AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Tell me about your last two decades,”he said.
“I spent almost all of my time indoors. Played a lot of card games with the other ex-humans. Spent a lot of time testing how to cook with plants I’d never seen before. Made a lot of nasty food, but choked it down. Avoided a lot of men. That’s pretty much it, to be honest,”I admitted.“I spent a lot of time crying, at the beginning. And I refused to fly with the other women, most of the time, so I could’ve learned more if I tried. But I just didn’t want to.”
“You were taken there against your will. They should’ve seen that and realized you were unhappy,”Teris said quietly.
“Everyone made mistakes. Luckily, it’s in the past. Now, no one will ever screw up again.”My voice got playful.
He chuckled into my mind, then said,“We’re getting close. Try to tap into the magic the goddess left you with. I don’t feel it in myself—only a small strain, coming from the bond.”
“Okay.”I closed my eyes and tried to find the magic. I’d felt it before, when it was draining the life from me in that cave. And that feeling was still within me, just barely. But I hadn’t found the mass of it, yet.
I focused as Teris ran, following the trail of it alongside the magic that used to be Vevol’s, but was now mine.
The snarls and howls of the creatures we were running toward slowly filled the air as I finally found the source of that magic in my chest.
It had a pulse; that’s why it was still slightly draining. The magic wasalive.
Vevol had told me I would be the heart of the creatures, but I hadn’t realized that meant I would literally be keeping them alive, with their pulse in my chest.
“Ready?”Teris asked me, his voice alert and unafraid.
“Ready.”I steeled myself for the fight that might be coming.
The creatures were alive. They had minds, and hearts, and willpower. They wouldn’t obey my exact orders; they would follow me, if I led them properly.
Because I really was a damn queen, just like Teris kept insisting.
“We should call them bears,”I told him,“They’re not bears—not really. But they’re similar, and since they’re new, they deserve an Earth name like the rest of us new fae.”
“Then they’re bears,” he agreed. “And I hope you know what you’re doing, because I really don’t want to have to fight however many of these things there are.”
My lips curved upward, just slightly. “I don’t know what I’m doing… but we’ll figure it out.”
Teris groaned, but I trusted him to believe me.
And so he ran toward the crowd of bears.
They were all together,moving in a pack. I wondered if maybe I should’ve named them after wolves, because of their apparent pack-tendencies, but decided to stick with the name I’d given them.
The ones at the front stopped when they saw me and Teris, but they didn’t snarl at us, or move to attack us.
They simply halted, and then stared at us.
And the rest of the creatures followed suit.
“Hot damn,”I murmured into Teris’s mind.
There weresomany of them.
“They smell your scent on me, and the power of our bond,”Teris said.“They won’t attack us.”
“But will they follow us?”I asked him quietly.
He didn’t have an answer for that one.
I slid off his back when he paused in front of the massive group of creatures. Though he growled a warning—and protest—into my mind, he didn’t command me to climb back on top of him.
He knew I had to deal with the creatures, and respected that.
