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I could feel myself being a completely irrational asshole and couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t be okay with Liam being a vigilante and judge Mazen for it. It wasn’t logical. There was just something about Mazen that set me off.

Radames, too, in a sense. He was calm, collected, and I couldn’t see a single tattoo on him that was associated with criminals. He was well dressed, groomed, and polite. I should have gotten along with him, and I wasn’t usually a judgmental person.

This was magic. I was feeling something I didn’t understand. I wanted to, but I didn’t have the time. I should have been making a stink about letting Lola go with them because I didn’t trust them. Lola was a victim, but there was just something about her, too.

I knew more about my jackal senses than I did anything else. Everyone here had a scent. The wolves smelled similar, but they were all distinct. It was like that with the vampires and fairies I’d met.

I was fairly certain I was scenting magic. I couldn’t compare because I hadn’t been around anyone without it since I got snatched. They checked my neck for the birthmark, but they even knew Sage’s parents had hers removed when she was a baby. They were pretty thorough about who was supposed to be here.

Lola hadn’t set off any red flags so far. She wouldn’t. She was the victim here. I was raging at whoever did that to her and I might have a little Liam in me. I realized Sage had come to join me while I was figuring out why a tiny girl who had the shit beat out of her was bothering me.

“I’m not sure who those guys were in their original life and Headmaster Mykene keeps say the past is the past, but I can feel they are connected to you in the present. Connected to all of us, really. But I don’t really know if that means friend or foe yet. It might be fluid right now.”

“What about Lola?” I asked.

Because I really wanted to avenge Lola, but I couldn’t figure her out at all.

“I can’t figure her out. I can’t see everything yet, but I can at least sense everyone has some kind of destiny, even if it’s not as big as saving the world. I don’t get anything from Lola. Honestly, I think that’s why her team hurt her. It’s unsettling.”

That made sense. We were getting all these new powers, and it was almost like cheating. If I met another vampire, fairy, or wolf, I’d know what they were without asking. I was also getting different reads on people.

It was different from Sage, but I could sense things about people, too. Like, some kind of read. It was how I knew that even though Liam was raised by criminals, admitted to murdering a man and cutting off his cock, I knew he wasn’t really a bad person. Lucian was the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler, but he abhorred violence. I didn’t know why he was back, but Lucian was going to be completely different.

“I sense things, too. It’s not the same thing you do and I don’t completely understand it. Lola is unreadable. The only reason I would know she was there would be that I could see or hear her. It’s unsettling, but I think you’re right. People do stupid things when they are scared. If her team were people who were prone to violence, they were already keyed up from everything that happened before we got dumped outside, they might have thought she was the enemy.”

“I’m betting that’s what I felt. They were trying to kill her, and they would have tried to kill anyone who caught them in the act. I can’t explain it, but I could sense there was a fight nearby and what would happen if we got involved without help. I don’t feel it anymore.”

“You feeling anything about these magical traps? The wolves aren’t going to help us. We might as well get the crystal since we’ve been stuck here for so long.”

“I think…the traps aren’t fatal, but the magic in them is going to make it hard to complete the trials. Think about it. They aren’t trying to kill us, just deter us. It’s not meant to be impossible, either, because all of us thought we were human. We can’t come at this with brute force. If we smash and grab, we’re going to get hexed. Look at them. They are puzzles and they can be solved by anyone.”

“Ha! That’s actually brilliant. Your first instinct is to get them down and destroy them. I thought getting them down and into a fire would work. Fire destroys everything, but I really don’t know enough about magic to know if that’s true with magic. I may have gotten us all hexed.”

“I feel violated,” Lucian said, joining us. “I get that I’m supposed to be all about the blood now, but I don’t like letting strangers drink from my wrist, even if it’s for a good cause.”

“Mate, no one cares. I don’t even like you and you sank those chompers in my neck without even asking. I’m the one who should feel violated,” Liam said.

“Sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

“What are we doing?” Liam asked. “Radames is kind of a ponce and I’d like to hit him. He’s too clean. I’m pretty sure he’s up to something. Mazen is good people.”

Magic was weird. I knew our guts were important, but I felt the exact opposite about those two.