Okay, that made me laugh.
I sat on the edge of my bed. “How do I turn my lights on?” I asked, defeated. Yet as soon as I said the word “lights” they came on, dim, but on.”
“They react to your voice,” Myel said, a tall shadow in my room. “If you say the word again, they’ll get brighter. They have three settings. You can also say “lights low” or “lights full” to get to the two extreme settings.”
That made sense.
Since he was being so talkative… “How do you disappear and appear like that?” I asked. I then added, “lights,” to bump the level up one, bright without being overpowering.
Myel took two long strides to reach me, sitting on the edge of my bed beside me.
“It’s something my clan can do, but it’s not common among shifters or even other chiroptanthropes. We call it shadow-stepping. Essentially, whenever I’m not in full light, I can jump to another place of shadow nearby. I can’t go far, and I have to know the place I’m going to.”
That sounded curious and wonderous, but also… limited.
Myel continued. “When I leave here, I jump to a shaded spot in the trees below, then walk across campus and shadow-step back into my room. I could shadow-step four or five times to get across campus, but I don’t like to use it if I don’t have to. It’s a secret.”
Useful.
“But enough about me, I can sense your unease. What’s wrong?”
I told him about my day. Though, for his sake, I left out how Rook had comforted me and how interested in me Vyns seemed to be.
“You can’t trust him,” Myel said, shaking his head, referring to Vyns.
“I don’t.”
“He’s done horrible things for Saldrea.”
I was sure, though, from what he’d said today, he’d hated all of it. That was assuming he wasn’t lying.
God! Why did everything in this world have to be so complicated? Though, if three men had been interested in me back on earth, that would have been nearly as complicated.
“I’ll be careful,” I said to ease Myel’s worries.
“Good. Now you should rest.”
Great idea.
We stood and undressed. When Myel pulled his shirt off, I noticed blood-stained bandages around his abdomen, covering a wound just under his ribs on his right side.
“Jesus, what happened?” I asked, kneeling to get a better look.
Myel sighed. “Please don’t worry. I’ll heal. It’s nothing.”
It’s nothing? Like Fuck!
There was a good six inches of blood on these bandages.
I looked up at him. “Training?”
He nodded.
God that burned me, that shifters were treated like dirt, their lives worthless.
“How quickly do you heal?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine by tomorrow,” he said, but his face — and the sense of insincerity I got from him — told me another story. He couldn’t fully heal this in just a day.
