Demonic Vampires (Supernatural Shifter Academy #3) - G. Bailey Page 0,15
freezing and filthy around me, getting in my eyes and dragging me down with its weight, but I force myself to think. What am I doing wrong?
It hits me in an instant, and I could almost kick myself for missing something so obvious: I wasn’t being detailed enough. It’s a bit like shapeshifting -- you need to be specific, or it won’t work. Once again I close my eyes and imagine London, but instead of a general view I focus on Speakers’ Corner itself: the colour of the leaves on the trees, the feeling of the dirt beneath my feet, the noise of the traffic on the nearby roads. And just like that, we begin to go intangible, the world around us fading to a blur only to be replaced with that same dirt and grass. I struggle to maintain my focus, throwing everything I have behind the spell…
And it works. Wiping the water out of my eyes, I look around to see that we’re standing in the late afternoon sun of London, still dripping wet, but exactly where we need to be. “You did it, Boots!” exclaims Landon, and I give him a weak nod before a wave of exhaustion hits me, making me stumble backwards.
Shade catches me, helping me onto a bench. “That was a hell of a workout,” he observes. “You all right, Boots?”
“I’ll be fine,” I pant. “Just need some time to rest.”
“I can’t believe you managed that,” Ruby says wonderingly. “And you took us straight here.”
“As long as we’re away from those Academy bastards, I’m happy,” Silas says dryly, sitting on my other side.
Shade puts an arm around my shaking shoulders, and I lean into the warmth of his body, exhaustion already threatening to overpower me. “Better text your contact now, Boots,” he tells me. “No time like the present, and all that.”
All I get in response from my mysterious ally is a terse reply of, Be there in half an hour, so we’re left to sit in the park and wait, hoping that whoever it is will be on our side after all. With the sun streaming down on me, I warm up rather quickly, although I still feel like I’ve run a marathon, no doubt the result of overexerting myself. I find myself sagging into Shade’s embrace, nearly nodding off a couple times as the wolf shifter absently runs his fingers through my hair, working the tangles out.
When I hear a voice calling my name, I’m sure I’m hallucinating. Not possible, I think groggily. I’m cracking up from the heat. I haven’t heard that voice in years. So long, now, in fact, that I had almost forgotten what it sounded like. And yet, my eyes go wide as a figure approaches us from further up the path, a person who might as well have stepped straight out of my past and into this new, crazy world. Disbelief filling me, I struggle to sit up. Peering at her with eyes that don’t buy what they’re seeing, I manage to utter one wonder struck word, the pendant in my boot rubbing insistently against the sole of my foot like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
“Mollie?”
Chapter 7
I feel like I’m in a dream. One would think that by now I would have learned not to make any assumptions about the world around me. Yet I find myself at a loss for words as I watch a phantom from my childhood cross over the swathe of grass to come to a stop right in front of me. She’s close enough to touch, and almost everything about her is like I remembered: the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, which are a bright cornflower blue; her stout stature; the way that she smiles. Her mousy brown hair is shorter than it was when I was living with her, and she’s lost some weight, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s her. This is the one woman I could have seen myself living with until adulthood, and yet, like so many other things, she was snatched away from me without any consent on my part.
Beneath the layer of awestruck wonder are so many questions that I barely even know where to begin. Mollie is human -- at least, that’s what I assumed -- and nothing happened during the time she was fostering me to give me the impression that she knew about shifters. What is she doing in London? How did she get in