hoped that I could rise to the challenge. Every Silve had a room at Locke, and when I left the Elders I headed straight to mine. I barely spent time there, but I had clothes there, and other things I would need for the trip.
Seeing her had just solidified it in my mind. I needed to protect her. The feeling, my promise to her mother, overwhelmed almost everything else, probably because after the fire I didn’t have much else left.
I tried not to think about the girl I had grown up with. Our mothers had been best friends, and Nat and I had spent all kinds of time together. It had been wonderful, and those memories were locked away in my heart, cherished above everything else.
It was clear from the romance slam that she didn’t remember anything that had happened - or me. Eleanor had told me that would happen. Unicorns have powerful magics at our disposal, and it’s not like the Elders would have sent a scared eight-year-old girl off by herself with memories of her mother burning to death. I just wished they hadn’t erased the memories of me as well.
I didn’t want to admit that the girl who was always floating somewhere on the edges of my consciousness barely knew I was alive.
“Going somewhere?”
I grinned and spun around. The familiar drawl belonged to my best friend, Jar, who was lounging against the door jamb.
Jar and his sister didn’t look anything alike, and Jar’s good looks weren’t clouded by a bitchy personality. My friend was always joking around and laughing. He always thought that the funniest person in the room should be the one making jokes, and he had never been in a situation where he didn’t think he was the funniest person in the room. Years ago, when he saw how much my dad was struggling, he had instantly come to help - that and he wanted to get away from his overbearing family and be independent, which was hard to do as a Silve. With his curly brown hair and a spattering of freckles around dark blue eyes he spent most of his free time with girls, and that’s how he liked it.
At the moment, his dark, well-muscled forearms were crossed in front of his chest, with his brown hair tousled and framing those sparkling eyes.
“You know I am,” I said absently. I would be happy to talk to Jar as long as it didn’t keep me from packing. Now that I was on my way, nothing was going to get in the way of my leaving on time.
“I told her about you,” I added. “Last night.”
Jar rolled his eyes. “Of all the things she should have remembered, I would be at the top of the list.”
I snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“How’d she look?” Jar asked carefully. He knew that turning eighteen was difficult for a unicorn, and Natalie was about to go through it alone.
“She looked good,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “She looked how I remembered. She looked a lot like Neil.”
Jar nodded encouragingly. “What’d she do when she saw you?”
I laughed a bit at the memory. “She was shocked. I think the silver eyes thing threw her off.”
Jar grinned. “That and your good looks.”
“I just wanted to explain everything to her, right then and there. Even with her friends there,” I said thoughtfully.
“You know she’s in danger, right, man?” Jar prodded.
“Yeah, that’s why I’m going,” I said tightly, without stopping the process of throwing clothes into a suitcase.
“And you know he’s with her?” Jar pushed. He was always reminding me of Natalie’s Watchful.
Obviously Jar wasn’t going to let this go. Every time I got into a funk about Natalie - which was more often than I was willing to admit - Jar tried to bring me out of it by reminding me that there was already a guy assigned to protect Natalie, a guy who had spent almost every day with her for years.
When I thought about that I wanted to throttle someone. I had known her first and I had known her better than her Watchful ever would, and every night I fell asleep thinking about her smile. That had to
Paige Shelton
Sandra Jones
Christine Murray
Jen Meyers
Enid Blyton
Neil Bartlett
Lynn Hubbard
Jaz Johnson
Kent Conwell
M. C. Beaton