fact he was again touching me and it didn’t hurt. How extremely unfair was it that he could instigate a one-sided touch relationship between us. Made me want to touch him more than ever, just because it wasn’t allowed.
“I’ve picked up its power trail again,” he said abruptly, breaking through the tightly woven tension between us, dropping me to my feet. “Follow me.”
I wanted to click my heels and salute him, but he was already gone, and my smartass action would be wasted. Oh well. There would most definitely be another time.
Shadow moved with determination now, seemingly locked on to this power trail. My ability to keep up was waning, and as my wolf gently whined in my chest to be free, I wondered if maybe it would be best to shift. I was about to ask him when we rounded a particularly dense set of trees, stepping out to stand at the edge of a frozen lake.
When Shadow Beast had stolen me from Torma, it had been a few weeks into winter, but where we were now was dead of winter weather, and I wondered if time was moving faster on Earth than in the Library of Knowledge. Or were we really far north in Canada?
Not that time really mattered when right in the center of the frozen lake was a… creature that was so far beyond anything I’d ever seen, it almost stole my breath away.
“That’s it?” I choked out, instinctively stepping closer to Shadow.
“Yes. It’s an abervoq.”
He said it so fast that I barely caught the foreign-sounding name, but I sure as fuck couldn’t miss the creature itself. Standing close to the eight-feet height of Shadow, it was a twisted beast. The top part looked like a bull, with huge horns, a snout, and large eyes. The bottom half was a shaggy bear with black fur that blended well into the darkness surrounding it.
Darkness wasn’t the only thing surrounding it, either. Nope. There were piles of carcasses, hundreds of them, filling the lake with death.
“All the animals,” I choked out. “It killed them all.”
Moose, bears, big cats, small bunnies. Nothing had been spared from its wrath.
“Abervoq are blood stealers,” Shadow whispered. “Akin to vampires, but it’s about more than survival for them. It’s a sport. They will try to best each other with the most kills. They’re one of the more dangerous creatures that exist in Shadow Realm.”
“Great,” I replied just as softly, unable to look away from the midnight creature braying at the moon. “How do we stop it?”
I could feel his gaze on me, heavy and considering, and I had to decide which scary creature to stare at. Shadow Beast won.
“Have you figured out how to touch the Shadow Realm again?” he asked me.
I shook my head, mute. Words were in my brain, but I couldn’t get them out of my mouth.
“Then we’ll have to subdue and contain it in one of the prison rooms back in the library,” he said, “until you learn to control your abilities.”
I was nodding, all the while wondering about these abilities. What abilities did I even have? Wolf shifters should not have been able to touch the Shadow Realm, so why could I? And would I learn to do it again fast enough to stop Earth from being consumed?
Shadow stepped out on the ice, growing in size until he was larger than I’d ever seen him, and once again I was wondering if there was an upper limit in his size changes? And would I ever get to see it?
Inky grew with him, the mass of smoky swirls swelling until it was a storm cloud of darkness behind the lord of darkness himself. From my angle, the two of them together was truly terrifying. Weirdly enough, in this moment, I wasn’t afraid of Shadow. We were fighting on the same side, and it was kind of nice to have an ally. For a change.
Slipping across the ice after him, Shadow, who was quite the distance ahead of me, was thankfully clearing a path through the dead animals left scattered by the creature. The blood remained, though, painting the ice into a grotesque artwork of red and black slashes. It was clear some of this blood was many days old, while other kills were fresh red spatters of death.
My boots sloshed through it, and I knew I had to pick up the pace to reach Shadow’s side. It got harder to keep my balance as the blood grew thicker and