“Am I going to get in trouble for ditching our welcoming?” I asked him.
“No one ever stays for the whole thing,” he replied.
“I did! Was I not supposed to?” Atarah interrupted, but Melora took her by the arm, leading her away.
“If it is Omeron witches, we w
ill cover for you both. Make sure there is nothing else we didn’t miss in the forest,” she said as they walked back into the maze.
“Where are we going for this danger?” Theseus asked, looking at me.
“Good question,” I said, turning back to see the cat still waiting. “Where do we need to go?”
It took off running along the hedges, and I followed after. “I guess we are running. How much of our conversation did you hear?” I asked, knowing he’d keep up and hear me perfectly.
“Everything.”
“Everything? As in, from the beginning? You followed us?”
He came up beside me. “I didn’t need to follow to hear you. I did not come to the maze. I simply stood at the window. Father was blocking all of your conversations from the hall.”
So, he did follow us, just not completely. Though I did just learn more about Sigbjørn’s gift—he could stop people from hearing things. That made sense seeing as the brain controlled all our other senses. The more I learned about him, the more I realized why he might be terrifying to others.
“You were upset I did not tell you more about Orspina,” he asked beside me. We got out of the maze with ease and were now entering the forest.
“Yes? But not very upset. Logically, I know we haven’t really had a lot of time just to be and simply talk.” We had time for sex, though. “I just, I don’t know, I disliked her being there. Trying to steal the moment when we were having a moment. Then I was mad at myself for using magic.”
“Why? Is it not normal to want to hurt someone who tries to claim your mate?”
I laughed. “Normal? I think I’m going to have to give up on that word. But it wasn’t the fact that I wanted to hurt her. I think it was the fact that the method…using magic again in front of those vampires made it clear that I was not like them. That I still had magic. One moment I felt like I was just like them all, then I felt different. I didn’t like it. Also, using magic seems to blow up in my face later! Now, look at us! I’m chasing after an invisible cat, which may be a familiar to a witch of a coven that I may have belonged to. Even though I said no to looking into all of this stuff—”
The tree branch I was running on broke, and Theseus caught me with ease, wrapping his arms around me as he hopped onto the next branch. “You are making a habit of this, I see?”
“I am not! Something—never mind,” I replied, looking at my feet. I felt like I was yanked or something.
“Are we still going this direction?” he asked, reminding me he was following me, and I was following the cat.
I looked in front of me, but it wasn’t there. “Shit, did I lose it? Where did it go?”
“Here!”
Following the voice, I looked down then turned around to see the cat on the forest floor beside the branch I’d just broken.
“We have to go down,” I said, and Theseus jumped with me.
The cat sat at the base of the tree, but no witch, though.
“That is odd,” Theseus said, stepping in front of me as if to protect me.
“What is?”
“This tree is covered in moss,” he said as if I should understand that.
“So?”
“If a tree is covered in moss, it’s due to the age of the tree. It means it is an older one that can’t fight off the encroaching moss. But this tree is no older than any of the rest, yet it is the only one with moss,” Theseus said, so I looked around at the other trees, and sure enough, none of them had anything on them. “Moss is a good indicator that something else might be wrong with that tree or that it is dying.”
I glanced down at the cat that was still looking at the tree.