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L ucian was certainly complicating things. I completely understood he was probably in a trance when he ate all our food, but I was starting to worry about what he actually wanted to eat and why the wildlife were worried about him.

And now that I was thinking about it, I had some extra senses, too. I saw a jackal, so that clued me in I was Anubis, but Anubis was always depicted with the head of a jackal. I appeared to also have the senses of a jackal. My hearing was a lot more sensitive and so was my sense of smell.

Liam looked like he was the only one who didn’t believe Lucian and was about to start beating on him again. Lucian wasn’t just going to have to make it up to Sage. Liam took it personally if anyone looked at her wrong. That probably meant something. We also all requested Sage for a reason, so even if we were all mad at Lucian at the moment, he was supposed to be with us.

“No, I have extra senses, too. Sage smells good, but the rest of you are a bit ripe without a shower. There are people outside the tent waiting to ambush us and I’m pretty sure they are all the same type of supernatural, like Lucian says.”

“Fuck that,” Liam said, storming out the tent.

Ugh. We were all pretty cranky without breakfast, but Liam was about to charge out there and take on an unknown amount of supernaturals who’d had their magic their entire life. All Lucian and I had was super smell. The forest animals might have communicated with Liam because he was an original shifter, but they might have the same loyalty to other shifters and might not protect us.

I grabbed Sage and hit the ground as soon as we exited the tent. I couldn’t see them, but they were shooting arrows at us. And they could move faster than I could see because I could make out a blur zip across and knock Liam off of his feet.

Liam was spitting mad, and he was probably the only one of us who’d actually been in a brawl before. My Baba enrolled me in boxing and taught me how to finish it, but there were rules in the ring. I’d never actually fought anyone outside of the ring before.

Someone darted to me and the next thing I knew, Sage was ripped from my arms and disappeared. Liam hadn’t noticed yet or he would lose it. Don’t ask me how he did this because I didn’t think he had it in him, but someone tried to rush Lucian and he just… snatched them out of the air and dangled them by their neck.

Lucian hissed at them and I realized his eyes were glowing red. The man he was holding was ethereally beautiful with large pointed ears, so I was guessing fairy or elf. And he looked absolutely terrified of Lucian.

Lucian dropped him when an arrow buried itself in his thigh. The fairy was off in a blur and so were the rest of them. Whatever Lucian was, the fairies recognized some of it and they didn’t like it anymore than the wildlife did.

Once we figured out where Sage was, we really needed to figure out who or what Lucian was because we might be in danger from him, too.