Page 18 of How to Hide Your Angel Kid

“You shouldn’t have carried me if you don’t want to be kicked!”

“I was going to bring you back to your own bed. Thought you’d be more comfortable sleeping there.”

“I—” Pinks ran out of steam. Galent hadn’t even come, and his priority had been making Pinks feel comfortable.

He pouted, feeling oddly touched.

Before he could say another word, a sound caught the edges of his hearing.

Galent glanced up at the same time.

It was a strange kind of laughter. Something was wrong with it, like it was split into two discordant notes, meshing together terribly.

“Thatthingcursed me,” Galent muttered, growing tense. He turned to the front door. “Stay here.”

“You can’t!” Pinks grabbed his arm. “If that person can curse you, whatelsecan they do? While you’re a statue? What if they mind-control you and use your body to hurt other people? What if they follow you here?”

The giant gritted his teeth. “What do you suggest we do?”

5

DANGER BEFALLS GALENT

“We stayin here and don’t leave,” Pinks said.

Was he crazy? “What the hell,” Galent said, angry heat growing in his chest. “I’m not the kind of person who sits and waits like prey.”

He’d been trying to track down thatthing,before he’d gotten distracted by Zarrie’s magnetic pull. Now that thethingwas within reach, Galent wanted to get rid of it once and for all, so the curse would disappear and he would stop being a danger to himself.

Pinks bared his teeth. “Yeah, well, I don’t want you leading danger back here, where Zarrie is. If you’re going to hunt that person down, don’t come back. I can’t risk my baby.”

“For all you know, thatthingalready knows where we are. It can probably sense its magic in my chest. That’s where the curse is.” Galent rubbed his hand over his heart, his skin crawling at the foreign energy lodged in there.

Pinks shuddered. “I’m not going with you. We don’t know what else there is in the forest.”

“You can hear them, can’t you?”

Pinks hesitated. “I’m not going out there.”

“Well, I am.” Galent strode to the back door, flinging it open.

The forest was eerily quiet. Galent set off at a brisk jog and strained his ears. The wrong-sounding laughter had stopped.

If he could smell... But no, he didn’t have a wolf’s sense of smell. All he had was his hearing, and his eyesight that meant nothing in a dense forest.

He crunched through the undergrowth, half-prepared to leap through the canopy into the sky.

Just in case he needed his wings... Galent reached back to tear open his shirt. Except he remembered turning into stone, and his friends’ warnings not to fly.

He could shatter his wings, if he fell. There was no way to put back a wing that had been ripped off his body.

With a frustrated snarl, Galent lengthened his strides, his head snapping up when the laughter rang out again. A shadow loomed up ahead.

Heat kindled in his stomach. He could breathe fire, set the entire forest ablaze.

Halfway through a leap, he turned his head, catching sight of a hidden line in the ground.

That he’d just crossed.

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