Page 34 of Enchantment of Silver and Sea
“You know, I can always carry you again,” he offered, his deep voice sickeningly sweet.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
He was still laughing when I resumed trudging through the underbrush. “I wasn’t sure at first how I felt about this side of you that I’ve seen tonight, but I think she’s growing on me. Like a squirrel that chatters at you when you get too close to its nest.”
A squirrel?
I whirled around to face him. But my comeback died on my lips when I saw his grin. He had gotten under my skin again, and he knew it.
I gave him my back again. “If I’m a squirrel, what does that make you?” I asked.
“Hmmm…a lion, maybe?”
“That won’t work. I already decided that Nya is a lion.”
“And you two are my whining cubs,” Nya said without missing a beat.
The crack of a branch echoed to the left of us.
We fell silent.
Instantly, as if it were second nature, Nya stepped back and Kieran stepped forward, filling in the gaps between us. Kieran turned toward the noise and crouched slightly, as if in a fighting stance. Nya did the same, but facing the opposite direction. In case we were being hunted. Surrounded.
I was afraid to swallow, to breathe. We stood like that for several minutes. Waiting.
“Well?” Nya’s whisper was barely audible.
“I don’t see anything,” Kieran replied.
They straightened at the same time. Nya resumed her position at the front of our little line and started out again.
Reluctantly, I trailed after her. “What if it’s that evil wind?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised when the sound of laughter burst out from behind me. “Evil wind?”
“We don’t have a name for it yet,” I explained. “But it’s a wind-like phenomenon that apparently makes people go mad.”
Ahead of me, Nya made a noise in her throat and continued walking.
“Have you all ever encountered something like that?” I pressed.
“Nope.” Nya paused, holding a low-hanging branch so that I could pass. “And even if something like that does exist, doesn’t sound like there’s a whole hell of a lot we can do about it. If we venture out to hunt, and an evil wind gets us, then I guess that’s just what fate has in store for us that day.”
Well, she had a point there.
Sensing that the subject was dead, I decided to broach another. This was my opportunity to learn from them, to get more questions answered. “It’s getting darker the deeper wego. It must have taken a lot of practice to be able to see so well at night.”
Nya scoffed. “Or no practice, if you’re Kieran.”
I looked back at him with raised brows.
He pointed at his eyes. They were shadowed under the treetops, but whenever we crossed under a gap in the canopy, they flashed that shade of silver that rivaled the moonlight. “A gift from my father,” he said. “They’re not just for looks.” He considered a moment, then added, “On second thought,looksare exactly what they’re for, huh?”
Nya sighed. “You’re becoming absolutely intolerable.”
I ignored them both. This was the opening I had been waiting for, to find out more about his family. “So your eyes—the eyes you share with your father—allow you to see clearly in the dark?”
“Yes.”
