He closed the distance between us, eyes roving over me, not lecherous like, but as if he wondered how I worked.

“You want to figure out how to tap into your abilities?”

I snorted, and shook my head. “You think you’re the first to try? You think my father didn’t try to find someone who could teach me? He brought in healers and shamans and even a Daywalker once, who happened to be more interested in getting me into bed than helping me, the little green-eyed lech. None of them could help me; none of them broke through because there is nothing to break through. I’m weak and that is all there is to it.” The words hurt me to say, but I kept my face blank. Something I’d worked hard at being good at over the years. Being weak was one thing, letting other’s see it was totally different.

Griffin shut one eye and squinted the other at me. “Not weak, blocked. There’s a big difference between the two. Just got to figure out what it is that’s cutting you off, yeah?”

He stood and walked away, obviously expecting me to follow. I hesitated. What the hell, I had nothing to lose. I followed him down a narrow path, the trees tight to us on either side, crowding close and blocking out the sun better than the fog could have. Griffin stopped and I stepped up beside him. We looked over a cliff’s edge, the view stunning as the world seemed to drop away into a deep ravine, the tops of the trees below us looking like waves on the ocean being ruffled by a steady wind.

“That’s very pretty, but—”

Snarling, he backhanded me, hitting me hard enough my vision blurred and warm, wet copper flavor burst in my mouth like an overripe grape.

I rolled, stopped only by sheer resistance on my part as I scrambled to grab the bare dirt with feet and hands, right at the ledge. He didn’t pause, didn’t give me a moment to breathe. Shifting into a huge wolf, his body contorting as fast as one of our shifters, the wolf Griffin lunged, teeth missing me only because I scrambled backward along the cliff. Panic reared its head and I fought to slow things down.

“What are you doing? You were supposed to help me!” I lost my bow and arrow in the scramble and I heard them clatter down into the ravine, bouncing off the rocks; my fate if I didn’t do something, and fast.

Niah had sent me here, was she trying to get me killed? Was it possible they were working for Cassava?

I didn’t know, and didn’t have time to think on it. I pulled my dagger and he bit down on my wrist, snapping clean through the bone. Screaming, I punched at him with my left hand, but my blows bounced off his thick skull. I kicked out as he shook me like a rag doll, the muscles and tendons tearing in my arm under his strength and teeth. Blood flowed down my arm, a warm trickle that pooled underneath us, making a slippery patch of mud.

He spit me out and I cradled my arm as I struggled to my feet, my back to the cliff’s edge. His dark eyes narrowed and his shoulders bunched. I knew what was coming, but I was powerless to stop him.

I pulled my spear with my good hand and swung it toward him, but I was too slow. He dodged the blow, but in dodging it, slammed his shoulder into my hip sending me over.

The world slowed holding me lightly for a moment. Weightless, I fell, looking up at the sky, and the earth seemed to whisper to me what I already knew. I was going to die. I knew it to the bottom of my heart and soul. I said my goodbyes quickly, breathed a hope that the mother goddess would accept someone so weak, and begged that I be reunited with my mother and baby brother.

A voice that was not my own whispered along my senses.

Call on your power.

I didn’t question the voice, just reached for that part of me connected to the earth. The part that hurt every time I tried. But what did it matter if I was going to die anyway? One last attempt before I bit the dust. I envisioned the ground softening, accepting me like a soft, moss filled bed, easing my fall. A flare of green filled my vision and instead of hitting the rocks a hundred feet below, I . . . bounced. A scream ripped out of me as my broken and mauled arm twisted under my body. I tumbled down the sheer slope until I hit the trunk of a tree, the bark biting through my clothes. But I was alive and the shock of that hit me hard.

I sat up in a puff of dirt, the pulse of green power gone from my eyes. There was a scrabble of rocks and Griffin slid down the rest of the slope, back in his human form. In desperation, I reached for the power connecting me to the earth again. A hum began low in my belly and rose up through me until my hair danced in a breeze. Terror lit me up like a bonfire on the night of the dead. “Don’t come any closer!”

He held up his hands and then squatted to a crouch twenty feet from me. “I told Niah there was only one way you would learn.”

Trembling, the pain was making itself known in a bad way, and I struggled to keep my breakfast down as the nausea rose. “What are you talking about?”

He spread his hands, a smile curving over his lips. “When someone has been blocked as long as you have from their natural born powers or talent, it takes a life or death situation to begin the road to opening you up. You had to truly believe I was going to kill you. Had anyone you’d known tried this, it wouldn’t have worked. You wouldn’t have believed them, yeah? But me. You didn’t know me. Still don’t.”

Even as he spoke, the power slipped through my fingers and the pain I’d always associated with trying to touch it rammed its horns deep into my brain. I screamed and tried to grab my head with both hands, which of course just set my arm off again.

The scent of wolf, musky and earthy, surrounded me and a hard vessel pressed against my lips.