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Curran rose. “I have something to show you.”
Thank God it wasn’t a pickup line.
As we followed the shapeshifter down the hall, Curran asked softly. “How are those arms? Sore a bit?”
“No,” I lied. “How’s your knee?”
A few steps later I decided to put my worry to rest. “You were joking about the whole please and thank you thing, right?”
“Meant every word.” A little light danced in his eyes and he very deliberately said, “Baby.”
No.
He laughed. “You should see your face right now.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Would you prefer ‘darling’? Or maybe ‘cupcake’?” He winked.
I gritted my teeth.
We went down the spiraling stairs into the inner yard of the Keep. The Pack Keep had trouble deciding if it wanted to be a medieval castle or a twenty-first-century prison. Its main tower rose, looming, forbidding, a huge square building, utilitarian to the point of being crude. Jim once told me that it was built by hand with minimal technology and took almost ten years. It probably took a lot longer. The Keep went on for many stories underground.
A solid stone wall enclosed the main tower, carving a chunk from the clearing. I had never been inside the yard before. It was spacious and mostly empty. Some exercise equipment at the far wall. A large storage shed. A water tower. To the right a group of shapeshifers stood by a tall tank full of liquid. The last time I’d seen a tank like that, it contained dark green healing solution Doolittle had magicked, and Curran floated in it naked.
This tank contained clear water. Within the water sat a loup cage: bars as thick as my wrist, laced with silver. Something dark moved in the cage. The shapeshifters moved back and forth. Among them were three near seven-foot monstrosities in beast-form whose shaggy heads blocked the view.
“What is that?” I headed for the cage.
“You’ll see.” Curran looked smug, like a cat who stole the cream and thought he got away with it.
As we crossed the yard, a dark shape blotted out the stars. A dark outline of a long colossal body armed with huge membranous wings passed in silence high above us and vanished behind the tree line.
It couldn’t be. Even during a flare, the possibility of such a creature was too miniscule to contemplate.
The shapeshifters parted before Curran. A familiar glowing body shifted within the cage. A reeve. “How did you…?”