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I wasn’t the only shifter, but I was the only rabbit shifter. Most of the other beings seemed to be a predator of some kind. Where were the rest of my kind? Maybe they’d put me in the wrong cage.
Or maybe they knew what they were doing, keeping me with the dangerous ones.
Everyone seemed to think I was some kind of devil when word had gotten out that I’d killed someone.
My stomach twisted just thinking about it. I hated that I’d killed that guy. It had been nothing more than self-defense.
Would a court see it that way? Would they believe anything I told them? Would I even end up in a court, considering that everyone in this alternate reality I’d been thrown into was…different?
A large man with dark hair and pale eyes came to the cage where I was locked up with a handful of other people and unlocked the door.
Everyone stiffened as he looked them over. They avoided eye contact. I looked away when his eyes fell on me, but he pointed at me, anyway.
“You,” he said. “You’re up next.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t going out there. They were auctioning off the shifters that were in the cages, parading them on a stage like they were animals, and people bid on them like their lives didn’t matter.
I was very far from home and way out of my comfort zone.
When I wouldn’t get up as the jailer asked, he stepped into the cage, grabbed the chain that linked the manacles around my wrist, and yanked me forward. I yelped and shuffled along. The chain between my legs wasn’t long enough to take proper steps.
He all but dragged me onto a stage, and my heart beat in my throat. I struggled to breathe, and I shivered with fear. The air was cold, and a lot of hungry eyes fell on me, studying my body, staring at me as if I was some kind of freak.
Weren’t they all freaks, too? Or were those humans down there?
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the auctioneer said, turning his head so that his lips were still pressed against the mic on his podium while he looked at me. “I give you the very first rabbit shifter!”
Gasps rippled through the crowd.
“That’s right! We haven’t heard of one in existence in a long, long time, so now’s your chance to get your hands on something rare. The bids will start at two million.”
More gasps and unhappy murmurs.
My ears rang. Two million? That was alotof money.
It eliminated a lot of the bidders who’d bought people before me, and I looked around at the unhappy faces. Only a few were grinning. All men, and all staring at me like I was edible.
I shivered and tried not to curl away in horror.
The bidding started, and the price hiked up to four million, and then five, in no time at all. After it reached six, two more bidders fell out, and only two were left. My ears rang as the price went higher and higher.
Magic drifted toward me from the crowd. It tuned out the bidding, the numbers they called out fading to the background. I tried to focus on the magic. It was hard to find at first—the magic on the chains that wrapped around my ankles and wrists made it hard to focus.
The magic grew stronger and stronger, and finally, I found the source.
I looked at him, and our eyes locked. His eyes were amber, almost glowing gold, and he had blond hair and a scruffy beard. He stood upright and tall, with stacked muscles, and he oozed confidence, arrogance, and something scary. He was handsome, though—attractive. Something inside me twisted, and I couldn’t tell if it was fear or something darker and dirtier.
He was one of the two final bidders. That meant that he would end up having me if he won.
The other also had a beard, but long hair and a sly grin as he called out numbers. I didn’t like him at all. He had shifty eyes, a suave manner about him that looked like he thought he was God’s gift to womankind, and although hewashot, that attitude made him disgusting.
They chased each other up, the millions climbing into the tens and then the twenties.
“Things are getting heated!” the auctioneer called out when they hit twenty million.
“Twenty-five,” Amber Eyes said, glaring at the guy with the long hair.
“Thirty.”
