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)
I knew better than anyone how much was at stake. It could have been so easy for me to have lived a lonely life. Love could have been something I’d only read about in a fairy tale. I’d thought about it often, how different my life would have turned out without the love of my parents, of Matti and his family, of Sienna and hers. Without Duncan’s.
Everything I knew about love and loyalty was because of them and their presence in my life.
You don’t spit in Love’s eye, my mom had told me once before my body had changed. You’ll make her mad if you do.
I don’t think you can spit in Love’s eye, Mom, I had argued.
The face she had given me had been only a little patronizing. Sí puedes, Nina, and she’s not as nice as you’d think.
It had been an interesting conversation, but I’d taken her words to heart. When life gives you a true love, you keep it.
And that was Duncan for me.
He was special, and I’d known it from the moment I met him, which had been about a heartbeat before I’d fallen in love with him. Up until then, I had always thought love at first sight was BS. An excuse for being horny, if anything. Then he showed up, and I suddenly understood just how the universe could drop something into your existence that your soul recognized belonged there.
Sometimes you learned real quick how you could love something more than you loved yourself.
“How old is he?” the man with the glasses asked quietly but still kind of weird.
“Two years old.”
There was a murmur among a few of the elders.
“His magic is strong,” he noted softly, attention locked on my donut.
“I know. When he was a baby, he felt magical but faintly, universally. The way most young magical kids do. I had hoped he might be an iron wolf because of his dark hair, or a mix—”
Matti’s foot bumped mine beneath the table.
“But since his tail and eyes changed, I started second-guessing that,” I finished telling them.
The woman with the silver-blue hair cleared her throat and leaned forward. “How did you manage to become the child’s guardian?”
My life with Duncan started on the night of a full moon.
Which shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. Full moons were the time when magic was the strongest. When it pulsed and resonated and reminded those with even the faintest trace of it in their cells that there was something greater out there. Something so powerful that, once a couple thousand years ago, give or take, our ancestors had thought the world was ending when magic streaked across the sky and fell to the earth, or so the stories from so many civilizations said.
It had always made me wonder if the first person to write about mysticism on full moons had been magical. Then I wondered if someone had taken them out for spilling a secret. That was the first thing we were taught the moment our brains could comprehend it: Don’t tell anyone.
On those special nights, I always had a harder time falling asleep than usual, which was why I’d been awake in the first place when I’d heard something big moving around in the bushes outside of my camper. I’d only been at that state park for two nights at that point, and the first thing the employee who had checked me in had said was “Watch out for coyotes.”
Animals didn’t concern me. It was everyone else that moved around on two legs that I side-eyed, at least until I got to know them. As many good people as there were in the world, it always felt like there were ten times as many not-so-good ones.
But the truth was, I hadn’t thought much of the noises going on outside my RV at first. By that point, I’d been living in it full-time for almost three years, and I’d heard and seen some things. For the most part, I liked staying at RV parks more than I enjoyed parking in the middle of nowhere. Being able to plug in to power and drain my gray tanks easily was a luxury I didn’t like living without. Having access to Wi-Fi, a shower that wasn’t confined to a tiny stall, and laundry facilities? If I’d wanted to rough it, I could have lived out of a tent, but I wasn’t that simple of a person. I loved air-conditioning too much, and the twenty-foot travel trailer I pulled behind my truck was more than enough space for one person.
Which was why I had been there that night in the RV section of a state park in Arizona, my reservation good for a whole month. Depending on how much I liked a specific location, and the ages of the people also around, sometimes I would stay for a month or two. Every once in a while, maybe three, if there was availability, among other criteria.