If I can work out a way to prevent people from being affected by bonding potions, there’d be no reason foranyoneto hide.
Chapter 10
Ever
Bellamy brushes my sweaty hair out of my face tenderly. “That’s enough, pretty girl, I’m calling it for the day.”
Hands on my knees, I suck in ragged breaths. “No, I can do this. It was a little easier this time, I just need to practice more.”
Ledger appears with a cup of water, face pinched. “You've been at this for six hours. It's okay to take a break.”
Easy for him to say. Pretty sure Ledger's never had to stop and catch his breath in his life. I can just picture him as a tiny, buff toddler doing pull ups in his sleep, the jerk.
“You're overthinking it and stressing yourself out. Come on, I know what'll get your mind off things for a little while,” Bellamy says, gently unclenching my fist and lacing his fingers through mine.
Of courseI’m overthinking it. The only factor here that isn’t working isme.Even Kiara can borrow powers on command, and though she tries to hide it, I’ve noticed how much it hurts her.
Arson’s cool, soothing shadows envelope me like an emotionally dependent snake. A little alarming, a small threat of being strangled to death, but mostly offering the same type ofcomfort as a weighted blanket. He helps switch off the anxiety chewing at my brain, telling me that I’m not good enough. That I’m a failure. There’s never been a problem I haven’t been able to solve before, but with every day that ticks by with barely any progress, my frustration grows.
Even the children in the compound can do this as easy as breathing.
Stewing in my terrible mood, I follow Bellamy automatically as we leave the training arena, but get distracted the second I see we’re headed for that shimmery barrier that I noticed was off-limits on my first day here.
Bellamy types in a code in a discreetly placed box embedded in the rock. The moment the barrier disappears, he ushers us through quickly, and not two seconds later, it snaps back into place. The jagged blue glowstone inlaid in the ground leads the way, keeping it from being too dark to see. It took a day or two to get the lay of the land, but I finally figured out that blue means daytime, while purple is night, giving people a sense of time and normalcy without access to the sun. Arson, Myles, and Ledger are two steps behind, never leaving either of us unsupervised since the kidnapping.
I get it. I hate it, but Iget it.
Even Bellamy filling me in on his latest prank against Adam, hacking his social media and posting about how devastated he is that his girlfriend left him because he’s a cheating piece of shit with a small dick, doesn’t completely lift the dark cloud over my head.
Following the winding tunnels, we eventually end up in front of a modern door sturdier than all the others, and Bellamy inputs another code before turning the handle and waltzing in.
I stumble over my own feet, my bleak mood melting away in favor of awe.
It’s like we’re in a giant geode, the light reflecting across the numerous gemstones as prisms and sending rainbows dancing across the curved edges of the walls. Throughout the cavern are a series of nests on multiple levels, a pile of brightly colored dust that glitters in the light in the center of each. And fussing over those piles of gemstone dust?
Birds in various colors, flames dancing along their brightly jeweled feathers.
Phoenixes.
“Holy hell,” I breathe, taking it all in.
Kiara is bent over one nest, cooing at a phoenix like it’s a casual, everyday occurrence. I catch a flash of black creeping up the veins in her wrist before she notices us and jerks back, hastily tugging her sleeve down.
“Fates, you startled me.” Hand fluttering to her chest, she takes a deep, shaky breath.
The phoenix beside her squawks and Kiara rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, Steve, I heard you, calm your tits.” She yanks an emerald out of the wall, giving it to the agitated bird. It starts pecking at it, heat rising in the room as we watch in awe as it begins to crumble under its attack. As soon as it’s reduced to green ash, it rolls their egg around in the gemstone dust, scooping it up and trying to bury the egg again.
Myles’s voice is filled with awe. “Is it insulating them, or is it an instinct to keep their eggs hidden from predators?”
Kiara grabs a couple of different gemstones and gives them to a phoenix that’s looking particularly distressed, flinging a rainbow of ash out of its nest. “A little of both. It’s also what makes them different colors; whatever gemstone dust they’re exposed to while eggs affects their coloring when hatched. I still can’t figure out how they choose which one they’re drawn to, though.Clearly.” She shoots a dirty look at the one that flings every single one of the new stones right back out of its nest.“They’re usually so sweet, but once they lay their eggs, they become high maintenance assholes that drive me to drink.”
“I can't believe they’re actually real,” I breathe, chest constricting, slowly spinning to take in every detail and sear it permanently into my brain, desperately wishing I had a camera.
How many magical things have I missed out on in life because I didn’t know where to look?
Kiara frowns in my direction. “Your mate is a wolf shifter, right?” When I nod, she asks incredulously, “So where did you think dragon shifters and the like came from?”
Talk about feeling like the stupidest person in the room.
