Page 55 of Found in Obscurity

He placed the book in one of the bags at the back of his bike as he ruminated on it and situated Kit in the front.

“Well, let’s see what we can find, huh?” he said to Kit as he pushed out into the street. Kit yipped at him, sticking his tongue out into the wind as Lorin pedaled home.

Lorin chuckled at the silliness, wondering whether human Kit was just as adorably weird as his animal side was.

He realized he was quite excited to figure it out.

Kit

The newfound hope had him feeling even more jittery than he usually did. After all the time spent trapped in his animal form, after all of the traveling and searching and trying to find a solution…there was Lorin.

His mate.

His witch.

His answer.

Well…kinda. A potential answer. The possibility of one, for sure.

Finding him was nothing short of a miracle in Kit’s mind. Being felt back was one of the best things to ever happen to him. Realizing his human side was able to resurface, even if only for seconds at a time, was intoxicating. And having Lorin finally learn that Kit had been in there all along just lit a fire under his paws. He wanted to sit on top of Lorin’s head and force him to do nothing but read and look for a permanent solution to Kit’s problems.

Which was why watching Lorin stare at a blank page for the past fifteen minutes had been…disappointing.

He had the library book open in front of him, and was studiously flipping the pages, making notes in a little notebook he had next to the book, frowning and offering opinions to Kit who did his level best to convey the correct messages back to him—that he was a raging lunatic because the library book was as empty as the notebook Lorin was writing in. Kit recalled the empty pages in the book Lorin had got from the Magic Shop, but he’d chalked that up to being an anomaly in the otherwise normal book and proceeded not to pay it any more attention than that fleeting thought.

But now…he wasn’t sure that had been the right decision.

Was that other book just as empty as this one? As in…completely?

Because other than the title on the leather binding, there was literally not a single word written in there. No drawings, no graphs, no spell recipes, nothing. Just page after page being flipped and Lorin staring at it for a while before turning to his notebook and jotting stuff down. Kit tried to read his notes, but Lorin’s handwriting was about as discernible as whatever he was seeing in that book was.

Was Kit wrong to hope?

Was his mate actually just… He didn’t want to say it, but watching Lorin mark another empty page with a sticky note made the word very loud in Kit’s head.

He placed his paw on Lorin’s arm and the witch turned his head to give Kit a small smile.

Kit darted in and licked his nose affectionately.

At least he was pretty to look at.

Chapter thirteen

Lorin

“So you don’t havea ghost, you have a shifter,” his grandma said, her beady eyes scrutinizing Kit in a new light.

“Apparently,” Lorin said, still reeling over the information himself.

He’d ridden straight home after the library to read and actually ate and drank a gallon of coffee like a normal functioning person until he heard the rumble of his grandma’s car parking outside. The house door had swung open for her without needing to be touched, the threshold shaking with welcome.

She was a sight for sore eyes, literally. If anyone had firsthand information on shifters, it was her.

They’d settled in the living room, her raven flying up to watch from the rafters.

“And you didn’t notice?”

Lorin scowled. “You didn’t either!”