“My Da thinks if you don’t do the candles and incense then your prayers don’t work. He’s also a murderer, so you probably shouldn’t listen to him.”
“Aren’t you?” Lucian said.
“Not like my Da,” Liam muttered.
“How are you feeling?” Khalid asked.
“Actually, better than I have in a long time, so if anyone is planning retribution on the fairies for kidnapping me or shooting them with an arrow, Saffron really helped me. And so did Liam’s friends, so thank you.”
“They appreciate your thanks. I don’t know which one is yours and if they can only communicate with you, but they all like food and they won’t touch what you left since you meant it for your familiar.”
“Listen, I don’t feel any magic powers, but I do feel stronger. I’m not sure I can take on a werewolf and I don’t know the first thing about magical traps, but I’m actually feeling good enough to try.”
“I’d feel better with Doris, but me, too.”
“Who’s Doris?” I demanded.
I didn’t have any right to ask that. He probably would have cut that man’s dick off for anyone and I was reading too much into it.
“My switchblade. Relax, she’s a sexy thing, but she’s not a redhead with legs for days,” he said, winking at me.
Ugh. Liam just had this way of making me blush.
Ididn’t know what I just ate. My mother read all the labels until I was old enough and then it was up to me. I didn’t put anything in my mouth unless I knew what it was until now. I trusted a fairy and then I trusted a bird.
And I felt amazing. I could tell Liam had problems with authority and definitely with Lucian, but he knew how to behave when it was time to work. Lucian was showing us the best path to get to the crystal without being seen.
We hid behind a boulder while Lucian showed us the tree where the crystal was.
“The noise I was hearing before was heartbeats. There are twelve wolves hiding near the crystal. I had to drink to get moreof my magic. Are you noticing anything since you ate food from Fairy?”
I thought about it. I didn’t hear heartbeats and I couldn’t scent them. I didn’t know if Liam could communicate with them, but I couldn’t do that, either. Yet, Iwaspicking up something.
“They don’t want to fight us. They mostly intend to put on a big show of scaring us off and chasing us. But if we attack them, theywillfight back and we will lose. Lucian isn’t strong enough to take on that many wolves yet and they all have training on fighting vampires at full strength. If we’re going to get the crystal, we have to get the wolves away so we can focus on the traps the witches left.”
I didn’t know how I knew any of that, but I couldseethe outcome if we went after the crystal. I could sense the wolves’ motivation for the fight.
“That’s a handy trick,” Khalid said.
“Also, the witches weren’t messing around with the traps. They are a lot more dangerous than the wolves. I don’t knowexactlywhat they do, but we’d have to go back to the castle to see Maya to be healed. It would mean we wouldn’t have enough time to complete the trials.”
“That’s cheating,” Liam said.
“It’s not,” I said. “They aren’t trying to kill us. None of them are. They said this was part of their thesis. I’m guessing they are being graded on using their magic against new gods in a nonlethal way. It’s aboutcunning.Headmaster Mykene said some of us go bad, even in our new lives. There’s more of them than there are reincarnations. They are soldiers.
“Andtheydon’t have death on their minds, but I can feel a group nearby that wants a battle, so they have the excuse to kill. They just make me feel weird. And I swear, I’m not making this up because you all have cool magic and I don’t.”
“No, that’s actually cool magic and will come in handy in the trials. It’s also a major hint, but I don’t know about all pantheons and we don’t know enough about your lineage to make a guess. And you’re right. I can’t sense who wants a fight and who doesn’t and I’m not supposed to. Someone close feels like death, but I don’t think it’s another death god. There’s no reverence for it. Theyrelishit,” Khalid said.
“I can’t sense it, but the animals can. They want us to warn the wolves because they consider them kin,” Liam said.
I got that. The wolves didn’t want to hurt us. I didn’t knowhowI knew that, but they wanted to chase us and herd us away from the prize. They very specificallydid notwant to fight any of us because they didn’t consider the fight fair.
That was probably because they had been born wolves, trained their entire lives, and gotten into this university by earning it instead of just being born with a birthmark. Liam had said several times his dad was a killer and there was clearly some kind of grooming going on there to turn Liam into one, so he ran.
Lucian had a lot of his vampire powers already and I doubted Khalid’s father didn’t teach him self defense. I had some weird new sense where I could predict what was going to happen, but that didn’t mean I knew how to fight.
And if I could see the future, I couldn’t actually see how to do this.
