set free and your souls with them, you'll tell me what happened here."
Now I felt the troubled energy in the cavernous room suddenly rise to a peak and the voices screamed, "They took it! They took it! The cloak! They took it!"
"Who took the cloak?"
"Traitors!"
"Was it other familiars?"
"Other familiars, yes, other familiars! They do not understand...they do not know what they do...and our spirits will be bound here forever more..."
As they cried out in pain so intense that I had to force myself to keep standing. I had to draw deep into the power I had taken from Variel. If I had just been my old self, ordinary Bevan, I know I couldn't have listened to that pain without getting sucked up into it. I would have forgotten everything and never left.
"I'll get the cloak back," I said.
"You will never be able to do it...one poor little familiar..."
"Look at me. I'm not one poor familiar. I've stolen the power of a demon. I'm Bevan Soundhunter, and I'm also Bevan the Devourer, and I have sworn myself to freeing our people for good, so that we are no longer born into this bondage. I understand that breaking the covenants was not enough. I want more."
"You want to break the original bond?" The voice echoed terribly.
"Yes!"
“So no more familiars will exist."
"But we will still exist," I said. "Shifters. Who make our own destiny."
Some small part of me, of course, thought about Helena. Of growing up beside her, of the bond we shared, and how I helped her learn to be a better witch, as all familiars and wizards learned together.
But in the end, I knew we could never gain any power without our freedom.
The building started to crack apart with hundreds of shattering echoes--or so I thought at first, but really, it was all the rusted chains snapping and the vaults opening all through the chamber, and from them tumbled hundreds of dusty cloaks and capes and pelts, made of feather, fur, and hide. Most were tiny, but a few were from larger animals. All of them looked dirty and stuff and smelled like a tomb, and I knew they'd been here for longer than we could figure. Long enough to be completely forgotten.
"Devour my soul!" one lone wail called out, and I knew it came from the tiny pelt of a mouse.
Ew. Eat an ancient...mouse skin? This might be going a little too far.
But I could also feel the desperation, laced with rage, of the spirits. They were testing me, I realized.
I picked up the tiny, stiff, dark thing. Its fur had rubbed off long ago, I guessed, and it could have been a mummified bat wing, dark and shapeless.
Wincing, I bit into it.
The power I'd taken from Lord Variel surprised me, and made the wing snap easily in my fangs, and then it seemed to shrink away so I didn't even have to swallow it. I just absorbed it. I ate the other half, and I felt the soul of the mouse shifter, residing inside me like a candle in the window of a dark house.
A tiny spark. But what could many sparks do?
Now I knew what I had to do.
I promised not to devour anything, but this was different. This wasn't for me. This was for every shifter who had been turned into a familiar, from their ancient ancestor to now. I would devour them all, and then I would set each and every one of them free.
But I needed the first cloak. The one that rested on the pedestal. Until I freed her, no shifter would have freedom.
I started shoving them into my mouth, tiny ones and large ones, devouring every last soul in the temple, and with every soul I devoured, I felt stronger until I was blazing with their power. The power of every shifter that had ever been trapped here.
"Revenge," they hissed. "Revenge... You are the one we seek!"
"I am the one," I promised them, and I felt like the words were destined just for me.
I thought I was just Bevan, and all this time...
I was the one.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Jenny
"No!" My scream was anguished as I heard Bernard calling me again and again, from some lonely state, as if he had nowhere else to turn.
Bevan tried to rush to me so fast that he slammed my horns into the doorframe and almost stunned myself. He ducked low, pulled his wings in, and rushed straight to my side.
"Bernard...!" I gasped at him. My hands, outstretched, grabbed onto