Blazing the Trail (5 page)

This does not work for me.

King doesn’t appear to care.

He didn’t care about what I said, either. He went to the door and waited, giving me a steady look. There’s something regal about him, and even in cat form he has a commanding presence.

I got it. This was an order.

“Something’s up,” I guessed. He gave a meow of epic proportions and paced from left to right in front of the closed doorway.

Impatient for me to get a move on.

“Go out in the hall. No peeking,” I instructed as I opened the door an increment. If a cat could grin, he did—but he did what I told him to do, as well. He slipped through the gap like a wraith. I knew he’d be waiting right outside. I could hear him pacing. I tugged on my jeans and a hoodie, then debated the merit of waking up Meagan.

I decided to go alone and crept after King, wanting to be sure I didn’t wake the Jamesons. Once I left the bedroom, King made a beeline for the front door, moving faster than I’d ever seen him move. I winced as I turned the dead bolt, trying to do it as silently as possible, and he streaked out into the night at the first opportunity.

I was right behind him.

“Should we fly?” I asked, intending to shift shape if it would help. I wasn’t sure how far we had to go.

He didn’t answer. He just leapt off the porch and into the shadows beside the step. One second he was standing in the snow, glaring at me, and the next he had hunkered down to peer into the shadows of the evergreens planted there. I could see only the swish of his tail.

I wondered whether he’d done some disgusting cat thing and brought me a “present” of a bird with its head bitten off. I had not come out in the night for that kind of token of his so-called esteem.

On the other hand, I was up, so I might as well look. I bent and pushed the greenery aside.

Mozart was lying in the snow. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t even rapidly rotating between forms, which is a sign of distress in a shifter. He’s a soot-colored cat with a white bib and white socks. He was terrifyingly still.

“Is he dead?” I asked, wondering what had happened to him.

King narrowed his eyes, and then I noticed the faint whisper of Mozart’s breath.

The subtle beat of his heart.

He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t exactly in the prime of health, either. I crouched down beside King and touched Mozart’s fur. His body wasn’t as warm as usual, but the feel of his heart beating beneath his ribs made me feel better.

I looked at King. “You brought him here.” He bowed his head regally. “But you couldn’t bring him into the house without my help.” King crouched down beside his friend’s body, as if standing guard over it. It must have been terrifying to leave him alone, even for a few minutes.

No wonder he’d been so agitated.

“But what happened to him?” I still was thinking that this was some kind of cat-related injury. Cat shifters are more savvy about navigating the human world than regular cats, but still, their form has its risks.

King gave me an intent look, as if I was missing something really obvious. Then he batted at the snow beside Mozart with one paw, indicating something. At his gesture, I did see it. The porch light shone on Mozart, casting his shadow across the white snow.

But his shadow was wrong.

There was a bite out of it.

This was not the most encouraging sign possible. I looked around for spell light or apprentice Mages or even ShadowEaters but couldn’t see anything.

King was watching me closely, so I tried to hide that I was freaking. I didn’t know what we could do to help Mozart or fix his shadow, but him lying wounded in the snow on a winter night—when his attacker could still be at large—couldn’t be the right answer.

I scooped Mozart up into my arms and headed for the doorway, casting a glance at the night sky. I couldn’t see any ShadowEaters, which had to be better than the alternative. King was right against my legs, slipping into the house when I opened the door. His eyes shone as he watched me lock the door; then he followed me to the bedroom on silent feet.

Mozart remained limp.

But alive.

I realized then that we had never learned his real name, that he just responded to the name Meagan had given his cat form, as if he were a cat. I knew so little about either of these cat shifters. They were mysterious to me, and maybe they liked it that way. Maybe they stayed in cat form to avoid discussion. To keep their secrets.

I had a feeling we’d have to find out more to help Mozart recover.

And one look at King told me they weren’t going to like that.

M
EAGAN WAS AWAKE WHEN WE
got back to her room and her eyes widened at the sight of Mozart. I shut the door behind us so her parents wouldn’t hear that we were talking.
She nearly tripped over the hem of her nightgown coming to get him from me.

“What happened?” She cuddled him close.

“I don’t know. King woke me up and took me to him.” I turned on the light beside her bed, trying to sound calm. In charge. Competent even. “There’s something wrong with his shadow.”

Meagan gasped. “Mages! But how?” She sat down hard and chewed her lip as she cradled Mozart. “Or it could be apprentice Mages. But why now?”

I had to love having the brilliant student on my side. I told Meagan all about my dream as we tucked Mozart into the blankets on her bed. King immediately leapt up to sit vigil. He would have just hunkered down there to watch, but I wasn’t having any of his mystery right now.

“No way,” I said, shaking a finger at him. “You have to tell us what you know if we’re going to help him.”

“Absolutely,” Meagan agreed. “We have to know how much of this has happened already.”

He narrowed his eyes at me and looked hostile.

“Shift and spill it, Fish Breath,” I said, sounding tougher than I felt. “What happened? What did you see?”

He gave a mewl of protest and glared at both of us; then there was a familiar shimmer of blue light. I closed my eyes to be diplomatic about it all, and when I opened them, there was a guy sitting on the end of Meagan’s bed.

In human form, King has sandy hair and is built like a football player. He carries himself as if he owns the world. People step aside for him, even when he’s a cat. He doesn’t say much, and when he does, he’s surprisingly soft-spoken.

“I woke up and he was gone,” he said even more quietly than usual, flicking a glance at the closed door. He gently
rubbed Mozart’s chin as he spoke, but the other cat didn’t respond at all. “I went looking for him, found him halfway down the block, dragging himself back here. He was exhausted. As soon as he saw me, he gave it up.”

