Charred Hope

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Skylar sat up in her narrow bed, unable to sleep. Starlight slipped through the spaces between the blinds of her small room, and she folded her legs onto the bed. It was warm enough in the hideout located in the mountains of northern Arizona. The setting outside the compound’s tall fences was peaceful and quiet, filled with pine trees and a natural lake whose waters were a muddy green during daylight. 

Every night since the skirmish between griffins and dragons, nightmares had jarred her out of sleep. She kept witnessing her father fall to his death in an attempt to save her life. Over and over he fell, and over and over she experienced the sense of free falling and despair. 

I didn’t even really like him. She barely knew him and didn’t exactly see eye to eye with him … but he was the only family she’d ever known. It wasn’t easy for her to try to process her emotions. Chace should’ve been there for us.

“That’s not true,” she whispered into the quiet room. “He lost his magic. He couldn’t have helped Gavin, even if he wanted to.”

Then what hurt? Her father’s death of course. Yet something about Chace hurt, too, and she wasn’t able to pinpoint what. She couldn’t get Chace’s parting words out of her thoughts.

I love you, Sky. Nothing you do or say to me is going to change that, he’d said.

He’d meant it. As flawed as Chace admitted to being, he did love her. Would he be there if she needed him again as promised? Because she sensed the day approaching when she was going to need the backup.

She sighed. Aware she’d get no more sleep this night, she dressed quickly and left her room, exiting into a long hallway lit by fluorescent lighting.

There were many mysteries about the compound she hadn’t been able to figure out. The most important one: why they let her roam around without restriction. Mason, her slayer-turned-shifter quasi-friend, said he trusted her to remain with them until she’d learned what he needed her to.

She did stay, and a part of her thought it was as much because she needed to uncover what was going on as it was because she had nowhere else to go. 

Leaving the barracks, she tugged on a jacket and walked out into the quiet night. Within the compound was a small picnic area where she’d found the perfect table to sit on to look out over the lake. The air smelled of pine trees and muddy water, and a cool breeze tickled the back of her neck.

A tingle went through her, an indication that a shifter was close. She’d been growing more aware of them as the days passed, able to pick up the individual signatures of shifter magic as the creatures moved around the compound. 

“I keep forgetting cats are nocturnal,” she murmured. 

“Your ability to sense us is getting stronger.” Mason’s dark purr came from nearby.

You have no idea. In the three days she had spent at Mason’s compound, she’d been surrounded by shifters all day, every day. She could not only sense them around her, but she’d begun to identify which shifter it was. It was instinctive, like a tiny whisper that came from the depths of her soul. Not only did she know their names before she saw or spoke to them; she also knew what kind of animal or creature they shifted into. It was a gift stemming from her role as the Protector of shifters.

For someone who spent most of her life capturing and caging shifters, she wasn’t certain how to view her awakening gift or the responsibility that came with it, especially when she had no shifter magic of her own. In the past, every Protector had a champion – a dragon of immense power, capable of enforcing order among the shifters.