Page 86 of The Wild Moon
What’s a girl got to do to be loved properly? Why was it so difficult?
Unsure of how to handle his misdirection style of conversation, I got myself right back up and wandered past the fire to peruse his selection of books. My fingers dragged along the spines. I recognized the names of maybe one in fifty of the books I passed. Most of them were rare or sounded rare.
“Hey!” I said as a familiar title stood out to me. “I know this one. I’ve read this one.”
I pulled out Froller’sThe Ancients,smiling as I reminisced about the books of old.
“My dad got me hooked on these, you know. All about the ancient shifter mythology. He was big into it, loved to talk about it.”
I’d long since stopped thinking of my parents as “the people who raised me.” I’d started to think of them that way shortly after my Soulshift, when I still wondered if they had lied to me on purpose and didn’t care for me, but I’d moved on. I knew the love I’d felt was real, that they had thought of me as their daughter.
Frig, I miss you guys. I’m sorry, Dad. I was trying to follow your clues, but things…things got weird. I’ll figure out a way. I’ll find you, wherever you went. I promise.
“What?” I asked when I finally snapped out of my reverie to see Hunky McHunkster staring at me.
“Mythology?” he asked.
“Yeah, you know. Legends, lore. That sort of thing. Stuff that isn’t actually real, but people used to believe was?”
To my surprise, Mr. Mysterious’ shoulders slumped. “Is that what we’ve become?”
I frowned. “We? What is thiswebusiness?”
“Page seventeen,” he rasped, the strength gone from his voice. “Turn to page seventeen.”
“Ooookay,” I said, doing as he said and looking at the page and the depiction of the god Vir, Champion to Amunlea. “Now what do I–Holy shit.”
Mr. Mysterious was standing in front of me. At some point, while I’d flipped pages, he’d approached. But gone was the long hair, blue eyes, and sharp facial features of a sex god.
The picture on the page now stared back at me.
Except it was alive.
Chapter Forty-Five
“No,” I whispered. “That’s not possible. It can’t be.”
The face of a wolf stared back at me. Giant yellow eyes stared down the snout. Horns of blue fire curved up from the top of its head. The rest of his body was the same, minus the wings of darkenedsomethingI saw fold in against his back. Whatever it was, it wasn’t feathers.
One hand–human, like everything from the shoulders down–was reaching out to the side, a long golden spear gripped firmly in his oversized fingers.
“Impossible. It’s not real,” I said. “This isn’t real. I’m dreaming. You don’t exist. None of you exist.”
The warrior-wolf hybrid faded, replaced by the face of the sexy shirtless man in sweatpants I’d come to recognize.
No, I corrected,the sexy shirtless god.
“I assure you,” the god said, speaking to me directly. “I am quite real.”
He spoke. To me. A god, a freakinggod, was speaking to me.
“I need to sit down,” I said, snapping the book closed and staggering past Mr. Mysterious and gently finding my way into a sitting position.
He wasn’t Mr. Mysterious to me any longer, I noted in a distant corner of my mind. I knew his name now. I knew who he was.
“You’re Vir,” I whispered as if saying it louder would make it any less true. “I’ve read about you. You were the Champion of Amunlea. Empress of the Gods. You were–”
I stopped speaking abruptly. If he was real…
