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He felt her shake her head in disagreement.
He held back his frown. “What—”
“I have magic.”
The words had been so quiet he thought he’d misheard her. His body went rigid. “What?”
Isla pulled back from him slowly, her stare colliding with his, and her eyes bloodshot, gleaming, and desperate. “I think Raana somehow gave me magic when she healed me.”
Kai’s features twisted. His mind flashed to the shadows he’d clocked just moments before along her skin. “How do you figure?”
Isla opened her mouth, then closed it. “I don't know how she did it, but when I try to shift, Idon’t, but my wolf…it still comes out. It’s just…it’s made of shadow.”
Kai blinked, trying to get the bizarre picture. “Youare shadow?”
“No. I amme,but my wolf…manifests as shadows. I can see it, talk to it, control it—but I also feel like I can’t. It’s magic; it’s the only way I can explain it. I always thought it was possible that she’d done something to me, but I never…I never thought this…” Panic washed over her face.
He tried wiping it away with the stroke of his thumb across her cheek. “When did you figure this out?”
She peered at him innocently. “We were attacked last night.”
There it was.
Rage slithered alongside his confusion. “Who and by what?”
“Me and Ameera on the beach. I don’t know what it was, but it came out of the water and tried to drag me into it. Ameera got it to let go, and then we didn’t have many other options to fight, so I took a risk, and it paid off.”
That explained Ameera’s arm.
Isla’s face flickered with horror and pride. “I’ve never felt anything like it. It was me attacking but different. I felt power in a whole new way.” Her shoulders slumped. “But I’m exhausted, and all of me feels broken and wrong.” Her throat bobbed. “If this is going to happen every time I shift, we’re in trouble. Not only because I don’t know how to control it.”
Kai let out an even sigh, trying to keep his agreement at bay. “You’re alive, and you’re safe. That’s what’s important.”
She nodded and then went rigid. Her eyes scanned over his face with stunned clarity. “Wait, what are you doing here? Don’t you have a meeting today?” She darted her eyes frantically around him. “Where’s the pup?”
Kai snorted. “And Ameera called me a fussy mother hen. The pup’s fine. He’s with your brother.” Kai wasn’t sure if only one of those last sentences were true.
“With my brotherSebastian?”
“You do only have one,” Kai said before explaining his previous night of familial introductions, then explaining how he’d felt her, how he’d run there.
A somber smile slid across Isla’s mouth as she ran her hands over his chest. “You didn’t—”
“You know I had to.” His hands settled on her hips with her legs still circled around his waist. “It may make me a shitty alpha, but my greatest duty is to you. If you call, I’ll answer. Every time.”
His heart stumbled when she brought her mouth to his; her lips were chapped, but the kiss was smooth. It deepened slightly, from one breath to the next, but then Isla pulled back just as Kai felt something dark twisting in him, recognizing her.
She spooled her fingers in his hair, twisting the curls at his nape. “There’s, uh, there’s something else.”
A shot of pleasure coursed down his spine at the tug of her hands, but the words and the way she’d said them had put a damper on his mood. “And what would that be?”
She flashed him a wary, beaming grin. “We need to go into the Wilds—as soon as today, I think.”
CHAPTER37
ISLA
Isla wasn’t sure which Kai had taken in better stride—her proposal about going into the Wilds, the severed head of the creature Isla killed last night that Ameera had kept, or her divulgence of the rebel meeting Amalie had brought her to.
