Page 201 of The Queen’s Shadow

The way he said it, again, gave me the uncanny feeling that he had meant to say something else.

I’ll take care of you, Kasha.

His unspoken words hung in the air around us and I wondered if this panther shifter knew that he was dangerously close to pushing me over the invisible line I had drawn around my heart.

As he tucked me in, and dropped a kiss on my head, I got the impression that he not only knew, but he was counting on it.

I had never known Rycon to stay inside the lines, and I didn’t think he was going to start now.

I just hoped he knew what he was doing.

I was so broken, there were barely any pieces of me left to break. If he stepped on what was left of me, I wasn’t sure I would be able to put myself back together again.

‘Be careful with me.’ I wanted to say as he slid out of the room, but the words never left my mouth. I fell asleep, the lyrics from the song we had just danced to still floating through my mind.

Instead of the nightmares that usually plagued me, I dreamed I had found that place over the rainbow. Rycon was there, and he was smiling at me, and everything felt right and safe.

‘I’ll always find you, Kasha.’ He whispered, and we danced together through my dreams until the gentle Olkuyrbe sun woke me the next morning.

Conrad

Rhatid! The Viridian Desert was just as awful as Dossidian had warned. We had been travelling for nearly two weeks now, and everything still looked the same.

I was losing confidence that Dossidian knew if we were even travelling in the right direction. It was exhausting, trying to maintain a shield around us to keep out the magick spores that often appeared in large, nearly invisible clouds.

Thanks to Jeremy, we had been able to stop several more heated arguments from escalating into something more violent.

Raven was clearly hanging by a thread, and I was doing my best to keep my chin up, and stay positive for her, but even I was finding that difficult. There was a creeping anxiety and sense of dread in my gut that we may never find our way out of this scorching, endless sea of sand.

As rough as the days were, the nights were ten times worse. I lay awake each night listening to the ghost of my grandmother as she tries to coax me out of my travel pod, insisting that she needs to show me something.

I knew it wasn’t her, but the phantom was so convincing, it was still hard to resist at times.

Mi miss har so much…

Without The Board, or Patricia, I felt just as lost in my own head as we were in this endless wasteland.

What was even more confusing, was there were some nights when the phantom that called to me manifested as someone else. She didn’t speak to me the way Patricia did, but on the nights the desert sent Nytara to my pod, it was especially difficult to stay inside.

Unlike Patricia, as far as I knew, Nytara was very much alive. I worried that the shadow that stood silently outside my domed tent was not a phantom at all, but the enemy, stalking us and waiting for her moment to strike.

We were running out of food, water, and energy, and from the dark circles that were painted beneath Raven’s eyes, it was clear we were also running out of time. I wondered who the desert sent to Raven’s tent at night. I would neva ask her, though. I was getting more and more worried each day that she was going to finally snap and take the entire Dominion down with her.

“How much fartha wi need to travel, Dossidian?” I asked, unable to hold the question back any longer, despite my suspicions that he had no idea himself.

From the look on his face, I was right, and we were very, very, lost.

Mi hate when mi right…

“We’re fucking lost, aren’t we?” Raven snapped. I frowned and checked that our shields were secure. They were. There wasn’t a spore in sight, and Raven was losing it.

Dossidian pursed his lips, clearly trying to think about how to best answer her question. Raven’s eyes flashed with rage, and she lowered us to the ground, dropping us into the sand a little harder than necessary.

She whirled on Dossidian, her long dark hair cutting through the shadows that seemed to constantly swirl around her these days. How she managed to call shadows to her in the blinding sunlight was beyond me. The laws of magick and physics did not seem to apply to her, and her grip on her aura was slipping more and more each day.

Jeremy looked at me, his brow pinching together with concern.

“The spores… are they back?” He asked me, speaking quietly so only I would hear. I shook my head.