was a teddy bear inside. Well, mostly.
When it was time to go, there were more hugs and more tears. Seeing Liam’s mom wave to us from where she stood on the front porch, wrapped in a blanket, brought warm fuzzies to my stomach.
She was going to be okay. Everything was going to be okay.
It had to be.
Chapter 13
We drove all night and the next day, taking turns at the wheel or asleep against the car windowpane. Jasper only slept in one-hour bursts so that he could bring our shield back up quickly, but we could see in the strain on his face that it was taking its toll on him. When we stopped for food, he ate enough to feed three grown men, but it did nothing to put energy back into his eyes. Holding this shield spell was obviously taxing. We were about ten minutes away from the general area that Liam said he felt pulled to. I didn’t want to say anything to anyone yet, but I’d activated my seeker power a few hours ago and felt for that darkness that I’d experienced in Faerie. I tracked it… and it was strong. Like scary strong, a darkness so powerful it made me feel nauseous to search it out.
I was hoping that if Liam’s dad had possibly used the sword to control the creature and gain entry to the portal, he’d killed it. But this dark creature I was feeling was definitely not dead. The closer we crept, the quieter the car became. Liam was sitting in the backseat next to Elle and me, eyes closed.
“Pull over,” he suddenly commanded, eyes springing open, and we stopped the car. Trissa pulled it into a canopy of trees where there was some parking for a hiking trail. The other cars in our caravan pulled over too, and we filled the last two spaces. It was dusk, just getting dark out, and hikers were coming in off the trail and to their cars.
“It feels very dark here,” Jasper observed.
We all knew he wasn’t talking about the setting sun.
Liam frowned. “I regained consciousness coming out of these woods; I didn’t know where we were exactly, but I touched a tree to catch my breath, and then they knocked me out again. I’m going to seek that tree now.”
“Seek a tree? Can you do that?” Elle looked impressed.
Liam simply nodded.
Seeking was hard to explain. Every object or person had an energy. We were all made up of energy. Once we experienced that energy, we could find it again.
I’d healed the final remaining crystals from Montana in the car ride, and now all nine of them were clean and ready to be placed at the base of the tree in Faerie.
We were in the home stretch.
“I’ll hold these. You lead us,” I told Liam, shouldering the backpack with the crystals as we got out of the car.
He nodded, nostrils flaring as he surveyed the woods around us. No one spoke; we didn’t dare mess up his concentration. Instead, we just followed him down the path, past a few human hikers and then off the trail and into the woods. Some heads turned, eyebrows narrowed at our little band of over twenty-five people stalking off into the woods, but no one said anything.
That dark feeling I was seeking got closer, and when I stepped on something hard, I glanced down to see that it was a piece of bone. Not a full bone, a piece. The ivory shard was attached to a ball joint, and it made my stomach roil.
“Getting creeped out,” Elle bellowed in a sing-song voice as we were plunged into darkness. Just like that, we’d walked into a thicket of trees, and the sunlight was so minimal it made it hard to make out the shadows before us.
“Screw this. I’m shifting,” Cam exclaimed, pulling off his shirt, which caused Elle to stare lustfully at his bare chest.
I grinned. Even in these dire times, my bestie’s mind was in the gutter.
Another one of Liam’s men pulled off his shirt, and he started to shift too. It was nice to have two beast shifters in our group so that if this evil creature was as bad as I feared, we had some fighting power. Now, not only were we plunging into darkness, but we were surrounded by the sound of cracking bones from their shifting forms.
Liam stopped dead and clutched his chest. At the same time, Jasper grabbed his head in pain.
“What’s wrong?” I pulled