniper, a human who fell in love with Maggie’s brother last year, shuddered. “Silas still has nightmares about it.”
“Don’t we all?” Jackie asked, leaning her iridescent, tin-colored elbow against the table as she propped her chin in the palm of her hand.
A Valkyrie, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Tin Woman, an imp, and a human walked into a restaurant owned by a vampire…there had to be a joke in there somewhere. I just couldn’t find it at the moment.
The server came over to confirm we all wanted our usual orders, turning our conversation away from the nightmare of our past.
“Did you hear who has come to stay in one of those cabins out in the woods?” Maggie asked as soon as the server left, clapping her hands together as she practically bounced in her seat.
Since she carried a lot of items that could only be found at her store, Something Wicked, Maggie had a steady stream of witches and other magical creatures. This meant she was always in the loop on the newest gossip, but I rarely saw my friend so excited about anything she’d heard.
Before anyone could ask what she was talking about, Jackie glared at her and complained, “I knew I should’ve waited to tell you what I heard. I got this hot tea while you were busy with Eli in the storeroom. I should be the one to spill it.”
It was silly of me to get my hopes up, but I couldn’t stop myself from wishing that the gossip was about the pilot I’d saved a month ago. Although there was no reason for him to have rented a cabin nearby—or at least I assumed there wasn’t since I didn’t actually know anything about him other than the color of his eyes, how much he weighed, and that he could fly planes—I was impatient to find out who they were talking about. “I don’t care who tells us, as long as you do it now.”
Maggie waved a green hand at her assistant manager, gesturing for her to go for it. Jackie beamed a smile at the rest of us. “Remember that dragon shifter series I talked all of you into reading?”
“Of course.” I rolled my eyes. As if any of us could forget when we’d devoured all eleven books within a few weeks and talked about the characters as though they were real. “Please tell me there’s going to be a new book.”
“That would be so amazing,” Juniper agreed with an enthusiastic nod.
“Yeah, I was so sad when I realized the series was done,” Izzy added.
“Nope,” Jackie let the P at the end pop before pausing dramatically. “But Soraya Hart has apparently rented a cabin just outside of town because she’s looking for inspiration for her next series.”
Isabeau and Juniper cheered while I slumped in my seat. As much as I was looking forward to reading Soraya Hart’s next book, it wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear.
Maggie tilted her head, her blue eyes perceptive as she scanned my expression. “I expected you to be a lot more excited by the news.”
I forced a smile. “Don’t get me wrong, I am.”
