Captive of Wolves (Bound to the Fae #1) - Eva Chase Page 0,53
easily as strength if we use them right.
Or Sylas could present the gift of the girl, and then we wouldn’t need to prove ourselves so much in other ways.
I pass into the forest, where the shadows drape the ground with patches of cool and the scent of pine fills my nose. I test it periodically for any taint of an intruder. About halfway through the stretch of woodland, I catch another wolfish whiff, but it’s a familiar one—one of our sentries.
One of ours, and loping toward me. I veer off course to meet her and pull myself back into my regular form so we can speak.
As the sentry comes into view between the trees, she does the same. It’s Astrid, gray-haired and wiry in both forms, her face just beginning the transition from wrinkled to wizened. She’s getting to the point where I’d have pulled her off sentry duty so she can spend more time resting her old bones if I didn’t know she’d sooner slash my face off than accept.
Astrid has fought in more skirmishes than I have, and she intends to fight alongside us until those bones give out completely. She wouldn’t still be here otherwise.
“Is there trouble?” I ask.
She lets out a short huff. “Not yet, but I can smell the start of it. One of the Copperweld cadre was sniffing around the borders, wanting to know if we’ve had any human girls come wandering onto our territory. I told him no, but he looked as if he’d have made his own investigations if I hadn’t showed my teeth.”
Copperweld—that’s Aerik’s domain. My back tenses. “Good that you did,” I say. “A lost servant is no excuse for them to intrude on our territory. If a human does ramble this way, let the keep know first.”
She bobs her head in acknowledgment and slips back into the shadows, leaving me twice as uneasy as before.
Aerik’s cadre is making inquiries all the way out here already. Do they specifically suspect us, or are we simply an easy target, one they had less concern about offending with their attempted imposition?
Either way, it amounts to the same thing: the mite is now bringing yet more trouble down on all our heads.
16
Talia
After another of August’s extravagant dinners, Sylas catches my elbow on my way out of the dining room.
“Come with me?” he says with the inflection of a question but the air of a command.
As he leads me down the hall, my pulse kicks up a notch. Did Whitt mention my eavesdropping to the fae lord after all—is he going to rebuke me in some way he doesn’t want his cadre to see?
Sylas doesn’t show any sign of anger or disappointment, striding along in his usual powerful, assured way. I can tell he’s keeping his speed in check so that I don’t fall too far behind. The brace on my foot taps against the floor as I hustle along, not wanting to seem like I can’t keep up.
When he heads down the steps to the keep’s basement, a deeper prickling races beneath my skin. I haven’t been down there except for a few baths in the small sauna room with its hot-tub-like pool. The thicker shadows and the cooler air that seeps through the wood make me uneasy, and when I pushed myself to explore a little farther once, I found the few other rooms along the hall were locked.
Not tonight. Sylas opens a door farther down from the sauna and motions me in. Two steps inside, I stop in my tracks, staring.
It’s not that the contents of the room are so alien. No, what’s startling is how familiar they are: a flat-screen TV, a shelving unit of DVDs, a device I don’t fully recognize but can identify as some kind of game system. The shelves at the other side of the room are stuffed with paperback and hardcover books in regular human-style bindings. Sure, the wooden shelves and the unit holding the TV look as if they’ve grown right out of the walls rather than being constructed by regular means, and the long, curving sofa that stretches through the middle of the room is upholstered with what looks like woven willow leaves, but still. I haven’t seen this much evidence that the world I remember really does exist since I was torn from it.
Tears I can’t suppress spring to my eyes. I inhale slowly, trying to steady myself, and propel myself toward the sofa. “This is—why do you have all this stuff?”