Page 41 of Monster's Reward

Shadow?I reached for the path that connected Shadow and me and hoped she would hear my call.

No answer.

I climbed to my feet and started walking.

Shadow!I tried to increase the volume of my telepathic call, but it’s hard to shout in your mind when there’s no real sound to your voice.

Kasi.The voice was faint, but I heard it.

Shadow, I’m here. Where are you?

Kasi.

Keep talking. I’ll find you.

Kasi, hurry. He’s hurting Mikaela.Her voice was getting louder, so I told myself I must be going in the right direction, even though as far as I could tell, I wasn’t getting anywhere fast.

The shadows around me didn’t waver and everything looked the same.

Even though I was used to going in and out of the shadow realm regularly, and in fact, had spent a huge amount of time in the shadow-room over the past couple months, this shadow-pocket of the shadow realm did not feel welcoming like all those other spaces did.

Instead, it felt menacing and dark, and the further into the realm I traveled, the darker and more foreboding it seemed.

Kasi, hurry!

At that moment, the silence was broken by a shrill scream.

Chills ran down my back as I recognized that voice. Mikaela!

I raced toward the screams that seemed to echo around me as the shadows got darker and darker.

I burst through a particularly dense shadow and there they were.

Mikaela was being held in place by dark shadows that were seething all around her, seeping into her skin and slithering from her pores.

She screamed again and writhed in place, pinned in mid-air by nothing but those damn shadow-tentacles.

Her skin rippled and a leopard came snarling free, then disappeared, sinking back into her skin.

“Mikaela!” I ran forward, but fire erupted all around her, then the leopard appeared again.

Some of the shadows wrapped around her struggled with others and it took a moment for me to realize it was Shadow.

She was clawing and raking at the shadow-tentacles, dragging them away from Mikaela, but every time she got one away, another attacked.

Mikaela’s skin rippled again and her leopard let out a pained roar that shook the shadow realm with its power.

The shadows covering her, all but Shadow herself, withdrew for a split second.

Seeing my chance, I leapt forward, exploding into my shadow-beast form.

I wrapped my shadows, those tentacles I’d used to kill three men a lifetime ago, around Mikaela and Shadow, pictured the shadows of our closet back in our dorm room andflungus there from the shadow realm.

One moment, everything was gray, the next we were staggering out of the closet.

My knees buckled and the three of us landed in a heap on our dorm room floor.

I heard Jahrdran and Jasmine’s voices exclaiming our names, but my eyes felt weighted shut and my entire system was shutting down.

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