Extraits

Chapter ONE

I could hear Weylyn whining in the background. My giant arctic wolf of a familiar acted like a puppy dog, and I loved it. Just then, though, I wasn’t wholly there. Couldn’t get my mind to work properly.

I was in a new environment, and that always left me feeling unsettled.

A new man’s house.

Diego.

I hugged myself, staring out one of the windows in Diego’s living room, my mind a thousand miles away and thinking about running.

Just run. Just bolt out the door and run until your lungs burn and your muscles scream at you. Just run.

Something wet touched my fingers, and I flinched. I looked to my right and saw Weylyn there--he wasn’t in his husky form, which meant that he was every inch of his massive wolf. He easily cleared my shoulder with his head, so he’d had to duck down a bit to be able to lick my hand.

I patted his head, turned, and wrapped my arms around his neck. I buried my face in his fur, realizing then that I was aching for a sense of familiarity.

Weylyn shouldn’t have been able to give me that sense of familiarity, because he was just as new to me as Diego was. But there was a part of me that felt like Weylyn had always been there, waiting for me, waiting to help me. I couldn’t deny that there was a bond between us that went further than the bite he’d taken out of me to allow our thoughts to flow together.

I’d gotten Weylyn, my familiar, during the thirteen trials I’d had to endure to prove myself worthy of training to be a Wizard. Yeah, I still wasn’t a Wizard yet. How fucking annoying was that? I’d almost died multiple times, I’d barely got rid of the mark in time to avoid getting executed, and I’d figured out that one of the officers of the First Hand was tainted when no one on the High Council had been able to.

But apparently, none of that is enough to earn you Wizard status. You have to train. You have to study. You have to test. Ugh. I’d never done that well in school. I just wasn’t able to get myself to focus. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the material; it was that there was always something else that was more interesting going on somewhere else.

And don’t even get me started on tests. The freezing sensation that settles into your chest, immobilizing your heart while your brain races at a thousand kilometres a minute. Your eyes blur, and none of the letters on the page make sense. You can’t focus, because even though your heart is frozen, you can somehow hear your heartbeat in your ears.

I hadn’t liked tests in school, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t going to like them any more now that they had ‘Wizard’ slapped in front of them.

Deep breath in.

We aren’t dealing with that yet, so there’s no need to freak out.

Weylyn whined and tucked his head farther down, his jaw pressed against my back, so that he effectively pulled me closer.

“You will be fine. I will not allow anything to happen to you.” The sound of his voice in my head still surprised me, but it brought a comforting warmth with it, and I allowed my body to relax somewhat.

I extracted myself from his hold and turned to face Diego. He was standing in an archway that led farther into his house. I didn’t know where it went, exactly. The room was large, and the ceiling was high above us, leaving plenty of room for our familiars. In the centre of the room were a couch, a coffee table, two chairs that faced the coffee table from either side, and a fireplace directly opposite the couch. At his side was a rather large cougar. Nowhere near the size of Weylyn, but definitely bigger than your average cougar.

The cougar was his familiar, just like Weylyn was mine. The size of your familiar is apparently in direct proportion to the potential power a Wizard can wield in their lifetime. So, just because Weylyn was ginormous now didn’t mean I was all-powerful at the moment. It meant I had the potential to be something impressive.

I didn’t know how I felt about that. At the time, it had certainly puffed me up quite a bit. To look at the High Council and see all their shocked faces as they regarded the size of my familiar--yeah, I had enjoyed that. But now it felt like it was another expectation for me to live up to, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to do that.

Taking in a deep breath, I tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. Then I folded my arms over my chest and straightened my back.