Glancing down, I saw an offering tray that only looked a day old. A few drying apples and perfectly fine nuts made my stomach rumble. Smack in the middle was a miraculous bit of cake. How a piece of cake survived this junk heap was beyond me, but I really needed something to eat after not having breakfast. Oh, and all this nonsense. I deserved a treat.
Munching happily, I watched as all the shifters calmed down and shook their heads as the call dissipated. A few still snapped and snarled, but we were getting there.
Ward jogged back up to me, gloriously naked. I think a bit of cake fell out of my mouth.
“Are you okay? Did anyone touch you? Are you hurt?”
I showed him the bruise on my hip where one of the cat guards bumped into me.
Ward swelled bigger, on the verge of shifting. “They will regret touching you. Every tuft of fur they own is forfeit.” He paused. “What are you eating, viper?”
“I was hungry, and you were doing your thing, so I wasn’t sure how long you’d be. I needed some breakfast. Do you want some?”
He stood unnaturally still. “Don't freak out.”
I immediately freaked out. Who said things like that? “Just say it.”
He put out his hands like he was settling a spooked horse. “That's not cake. That's a dragon scale.”
I held it up, turning it over. “No. Come on. Look at it! Soft, squishy, it tastes delicious.”
“That thing is ancient. I destroyed the armor and none of the shifters changed yet. But you are halfway done with that cake and they have calmed down. You are going to have to finish it.”
I looked down, my stomach doing flips. The last thing I wanted to do was throw up a relic. “No. I can't.”
You have to, I'm afraid,The Goddess said. What an unhelpful wench.Just two more after this.
Well, that was something to look forward to.
Ward sat down in the pile with me, his big hand coming to rub my back. “You can. I'm right here. You can finish.”
I hiccuped, took a deep breath, and kept eating. One small bite at a time until the cake—I was totally going to remember it as cake for the rest of my life—was gone.
Every single shifter popped back into their human form. The guards were so surprised, all the fighting immediately ceased.
“I need to stop eating holy relics, Ward.”
He smiled. “You're a problem solver, mate.” But he was looking down at our linked hands. And to be fair, they were glowing. Not the love struck kind of glowing but absolute-Goddess-power-type glowing.
“Shift, mate, and then we're going to tear apart those pens brick by brick. Those cages will never hold a shifter again.”
Yeah, that seems like the right thing to do. Ward bounded off to wreak havoc, leaving me to follow.
The Goddess' voice washed over me.Yes. Make them pay for touching my children. Use my gifts well.
I felt fearsome for the first time ever. I reached deep inside for the new pool of power sitting at the center of me and unfurled it over my body. Rising up and up from the pile of junk, I swelled with might and purpose until I crashed back down to the ground on four stumpy snake legs.
Fuck.
Chapter13
Evie
Ijust wanted a birthday drink. An escape from my boring small town that only knew me as the “jilted girl”. The best I thought I could hope from a boyfriend was someone who would regularly dust my collections.
The scrabble of rubble spraying across stones sounded again. Ward brought down another section of the pen and a chorus of yowls joined him. I couldn’t imagine him dusting anything smaller than this temple in the quite literal way he was now. Ward was having the time of his life. Thank Godds he ran off before he glimpsed the horror I’d become. His bear looked bigger and stronger than ever, like the Goddess had touched him, too.
The place was mighty tore up. The guards all left when the Queen of Flesh flounced out, proclaiming she was off to her “summer home”, claiming shifters caused too much trouble. I sat there with one of the strange metal boxes in my lap, guarding it so we could examine the contraption when Ward finished rampaging. I didn’t want it to get lost in the stream of shifters leaving the temple. They took anything they found, and rightly so. There was no way the shiny box didn’t connect to the Goddess’ call after seeing the same thing in the first temple. And if that was true, we were dealing with far more than a few relics.
