Page 60 of Renegade Kings
“And we’re stronger now. More than we should be,” Ryder added.
Maddox nodded again, and I could see the way he started to assess our situation. “We have to learn how to get stronger. At the minute, we know we have magic, but until we can actually use it, it’s of no use to us. Training to fight with blades will only get us so far. In fact, given what we’re going up against, it won’t get us far at all. We’re going about this all wrong.”
He was right, and the more that I thought about it, the more I could see how much time we’d been wasting. Magic was the problem here, and we wouldn’t solve that with brute force.
“You’re right. We need to find out more about the magic we have and what we can do with it. You need to practise your shifts too. You clearly have exceptional control, but you need to learn to shift in a single breath. It could be the difference between life and death in a fight. You have to be able to hold back your animal when it tries to take control out of a need to protect you. Holding that control can be distracting if you aren’t used to it.”
“This is good,” Maddox murmured, getting up from his seat and heading to the door. “We have a plan, direction. This is what we’ve been missing.”
“Erm, where are you going?” Ryder asked as Maddox reached for the door handle.
He looked over his shoulder at us in confusion. “To find Dean, that’s what we just said.”
“Right! I’ll come with you.” Ryder jumped up out of his seat and jogged to his side.
I knew I should probably go with them, but my bear was having none of it. Alyssa slipped out through the bathroom window to avoid the fight of telling us she needed to do something alone. She’d come back the same way, hoping that we hadn’t noticed her absence. I knew she would. I didn’t want her to come back and find us all gone, but mostly I wanted to stay to make sure that she actually was unscathed from whatever it was she’d got herself into this time.
“You should stay,” Ryder said softly, almost as if he could read my mind. “You can feel that she’s all right through the bond. She hasn’t come to any harm. But you need to see that with your own eyes.”
I nodded, feeling kind of stupid that I couldn’t say something so simple aloud. I’d waited for her for so long, stood in the shadows, waiting for a reason to tell her she was supposed to be mine. Now that I had her, I didn’t know how I’d suffered through her absence for all those years.
“We’ll find Dean, calm him the fuck down, and then see if we can find Fizzle. He’s going to be the best person to figure out how we need to train,” Maddox said, already heading out through the door as he spoke.
I didn’t respond. They were already gone anyway, but there wasn’t really anything else left to say. Alyssa and Fizzle seemed to have worked through their problems yesterday. We’d agreed that we were staying to fight by their sides. What other choice did we have but to trust them? Fizzle had kept the secret of Alyssa’s magic for so long, we just had to hope he’d keep ours as well, if not for us, then for her.
I dropped into one of the seats in front of the fire and settled in to wait. The fire wasn’t really needed. The palace was warm enough without it, but there was something comforting about losing yourself in the dance and crackle of the flames.
My mind flowed back to the day we’d stepped into this realm. The rush of magic that had floored Alyssa when she’d finally made her way home. Every time something happened here, it seemed to be accompanied by the power that she held getting stronger. I couldn’t help but wonder, how much could one person hold until it became dangerous? Is that why she was different? Why she had links with the courts she wasn’t supposed to?
Then there was us. I couldn’t remember when I’d started to feel differently or if I even did. No, that wasn’t true. There was definitely something going on inside of me. A hum in the background of my mind that hadn’t been there before. Had it come when I’d slept with Alyssa? The bond might not have been fully formed that night, but there had been enough for my bear to be satisfied that he’d finally claimed his mate.
“She makes us different,” a voice said inside my head, and I found myself nodding in agreement at the thought. “She makes us who we were always supposed to be.”
She did. Alyssa had shown me I was more than just a bear on the outskirts of his sleuth. She wasn’t afraid of me and I’d even learned how to manage my bear’s emotions while I’d been with her at the garage. Yeah, I still shifted when he flew into a rage, but it had been becoming less and less over the years. There had been hope that I wouldn’t always be such a liability.
“Mate makes us one. Makes us strong.”
I sat up straighter as the thought echoed through my mind. Except that wasn’t exactly what it was. Yes, it was a thought, but this one wasn’t one of my own.
“What the fuck?” I muttered, looking around the room like there was some kind of explanation in here as to why I was hearing voices all of a sudden.
When a chuckle that wasn’t my own echoed through my mind, I waited for my bear to fly off the handle. But then he didn’t.
The shock of what was happening was enough to have me considering my sanity because this wasn’t what being a shifter was like.
“How do you know what being a shifter is like? We were nothing but a shadow before.”
“So… it is you then,” I said aloud and then felt weird because I was essentially talking to myself.
“You’re not talking to yourself, you’re talking to me.”
“Yeeeeahhhhh, but that’s the problem, isn’t it,” I mumbled, standing up and pacing over to the small table that seemed to be constantly refreshed with food and drinks even though we never saw the person who was doing it.
I grabbed a glass and filled it with water from the jug, wishing it was beer even though it was early morning.
“I can talk to my bear,” I thought, more to myself than the animal in question. “This isn’t a problem, this is… happening.”
A wave of panic threatened to take hold of me, but I shook it off, suddenly seeing the upside to all this.