Page 38 of Monster's Melody

“Are you seriously going to sit there and tell us you’re not thrilled that he’s finally focused entirely on you?”Mikaela demanded.

“Well.I didn’t say that.”

We laughed.

And so it went.

Gifts appearing as if by magic in my classrooms, in the cafeteria where I usually sat for lunch, on my bed, in my book bag, on the trowel I was about to use in the Academy’s poison garden.

The gifts were always different, but so very perfect for me.

My favorite chocolates.

A scarf covered in tumbling kittens.

A hand-carved wooden cat to go with the wooden snake.

A handwritten recipe for cupcakes, along with its hard-to-get ingredients from realms I’d never heard of.

A woman, hand-carved in lighter and darker woods, sitting on rocks, with ocean waves all around.

A rare plant that only bloomed at night in March.

A hand-carved dragon with a woman riding it bareback.

“She looks like you,” Mikaela exclaimed when she saw it.

I’d thought the same thing.

“The workmanship is exquisite,” Kasi said.

“I wonder where’s he’s getting them,” Mikaela said.

The next day I asked that very question.

That was the day I finally tumbled head over heels for Vorzak the man.

I’d already fallen for his snakes long before, but I’d resisted that final step because the man had yet to make a move.

Then, he answered my question.

He’d carved each of those figurines himself, just for me, and that’s when I knew.

He’d been making moves all along.

I’d just been too blind to see them.

CHAPTER7

It wasright after I had that epiphany that Lydrel Zowen stepped back into our lives.

The Shadow Killer had either retreated or been forced into the shadows hundreds of years before and had only stepped back out of them when Kasi, the first shadow-beast born since his time, entered the shadows herself.

A lot of what we knew was speculation, rather than fact, but a lot came from the history books.

History written by the Varulvka who once upon a time had hunted the shadow-beasts to extinction in their attempt to catch the Shadow Killer.

History also, if not written by the shadow-beasts, certainly written for them, or at least for Kasi, the very last of them, who had found theirHistory of Shadowsin Blackthorn’s shadow library the year before.