Page 18 of Savage Prince

If we don’t find fuel soon, I’m going to be a wolf for as long as it takes to get food in my belly, which increases the risk of getting shot by some sheep farmer who doesn’t care that wolves are on the endangered species list.

Still, I’d be tempted to go after one of the fluffy creatures grazing on the grass-covered hills below the forest if I knew we’d have time to feed out in the open without getting caught.

Or if I knew what Juliet eats in her phoenix form.

What’s a typical diet for a mythical bird? I send out a mental query, asking her if raw meat sounds okay, but she doesn’t respond. Maybe I’m too far away from her down here on the forest floor. Or maybe she’s too weak. The fact that she can hear my telepathic communication at all is new. She couldn’t before, probably because she’d been kept from her shifted form for so long as a kid.

She’s different than she was before in other ways, too…

Like the fact that she clearly finds me attractive and isn’t very good at hiding it. I guess I should be happy that I make her blush and shoot burning glances my way, but I’m not. I miss my growly Juliet, the one who fought her feelings for me tooth and nail.

What that says about my mental state, I’m not sure, but I try not to think about it too much right now. Thinking burns calories and I don’t have any to spare.

Finally, just as the sun is sliding closer to the tops of the mountains, we come to a clearing high on a hill with a bench perched in the middle. It’s a memorial to Bill and Carol Rascombe, a couple who apparently loved to hike the trails around here, and it smells like it’s been sat on recently.

Juliet lands on the back of the bench just as I’m finishing my sniff and lifts a wing, pointing toward the valley below. I jump up onto the seat, gaining enough height to see what she sees—a seaside town with a bustling Main Street, three church steeples, a soccer field where kids are playing, and enough hustle and bustle that we might actually find a bus station.

And clothes.

There’s a subdivision not far from the soccer field, and I can already see that several families are drying their clothes outside. Thank God it’s summer, for more reasons than one. Scoring clothes will be easier and we still have several hours of daylight before nightfall. If we’re lucky, we’ll be on the road by then, or at least have found a safe place to hole up for the night, where it won’t be easy for Hammer’s scouts to smell us.

Do you have the strength to shift again before we head down?I ask Juliet.

She answers with a sparkle of feathers and a beat later is sitting naked on the bench beside me, her hands braced on her knees and her breath rasping audibly in her lungs. “Yeah, but that’s it. I’m tapped out.” She lifts her head, blinking in the late afternoon light. “And I’m seeing stars. I need to get something to eat before I’m unconscious.”

Same, I say.I would have taken down a sheep a few miles back, but I wasn’t sure if you could eat it as a phoenix.

“Of course, I could have,” Juliet says, frowning my way. “Phoenix are the garbage disposals of the shifter world. I could have eaten carrion if we’d come across any. I guess we really didn’t spend much time together as kids.”

You also didn’t spend much time in your shifted form, remember?

She sniffs. “Still. I’m sure I knew what I could and couldn’t eat. That’s pretty basic stuff.”

You shifted for the very first time just a couple of days before you flamed out,I say, leaping off the seat.

“What?” She stands, reaching out to brace herself on the back of the bench. “How is that possible? I’m in my twenties, right?” She blinks and stands up straighter, recovering her balance. “At least, that feels right.”

You’re twenty-three. And it’s possible because your dad had you micro-chipped for most of your life,I say, starting down the path toward the town.I’ll explain on the way. Stay close and come up with a cover story in case we run into someone who wants to know why you’re naked and travelling with a giant wolf.

She huffs. “Like what?”

You could say you were raised by wolves and I’m your sexy interspecies boyfriend?

“Very funny,” she mumbles, following behind me. “That’s a book, isn’t it? The…Jungle Book? The boy in that was raised by wolves? Why can I remember that, and I can’t remember why my father didn’t want me to learn to shift?”

I don’t know.I have way more questions than answers when it comes to phoenix shifters, but that’s another reason to go to New York.There isn’t much information about phoenix shifters, but we read one’s journal when we first got to Lost Moon. He was a former student from New York City. The end of his journal said he was going back there to work for his family’s business. That was only thirty years ago. With any luck, he’s still there and we can look him up while we’re there.

Juliet’s expression brightens. “Yeah, that would be great. I have a decent amount of instinctive knowledge, but it would be nice to know if there’s any way to recover memories of my former life.”

Deciding to leave the talk about whether that’s what’s best until later, when I have more strength, I veer off the trail, taking a shortcut toward the houses at the base of the mountain. They’re arranged in semi-circle around a park and playground, with the soccer fields and what I see now is a small school on the other side of the recreation area.

But it’s summer, so the school should be empty. I tuck that knowledge away for later in case we end up looking for a place to crash tonight. Even an empty school cafeteria should hold enough smells from days gone by to make our scents harder to track.

As the woods thin, Juliet slows, scanning the backs of the houses on the opposite side of the field of tall grass. Some of them are fenced, but others are open and have people puttering around in plain sight. An older man works in his garden, a young mother holds a hose while her kids run through the spray, and a man in a tiny swimsuit lies asleep on a lounge chair in the sun.

He’s covered in oil and, judging by the muscle car in his driveway and carefully coifed comb-over, looks like a douchebag. But he’s also enormous and drying his clothes on a line beside his covered jacuzzi tub. Finding clothes my size isn’t easy. It might be worth risking a trip into his yard and hoping he’s not a light sleeper.

I fill Juliet in on my plan and she nods. “Yeah, and I can grab a t-shirt and wear it like a dress until I find something better.”

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