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“Let’s see what she has to say about it.”
Dagger nodded and disappeared to invite Uma along.
By the time we were ready to leave, Uma had joined us.
“So, the rabbit shifter news is making the rounds, huh?” she asked, her eyes sparking with excitement. Her blonde hair was in a bun on her head, and she wore grunge type clothing, with a flannel shirt tied around her waist and jeans ripped at the knees. She had to be almost a millennium old, but she dressed like a teenager. “I heard she killed a panther shifter.”
“Really?” Dagger asked. His face darkened, brows knitting together.
“I can’t wait to see what it’s all about,” Cal said, rubbing his hands.
“Rabbits can’t kill,” I snorted.
“Of course they can,” Uma said, her face serious. “You have no idea what rabbit shifters are capable of. They may look cute and fluffy, but they’re more dangerous than your biggest shifter with the most teeth.”
I grinned at her. “That I have to see for myself.”
Uma smiled sweetly at me. “And challenge it for dominance?”
“There’s only room for one most-powerful beast in my town.”
“Even the biggest and baddest has a weakness,” Uma said cheekily. “I hear she’s pretty, too.”
I rolled my eyes. I was more interested in the fact that she had a different kind of magic than what she looked like. I was a lone lion. I didn’t have a pride like the rest of the shifters with their kind, and that suited me just fine. The fewer people in my circle, the fewer there were who could betray me. I didn’t need to be stabbed in the back just because I trusted the wrong people. Control was about having the monopoly, and having the monopoly meant going at it alone.
Still, if there was something with a lot of power out there, I wanted to see it. I wanted to taste that power, and more often than not… I wanted toownit.
3
KINLEY
Iwasn’t the only person bound in chains and kept in a cage like an animal. Beings were all around me, all in different shapes and sizes, and the magic around me was like a giant smorgasbord. Most of them were naked, like I was. I tried to cover up, to tuck my hands over my chest and cross my legs, but it was hard to do with the manacles they’d clamped around my wrists and ankles.
I’d tried to shift out of the manacles when they’d put them on, to escape when I’d had my chance, but something didn’t work right. They had to have had some spell put on them that stopped my magic from working. I still had it, I couldfeelit. I just couldn’t reach it. My rabbit was tucked away in the recesses of my mind, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find her. It was like she was hidden behind a screen.
They’re all shifters.
Maybe the same chains were what stopped the others from shifting, too, and that was the only reason they were all in human form. They just sat there, undressed and taking it as if this was normal. Or maybe they’d been captives for so long, they’d stopped trying to fight, resigned to their fate.
I was the only one that seemed to feel uncomfortable naked.
I hadn’t known I wasn’t the only shifter until last night, when I’d been attacked. For years, I held the secret of my abilities close to my chest, because I didn’t think anybody else would understand. If I had only known that other people shifted into beasts, I wouldn’t have felt so alone in this world.
Now, I realized that the world was full of shifters like me. Every single person around me emitted some kind of magic—I could feel it, although I had no idea what I was feeling. I just knew that whatever they were, they were more like me than any human I’d grown up with.
My human side was freaking the hell out. Panic lodged in my throat, impossible to swallow down, and my skin was slick with sweat, even though I was cold.
My rabbit side wasn’t freaked out at all. She’d known she wasn’t the only one all along. Her calm bled over to my human side, and the panic didn’t take hold and choke me to death. It allowed me to think clearly, which was a new sensation in a stressful situation.
How the hell was this possible? I’d grown up thinking I was human, only to realize I wasn’t. Then I’d gone through my life thinking I was alone.
Again, clearly, I wasn’t.
Although, with the way everyone stared at me and sat as far away from me as they could, that last part might not have been true.
One good thing that came out of this was that the other prisoners’ whispers gave me small insights into this world that I didn’t know existed.
This was what I’d learned in the past couple of hours since I’d been taken:
