Page 43 of Poison

There’s the sound again but louder this time, more demanding. I turn again but nothing. Someone is seriously messing with me at the moment. I look over to where I saw the hooded figure but their spot is empty. A feeling of dread washes over me, the blood in my veins feeling like it’s becoming electrified.

“Psssst.”

“Whoever you are, will you stop with that annoying sound and just show yourself!” I snap, losing my patience.

I wait to see if whoever it is reveals themselves. And wait some more… I start to get annoyed, my foot tapping against the pavement. After what feels like a lifetime but must only be a minute or two, I take off down the street and head in the direction of home. The walk through the streets is quieter than I thought it would be, which means everybody must either be trying to find out what happened, or there’s something weird going on.

“How ignorant are you?” a voice hisses. I smirk as it registers who it belongs to.

“Well if you didn’t disappear on me, I wouldn’t have left you there,” I sass back as Kevin grumbles something under his breath.

“Didn’t psst tell you where I was?” he shoots back.

“That was you?” I say stopping in my tracks.

He gives me a wide toothy grin. If I wouldn’t break something doing it, I would follow through with the urge to smack him. But I learned my lesson when I did it the first time, and I had to have a healer re-knit my bones back together in my hand.

“Why wouldn’t you show yourself instead of trying to catch my attention like that?” I demand.

“Well it’s got something to do with the supernatural council lackey following us,” he throws back.

“Wait,” I say with a gasp. “What?”

My head whips side to side frantically as I check our surroundings. He nods his huge head to the right, just enough for me to see the movement but not so much that someone else would notice it.

I look in the direction he nodded and I can see the hooded figure from earlier. So they were definitely watching me then, I know it’s the same one because the body shape and height is the same. I turn my back on them, and Kevin moves to my side. Then I spot another hooded figure further up the street.

“Look,” I whisper-yell.

He follows the direction I’m looking and I hear him growl a touch. Something moves to my left and I turn just enough to see it, making my heart plummet in my chest. There’s another one, but this one is different from the rest. The sheer size of them means this has to be a shifter of some sort.

“What do we do?” I ask, my mind conjuring up all sorts of scenario’s. “Who are they?”

Kevin’s eyes are still on the biggest one, and I look, my heart beating erratically in my chest. My earlier assumptions were right. They are most definitely a shifter, their head is no longer covered. A guy with lines all over his face stands there with his huge arms folded across his chest, watching us. His face set in stone, the lines have got to be scars of some sort, because shifters heal rapidly and for someone like him to have them, he must have ended up close to death more than once.

“Poison?” Kevin’s voice is a low rumble. “Don’t overthink anything, just act on instinct.”

“What’re you talking about?” I hiss at him.

My eyes widen as a blue light catches my attention out of the corner of my eye. I look to the original one I saw, my eyes widening as blue magic swirls over their palm. The big guy pulls the cloak off, and my anxiety spikes as adrenaline floods my veins.

“I’ll find you,” Kevin says.

Emotions I can’t describe are swimming in the deep pools of Kevin’s ruby-coloured eyes, and my mouth drops open as his body shimmers with magic, almost blocking out my view of him. I hear a hiss that sounds like there are thousands of snakes surrounding us.

The magic dies down and I can’t believe my eyes. I have to crane my neck back to almost breaking point to be able to see Kevin’s face. He is enormous, he has to be at least sixty feet tall. His head is taller than some of the buildings surrounding us.

“Oh my god!” I breathe in both shock and awe.

“Run, now!”

Movement catches my eye, I’m frozen in place and I see all three of the hooded figures stepping out of their spots, their eyes trained on me. A blue bolt comes flying in my direction and I have to duck into a crouch to narrowly miss it hitting me. The heat of the magic whizzing past over my head. An ear-splitting roar fills the area, forcing me to cover my ears, but it doesn’t stop me from hearing gasps. My head whips up to see all three of them looking up into the sky.

My gaze follows theirs, finding Kevin in his huge form. I can’t help but smirk as I see the magic users step back. Kevin’s massive tail lifts off the floor so high into the sky it’s like he’s trying to shroud us in darkness. Then, with a flick, it crashes into the stone floor with enough force to fracture the ground like an earthquake.

Craters open up as cracks rush out in either direction, the concrete splitting and lifting as they continue on their way. The power of it makes the three people jump out of the way as fissures turn into holes and the ground starts to fall away.

“Move it!”

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