“Highborn from the looks of it. Is she marked?” another voice asks, and I’m immediately shoved forward.
I’m bent over at the waist, completely naked thanks to the sudden shift into Pigeon earlier. Whoever is holding me is also naked, and I feel his limp dick skim my ass and start to grow firmer. I release a warning growl that goes ignored as someone brushes hair from the back of my neck and checks the skin there.
“No mark,” the first voice declares, and I’m pulled back up. I’m brought face to face with another naked massive shifter who has long straight black hair, blue eyes, and a dimple in his clean shaven chin. He brushes the white strands of my damp hair out of my face, and his eyes light up with interest as he takes me in.
I snarl at him, but this only seems to amuse him. The guy holding me tries to stop my continued struggling to get out of his hold, and I wince when he yanks on my hurt hand.Note to self, if we survive this, never punch a shifted gryphon in the face again.The blue-eyed guy in front of me doesn’t miss my pained response, and he reaches out and grabs my chin in an effort to make me go still.
“You’ll just hurt yourself worse if you keep that up, flower,” he chides, his eyes locked on mine.
I’m still not sure if staring contests with gryphons hold the same weight as they do with wolves, but I fix my lavender gaze on him and refuse to look away. I stop struggling, the fight slowly leaving my body, and the absence of it invites shock and exhaustion to flood me.
“That’s a girl,” he tells me, the firm grip he has on my chin softening ever so slightly, but he doesn’t let go. “Now what’s a pretty purple flower like yourself doing way out here?”
His bright blue eyes run over my features like he’s searching for answers, and I internally cheer as he’s the first to break eye contact with me.
“You don’t look like a rebel,” he observes, picking up a strand of my hair. “And yet you bear no mark.”
I debate the best way to handle this situation. My initial instinct is to stay quiet, but as I subtly pull in a deep inhale of the blue-eyed shifter in front of me, it confirms my suspicions. He has the windy lilac scent of a gryphon, but that same hint of citrus that the hunters that captured me and Zeph in the woods had. I thought maybe it was because those gryphons were related somehow, but now I’m realizing that the citrus smell might be what the vow does to a gryphon’s scent.
These shifters are the Avowed, and maybe, just maybe, the truth of how I got here will work on them like it did with the Hidden. I stare into the curious blue eyes of the shifter in front of me and hope they don’t have an Ami that will see the parts of my story that I’m hiding. I’ll just have to deal with that later if it happens.
“My name is Falon Solei Umbra,” I offer. I take a second to look around at the strange gryphons surrounding me and let fear and confusion leak into my eyes. “I woke up in this strange place a couple of days ago, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to get back home ever since.”
“And where’s home, flower?” Blue Eyes asks me, concern leaking out of his tone, but it does little to mask the cunning glint in his eyes.
“Colorado.”
A large tan gryphon slams down onto the sand on my right, and the force with which he lands sends vibrations through the ground up into my legs. His arrival pulls my thoughts away from the plausible cover story I’m trying to pull from my ass. This must be the commander that Blue Eyes requested. That thought turns to ash in my mouth as another massive, well-muscled shifter touches down gracefully on the bank just behind Blue Eyes. Large gray and white wings give a quick flap and are then quickly folded back, giving me a clear line of sight at a familiar face. My eyes go wide with shock and then quickly narrow with stupefied confusion.
What the fuck is Ryn doing here, and why does he smell different?
The end of book one
