Marked Prince - Michelle M. Pillow Page 0,32

voice was gruff.

“Grace, guard them,” Grier ordered as he ran toward the door.

Grace grabbed hold of the sisters and pulled them back toward the side of the home while still craning her neck to see inside. Her eyes flashed with gold.

Fiora caught a glimpse of the floor. Shards of broken glass and pottery littering the entryway.

“Olena? Yusef?” Grier yelled.

“Are you in here?” Jaxx called in his now gravelly tone.

“What’s happening?” Salena whispered. “Who would do this?”

Fiora instantly picked up the future of a woman with red hair following a man as he carried a broken chair through the woods. The man glanced back, surrounded by stark sunlight and shadows, looking very much like an older version of Jaxx. For a second, she started to smile, thinking she might have picked up Jaxx’s future. That meant he would survive, and they were on the right path.

“I don’t think they’re here.” Jaxx appeared at the door, worried. “Someone tore up the house.”

“Jaxx, blood,” Grier called from inside.

“What does Olena look like?” Fiora asked her sister.

“Beautiful. Red hair. Flaming red. Um,” Salena gestured at her own face as if trying to recall. “Green eyes. Kind of mischievous, knowing expressions. Quick wit.”

Fiora felt her hopes crash. It wasn’t Jaxx, but his father. She pointed toward the forest to a tree she recognized from her vision. “I think they’re walking over there, or will be soon.”

“Jaxx,” Grace yelled. “Fiora thinks she knows where they’re going.”

Jaxx appeared at the door. His face was still shifted in his worry. “Where?”

“I can’t believe you were going to throw that chair into the fire bit to be burned,” a woman scolded from the direction Fiora pointed. The older version of Jaxx appeared on the path carrying a broken piece of furniture. “I held our son in that chair, and if your son ever gets his act together, I plan on holding my many grandchildren in that—”

“Our son or my son?” the man she assumed was Yusef answered. “You can’t have it both ways, firebird.”

“He’s yours when he’s pissing me off,” Olena quipped.

“Aunt Olena,” Grace called. “Are you all right? What’s going on?”

The woman instantly turned toward the home and smiled. “Grace? What are you doing…?” Her smile dropped as she saw everyone. “What’s happening? Has the palace been ransacked as well? Are the villagers—?”

“Everyone’s fine,” Jaxx assured them, rushing toward his parents. The man-dragon features retracted back into his body. He reached to help his father carry the chair. “What happened to the house?”

“I think people were looking for food,” his mother answered. “They raided the kitchen and took a few loaves of blue bread and dried wilddeor. We were in the village when it happened, trying to calm nerves after the general visited the palace.”

“They tried forcing their way into the guest room doors with this chair,” Yusef said. They set down the broken chair without carrying it back inside.

“And your father was trying to sneak it into the fire pit so he didn’t have to fix it for me while I was retrieving the cleaning droid from its storage bin to sweep up glass shards,” Olena added.

“I don’t like this,” Grier said, pulling Salena closer to him as if to protect her from the unseen. “General Sten and now intruders?”

“Well, either Nadja has started dabbling in making clones, or Salena found a sister.” Olena looked at Fiora and then Salena.

“I’m not a clone,” Fiora said, answering the implied question.

“I didn’t really think you were, dear,” Olena said. The woman’s future wove through Fiora’s thoughts. The impressions were sweeter than she was used to seeing—husband and wife holding hands, laughter as Olena ran through the forest, a stolen kiss in a crowded room. There was love here, as deep as Fiora had ever sensed before. But, also, beneath Olena’s surface smoldered a fierce protectiveness—of family, of shifters, of the people of Shelter City.

Jaxx had been raised in this love. She felt a pang of jealousy, or maybe it was better classified as longing. Her parents had loved their three daughters just as deeply.

Yusef and Olena moved to go inside the home, stepping over the broken glass.

“Why are they living in the forest without protection?” Fiora whispered to Jaxx.

Apparently, her whisper wasn’t quiet enough because all eyes turned to her.

Olena opened her mouth to speak but then quirked a brow. She stared at her from within the doorway. “You’re not like your sister, are you? We’re not compelled to answer you.”

“No, I—” Fiora began.

“Fiora has other gifts,” Salena put