Page 49 of Monster's Melody

Alongwhile.

When we finally rolled away from each other, gasping for breath once more, Vorzak told me something I should have known, but didn’t.

While I’d been sitting at Mikaela’s side, holding her hand, willing her to wake up after Zowen tortured her in the Shadow Realm, my mate was at ground zero where the battle for Blackthorn Academy was taking place.

He was one of the first snatched, right off the stairs as he’d been heading to the cafeteria.

He’d been flung into the Shadow Realm and because he was one of the first, he was also inside the Shadow Realm the longest of all the students and professors taken that day.

“It messed with my head,” he admitted.“I didn’t have a chance to fight or anything.One minute, I was here, the next, I was in the Shadow Realm.The worst part was that I’ve waited my entire life to hear my snakes talk to me and when I first arrived, I thought it was finally happening.”

“You heard the shadows, didn’t you?”

He nodded.“I didn’t know that’s what I was hearing.The whispers were so quiet, I almost didn’t hear them.”He fell silent.

“What were they saying?”

“It’ll sound hokey.”

“That’s okay.”I sat up and grinned at him.“I like hokey, or haven’t you figured that out yet?”

He chuckled.“They kept telling me to hide, to be still, to hide in the light.I told them there was no light and they told meIwas the light, which makes no sense, and that I should hide in it.”

“Is that how they said it?Hide in the light?”

“No, it was more like, ‘Hide inside your light.’”

“So what did you do?”

“I stayed as still as I could and focused on the memory of sitting in the garden at home with The Hissies spread out on the rocks behind me, basking in the feel of the heated rock beneath their skin and the sun beating down upon us.It worked until it didn’t.”

“What happened when it failed?”

“The darkness started creeping in.I was losing my way, forgetting who I was, forgetting my family, Yukiko, all of it, and then suddenly, Kasi was there.Her shadows wrapped around me and yanked me back to the Academy.”

I was suddenly acutely aware that I might have lost both my mateandmy best friend on the same day, if it weren’t for Kasi.

Hissies.

Fight.

Bad.

Zowen.

Shadows.

That’s when it hit me.“You’re in Inner Beast Management with Mikaela.”

“Yes.”

“So you were in that battle, too?”

“I was, though I was no more successful fighting the shadows then.The only thing I can say is that I wasn’t taken a second time.”

“Well, then, you must have been better, to have avoided that.”

“Okay, maybe minutely better, but only because I had warning this time, since I was on the other side of the room when he first appeared.Still, it was a total disaster and the Hissies werepissed.They can’t bite a shadow or inject it with venom, so they felt pretty helpless.”