Page 23 of Blade

Nodding made the most sense but for some reason he looked like he was going to faint.

No.

I needed to be able to talk to him.

I needed to look human for him.

I was smarter than this.

Oh.

Maybe this wasn’t my fault?

Closing my eyes, I ignored my questions and the confusion running around in my head and focused on my magic like I was a kid trying to shift for the first time. I hadn’t needed to think about shifting in years, but as I looked inside myself, I found my magic and it looked a bit worse for wear, as my grandmother used to say.

It looked like it was tied up in knots of magic I couldn’t identify, like a big ball of string.

Part of me wanted to pull at the strings but I couldn’t decide if that was magic logic, impulse control issues, or my inner cat not being terribly well-behaved at the moment.

Either way, I didn’t think shifting was an option even if I could’ve made it work.

Great.

By the time that I opened my eyes, my mate looked less startled and more thoughtful. “Did you just try to do something? To shift, maybe? I felt that same bubble of pressure I thought I’d felt earlier. It clearly didn’t seem to work, though.”

No, it hadn’t.

Licking his face again did, and it made him squeak which was fun.

“You did that on purpose.” His glare was fun too because I could sense he wasn’t angry. “Ugh. Okay. Out of the truck and we’re going to work on communicating more clearly.”

That seemed like a good plan but the more I moved the more I realized how strange everything looked even though it smelled amazing. From my mate’s clothes to the Batman truck, everything was wrong and it looked like I’d fallen into an alternate universe.

But thankfully one that still seemed to have food because I was starving and couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten.

“I’m going to open the camper so you can just go directly inside.” Stepping out of the truck, my mate checked our surroundings as I climbed into the front of the strange vehicle. “I have no idea if anyone in the RV park knows about shifters or not, but we’re not going to take any chances.”

Ah.

I should’ve thought about that before I started to move.

Showing him that I understood, I crouched low in the driver’s seat and did my best to ignore how soft it was and how the dashboard looked like we were on a spaceship. How weird reality looked could wait but making my mate happy could not.

Standing back from the open door, my mate nodded. “You’re good to go.”

Clearing the distance in one jump got another squeak from my mate, but since he did that a lot, I wasn’t worried. “Fucking hell. No. I should’ve expected that. Large cat. I’ll catch up in just a minute. Somehow.”

I was glad one of us was so confident because I was fairly certain it was going to take me a lot longer considering everything had just gotten stranger. I’d been inside trailers before but this one looked just as out of place as the truck.

Everything from the decoration to the appliances was wrong and he had a few odd things in the tiny kitchen I couldn’t even begin to guess what they were. The black box mounted to the wall was the strangest, so I stretched up and stared at it as my mate came into the trailer and shut the door. “I think we’re fine. I don’t see anyone around us and you were fast.”

I was always fast.

“Um, well, you look curious, so, that’s called a microwave oven. It heats food quickly but cooking in the regular oven still makes food turn out better.” My mate’s casual shrug and sighmade me feel like I was missing something important. “You’d think we’d have figured that out by now, but faster always means worse these days.”

By now?

These days?