what are you going on about? Let go of me.”
She shook him again before Fallon was there, pulling her away. “Did you do this, Reece? If you did, so help me I will make you pay.”
Reece adjusted his shirt, pulling it straight with a dirty look aimed at Shea. “I’d call my present situation punishment enough, but I have no idea what you’re talking about, Shea.”
“The golden eagles, Reece. Did you call them?”
Fallon went still beside her. She didn’t spare him a glance. He wasn’t going to be happy when he learned how much she had with-held of the pathfinders’ capabilities.
Reece’s face went cold, his eyes icing over and his mouth turning down. His gaze went from Shea to Fallon’s. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She scoffed. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t,” he said through gritted teeth as he gave her a warning look.
She ignored his warning. If he’d done this, he’d gone too far. “Bullshit. There were children, Reece. One of those beasts tried to take a child.”
“Shea, stop.”
Not this time.
“You and I both know you have the ability to do something like this. Do you have a beast call? Does the guild know about this?”
“What is a beast call?” Fallon asked from behind her.
Reece shook his head as Shea lifted her chin. She didn’t care who knew. If her people had done this, if they had set the beasts on the Trateri and the Airabel villagers, her loyalty to them would be at an end.
“Don’t.”
Shea looked at Fallon. “A beast call is rare. There are only two that I know of and it’s exactly like it sounds. It can call beasts. The ones I know of both date back to the cataclysm.”
“Can it control them?”
Reece threw up his hands and sat back down, shaking his head.
Shea ignored him. “No, at least not that we’ve found. As far as we’ve seen, it simply summons whatever beasts are in the area. If there was a way to control them with it, that knowledge has been lost to us since the cataclysm.”
“Share all our secrets while you’re at it, why don’t you?” Reece said.
Shea glared at her cousin, words coated her tongue but didn’t spill out. She had many things to say but couldn’t get them through the anger that had taken hold of her.
“They would have eventually forgiven you for abandoning your post, you know,” he informed her. “But not now. You’ve gone too far, Shea.”
“I already knew.” Fallon’s words fell between them like a blast of cold water.
Shea paused and looked at him. He’d known? How?
Reece scoffed. “So, you’ve already told him. I shouldn’t be so surprised.”
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Shea said, not taking her eyes off Fallon, who appeared calm and composed.
“No, she didn’t. Your secrets aren’t as well-guarded as you assume, pathfinder,” Fallon said with a quirk of his lips.
Reece’s face was arrested as he studied Fallon. “Impossible. Only pathfinders know about the call, and only a few of them at that.”
Fallon lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Secrets have a way of coming out. For instance, if a single child survives after his town is inundated with beasts shortly after a fall out with the pathfinders, certain conclusions are drawn.”
Witt. Had to be. He was the only other person from the Highlands that Shea knew of. He and Fallon had some type of weird relationship that she still didn’t understand. The other man was sharp and observant. It didn’t surprise her in the least that he’d put that together. It made her wonder what other conclusions he’d managed to draw about the pathfinders’ guild and the secrets it held.
Reece’s expression smoothed out as he studied Fallon and Shea. His gaze shifted to Shea. “This doesn’t change things. You will find it very difficult to come back after this.”
She stepped closer to him and leaned down. “You assume I want to come back. My home is here. My people are the Trateri. There is no going back. I wouldn’t even if I could.”
Fallon’s eyes seared a hole into the side of Shea’s head. She didn’t look at him, keeping her gaze focused on Reece.
“You don’t mean that,” Reece said. His expression said he thought she was bluffing, that he couldn’t fathom a world where she didn’t want to return to the fold.
“I do mean it.” She let him see she was serious, because she was. She’d built a home with the Trateri, found a place to belong. As much as