Children of the Stars

Chapter Twenty Five

I shook my head. "No one's ever told me why, no."

Kai looked down at his hands, fiddling with a thin braided leather band around his right wrist. "I was in a zoo. For two months." He rubbed his nose and ran a hand through his sand colored hair. "A friend made a stupid dare and I went past the boundary as a lion. He dared me I couldn't make it three miles out. Well I did."

Kitch whimpered in her sleep, a noise that I was completely unfamiliar with. Never once in my months of knowing Kitch did she whimper. Her cries the night she ran away weren't sobs of defeat, they were sobs of outrage. Kai's eyes softened and the lion-boy placed a gentle hand on her cheek. It was a display of the utmost affection for him which really moved me. He was a man who rarely showed his feelings, and here he was comforting a girl he barely knew going through a boatload of pain. He caught my look and rolled his eyes a bit.

"I don't have a heart of stone, if that's what you're trying to figure out. But anyways, I actually made it to Thane within the night. I wanted to go further but there was a bear trap." He lifted his leather bracelet, where a jagged scar laced around his wrist. I winced. "The hunter found me the next day and called in to the Vancouver Zoo. They figured I must've escaped some how. So I was sedated and brought to the zoo. They called me Manfred—" his look turned into a scowl as I snorted in amusement— "but the other lions called me Tawny. And that name stuck better than Manfred."

"How did you get out of there?"

"Well sometime in my first month of being there, someone took a picture of me. Of course back then my eyes weren't golden, so when the picture went viral, someone here showed Mr. Rivas and he posed as a private wildlife park manager. There was a lot of back and forth I am told, but eventually I was shipped back. Once inside the magic, I was human again. Only, my eyes changed color."

"What color were they before?"

At this, Kai smiled once more and his sad gaze turned out the window, recalling something that was long gone, never to return. "I can't remember."

We were talking for the best part of an hour when Emma, Ember, Isobel and Skylark burst through the doors. The instant they arrived, Kai clammed up. There wasn't much more to be said, anyway. By the time they arrived, we were just sitting quietly, watching while the nurse took away the bowl of water that had cooled. Kitch was continuing to groan and shift restlessly in her sleep. She woke once or twice but was always lulled back into sleep by my fingers gently combing out the knots and frozen bits of her hair.

"What happened?" Emma demanded, taking in the fragile appearance of her best friend propped up on my shoulder.

"A Pisces and I found her out by the trash. She was hardly able to walk."

"But I thought she was in Lux!"

"She may have gotten lost. She didn't say much when we found her, and Ms. Ramsay loaded her up on pain meds for the thawing of her fingers. She's been in and out for awhile now. Maybe in the morning she'll tell us what happened."

"I'm staying with her," the blonde girl announced, taking a chair beside Kai and squeezing her friend's icy hand. Agreement rang out from all our roommates as they each took a chair from around the room and sat beside the bed. "Me too," I murmured, gently propping Kitch down on the pillow to give my arm a break from holding her.

We chatted about homework and sports and the weather for another hour—anything to distract from the wild commotion the Leo attack had caused. Even so, there was a sense of unease in the air. I decided to tell them my crazy theory that I had forming in my brain since the Libra girl Charlie had said something was all her fault.