Page 169 of Whispers of Wisteria

There was a deepness in my movements, as if I were in water, and the pain fell from my awareness. I was surrounded by slowness and silence, and my thoughts were heavy.

I didn’t recognize this feeling. This wasn’t my magic.

Gloria was frowning at my face. “Her eyes are blue.”

“Well, duh.” Maria’s voice reverberated through my head. “They’re hazel.”

Gloria’s scowl deepened. “But Mu has always had green eyes.”

My exhaustion was distant, but still very real. I could feel it hovering over the edge of my awareness, but I moved past it.

I was sure it’d all catch up with me later.

I squeezed Gloria’s hand once more and looked at the lioness and hyena. I still couldn’t speak.

But she still seemed to get my meaning.

“Ican’tshift,” Gloria responded. “I told you that.”

My attention moved to her hands—to the drying blood around her wrists. A sense of wrongness spread through me as the scent of rotten magic grew stronger, heavier, with every breath.

I sat back on my ankles and looked at my wrists. I was younger than Gloria. Where her paper-thin skin had easily torn, I barely had a rash.

However, the inside—where Jameson and then Albert had bitten me—was still bleeding slowly.

I couldn’t speak, and Gloria didn’t. I didn’t have any idea what might happen—I was running only on instinct and something I read in Brayden’s gory fairy book.

I was breathless—it had to work.

She was staring at me. Her blood had gotten on my neck and shoulder when I’d fallen against her, and I wiped it until a thin layer coated my palm.

Then I rubbed my wounds, gathering my own.

I pressed my hand to her forehead as a door slammed open.

We were almost caught. There was no time to think.

Shift.

A velvet darkness shuttered over my vision, and there was a bitter, salty taste in my mouth. Then, in the distance, was a gray light reaching towards me.

I went to it.

The blank canvas transformed into a red and black house, surrounded by trees, under a red-orange evening sky.

Leaning against the climbing ivy, her back to the brick, was Gloria.

She was younger here—a child. Her crimson hair was curled around her shoulders, and her light pink dress was torn and dirty. She was crying.

“Gloria,” I knelt in front of her. “You need to shift.”

She startled and hugged her knees as she stared at me. “Who are you?”

“I’m…” My name was on the tip of my tongue, but I paused. My skin was humming, and it didn’t seem right.

“I’m Mu,” I said.

Because Bianca, right now, was a nobody.