Total pages in book: 254
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
So different that someone would try to hurt me to kidnap a puppy with red eyes and a blue flame on his tail.
Not once but twice.
But I was going to save telling these two about those incidents a little while longer. We had other things to get through first. I didn’t need Matti or Sienna distracted when there was nothing anyone could do about the past.
With the arm I wasn’t using to support his sleepy body against mine, I pinched the blue flame to show them. They gasped like kids on Christmas. I’d expected to get burned by it, too, the first time. That hadn’t happened, fortunately, or else doing anything with him would have been impossible.
“It doesn’t hurt?” Sienna asked in a voice I was pretty sure I’d only heard her use on the day she’d met Matti. Like she was in awe.
Me too, Sienna, I thought. There were magical beings—races that could trace their lineages back to ancient lore, who could look and act like normal people when they wanted to—and there were magical beings that looked like puppies. Specifically, a really, really cute puppy with big, innocent eyes and a sleek, soft coat.
“No.” I pinched the flame again to show her.
Her wide, pale green eyes moved from me to Duncan and back. This was as close as she got to being speechless, which said a lot because she wasn’t the quiet type either. It was part of the reason why we had become friends as teenagers and managed to stay such good friends for so long. We had never struggled to talk to each other.
Until now.
But I guess I could take responsibility for that. I had kind of blindsided them by showing up like this. There wasn’t much I kept from them, but I’d hidden this until now since they’d been in Europe for most of the time since all this had gone down. I hadn’t wanted to spoil their vacation.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered eventually, still stunned.
I bit the inside of my cheek, taking in her black hair and a shade of skin that was almost milky, no matter how much sun she got. She was the first person to say she wasn’t classically beautiful, but she was the cutest. Her round face and pink cheeks hid the fact she had super sharp teeth sometimes and an ultra-protective personality all the time. An hour ago, she’d opened the door wearing a fitted red blouse and black pants with her hair tied up in an elegant bun, and now, she’d swapped that outfit out for a sweater and pajama pants I would’ve bet my money she’d taken out of her husband’s drawer. This was the version of her I knew the best, but I loved Sophisticated Sienna as much as I loved Sweatpants Sienna.
And she loved me even though 95 percent of my wardrobe consisted of T-shirts I’d picked up in towns Duncan and I had visited, paired up with jeans or jean shorts. My three nice blouses were hand-me-downs from Sienna herself. She and Matti both thought it was “so cute” I had four pairs of shoes total: hiking boots, beige sneakers that matched with everything—and if they didn’t, too bad—Crocs, and one pair of sandals.
Then I looked at Matti, who I had known over a whole decade longer than I had her, since we had become neighbors at three years old. I took in the brown hair that used to be so long he’d had it in a ponytail for a while, but now he had a “real job,” as he called it, and had to keep it professionally short. His skin was on the medium spectrum of tan, and those features that I’d seen grow from a toddler to a thirty-two-year-old had gotten sharper with high cheekbones and a defined jaw. Plus, he’d gained around two hundred pounds over that period. And gained a mustache at some point since I’d last seen him; one I wanted to give him crap about, but he somehow managed to pull it off. He might be into clothes now, but he hadn’t lost the twinkle in his eye: the dead giveaway a mischievous little asshole still lived in his body.
They were such a beautiful couple. Such great friends. The best people I knew, other than my parents.
And you would never, ever know at first glance that they both came from old magic that allowed them to turn into something straight out of a folktale—a wolf, or a werewolf, as some chose to refer to themselves. And by werewolves, I meant the “real” kind: giant wolves, not some hybrid bipedal monster like in most movies.
To “normal” people, people born without magic—the word almost everyone threw around as an explanation to what gave certain folks the ability to become something out of a tale—Matti and Sienna didn’t look any different, other than the fact they were both considered taller than average in most cultures. But to those with sensitive noses or feelings—me included—who had been born with a magic-heavy bloodline, you could just tell there was something else in them. Some people liked to say they were “blessed” when they referred to their ancestries.