“He knew you’d bring him home,” Meagan said, sitting down on the other side of the injured cat.

“I didn’t know how else to bring him into the house,” King said. “I had to shift to human form to carry him home, but couldn’t enter the house that way. So I hid him and came to get Zoë.”

“Thank goodness your parents installed that cat door,” I said.

King’s lips tightened. “He would have been better off if they hadn’t.”

“Did he tell you what happened?” Meagan asked.

King shook his head.

“Did you see anything? Was anyone else around?” I asked.

King frowned. “There was something strange in the air. Like electricity. I felt like my hair was standing up the minute I went outside.” He shuddered. “It felt bad, like something evil was brewing.”

I sat down, thinking, on the twin bed on the other side of the room. “Why Mozart?” I asked. “I wonder what he saw.” You know I was thinking about ShadowEaters walking the earth.

“He can’t tell us, not when he’s like this,” Meagan said, gently touching his ears. “How do we help him? How do cat shifters heal?”

“I can’t tell you more,” King said forcefully. His heated reaction surprised me a bit. “You need to ask Jessica.”

I would have asked him more despite that warning, but he shifted shape, effectively ending the conversation. What had he been worried about? He gave me a lethal look in his cat
form, then curled himself behind and around Mozart, his lush tail wrapping protectively around his friend.

Like a guardian.

One that wouldn’t be bypassed easily.

Meagan was stroking Mozart’s head with a care that King was prepared to tolerate. “My mom’s going to want to take him to the vet in the morning.”

“The vet isn’t going to be able to do anything about this,” I said. “We need to figure out how to heal his shadow, and I don’t think they teach shifter physiology in college. Like King says, we’ll have to ask Jessica.”

King purred approval.

“Maybe we could hide him here.” Meagan looked up. “Will you stay with him while we’re at school, King?”

King lowered his head protectively. He seemed to enfold Mozart and I knew that the other cat shifter couldn’t have a better defender.

Even if I wasn’t sure what he could do against apprentice Mages or ShadowEaters on the hunt.

M
EAGAN WAS SURE THAT IF
my dream had already happened, then Mozart would have died. She had a point—the apprentice Mages nibbled at shadows, but the ShadowEaters consumed them. So, we knew two apprentice Mages, and we knew where one of them was.

“I have to talk to Trevor at school,” I said. “Find out what he knows.”

Meagan caught her breath. “It’s dangerous.”

“Not stopping them would be worse.”

Meagan frowned as she reviewed my list with record speed. She and I agreed that the ultimate key had to lie in the alliance of shifters we’d formed. Skuld had been warning me of pending disaster. We had to prevent it from happening.

I could see that Meagan was drooping, so I told her to get some sleep while she could. She curled up in bed with both cats, one hand on Mozart, and soon I was the only one awake in the room. I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.

First things first. I composed a message to Liam, Garrett, and Nick, my best guy friends and dragon shifters, too, briefly explaining my dream and asking them to come to Chicago ASAP. This was an emergency. Nick answered right away in the affirmative, I guess because he was awake. That made me feel a bit better. If there was fighting to be done, Nick was the dragon to call.

Next up, the other shifters. I’d see both Jessica and Derek at school in the morning, just hours away. I had no idea where to find Kohana, much less how to warn him, other than sending him a text message. He had a tendency—like another guy I knew—to ignore text messages.

That got me to thinking about the alliance.

And King’s reaction.

Wasn’t it funny that we didn’t know what the cat shifters even called themselves? Actually, we didn’t know what Derek’s wolf shifters called themselves, either, just that they had a prophecy to follow a dragon when “the stars stood still.” That would be now, during the Great Lunar Standstill. There was quite a lot we didn’t know about one another, so we’d better get started if we were going to solve this riddle.

By tonight.

No pressure.

I pulled out my messenger and sent another message to Garrett. I didn’t think I’d forgotten those names for the other kinds of shifters, but it was possible. Garrett would remember if I had. Or he might be able to find out in his mom’s bookstore. I asked him to score any details about shifters he could find.

I hesitated a moment, then sent a message to Derek, asking what the wolf shifters called themselves. It suddenly seemed important to define what was similar about us remaining shifters and what was different.

Were we four kinds the survivors for a reason?

One that Team Mage knew and we didn’t?

Because there was exactly zero chance of my falling back asleep and it was only 5:14 in the morning, I made a chart on my messenger of what I knew about the four remaining kinds of shifters. It was pretty thin but looked like this:

I should have sent a message to Jessica then, but I hesitated. Meagan could do it.

Things weren’t great between me and Jessica. I still felt that there was a barrier between us. I’d thought it was just the math proficiency that fed her bond with Meagan, but now I realized we hadn’t talked about shifter stuff since discovering our respective powers in November.

Not at all.

And it was strange. I mean, having that in common had to be more important than sharing a talent for math. Both of us being wildcards gave us common ground, too. That was certainly more rare than acing math. Meagan had said before that Jessica was an only child, under a lot of pressure from her folks.

If she was the cat shifter equivalent of the Wyvern, why didn’t we have more of a bond?

I had tried to open the topic a bunch of times. But she always changed the subject, like she was avoiding my
questions. And I was starting to think that she was avoiding me, too.

What didn’t she want me to know?

I wished I could have been less suspicious of her, but given her behavior, I couldn’t. That was partly because she’d been compelled to help the Mages in the past, but mostly it was because of her evasiveness ever since.

Were the cat shifters still aligned with the Mages?

Or were they just naturally secretive?