Free Murder of Crows (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 2) by Annie Bellet

ice blue eyes.
    “I’m okay,” I said, hopefully sounding more convincing than I looked. I didn’t want to think about how much dried blood was matted in my hair or how dirty I was. My kerchief hadn’t survived the head wound. Without needing to hang onto my magic, I felt slightly better. I still leaned heavily on Wolf, but my breathing was coming back under control and my eyes no longer felt like they were squeezing out of my head.
    “Alek!”
    “Carlos!”
    The two men looked as though they might embrace, except Carlos still had a wide-eyed little girl in his arms.
    Then Alek looked at me and I guessed from the look on his face that the sight wasn’t pretty.
    “Are you all right?” he asked, gently touching the side of my face. Blood flaked off and I reached up, wondering where my kerchief had gone.
    “You should see the other guy,” I said.
    “I hope I do,” he said, his voice lowering into a growl. His eyes were glacial and promised violence upon whoever had hurt me.
    I wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him I loved him right there. My romantic timing sucked, but being hit in the head and chained up underground had apparently clarified some things for me.
    “Alek,” I started to say but he shook his head slightly, softening the negation with one of his slight smiles.
    “Back to camp,” Alek said. “Then we will talk.”
    “I don’t know if the kids can walk that far, after being chained so long,” Carlos said.
    “I can walk,” one of the boys said. Peter, I thought. He looked the least pale and weak of the two boys. Two weeks underground and chained wouldn’t have been good for anyone, much less a little kid.
    “I bet you can,” Alek said. “But would you rather ride a tiger?”
    Peter and Thomas looked at him, then at each other, then back at him, their dark brown eyes suspicious. “I don’t see no tiger,” Peter said.
    Alek smiled and shifted. One moment he was a huge Viking of a man, the next a giant tiger. Dire tiger, Harper called him. It wasn’t a bad description. Shifter animal forms are more like the Platonic ideal of the animal than any realistic version. They are bigger, prettier, stronger, faster. A giant white tiger is one of the most beautiful and most terrifying things ever. Alek was lovely and scary as fuck, is what I’m saying.
    Carlos lifted the wide-eyes boys onto his back. A tiger isn’t made for riding, but I knew they would cling and Alek would take it carefully. It wasn’t like their combined weight would give him back problems.
    “I wanna ride tiger,” Primrose said, clutching at the blanket.
    “How about you ride a lion instead?” Carlos asked her. “You had better ride with her, Jade, keep her on.”
    It was a testament to how tenuous and dangerous the situation was that he would allow a virtual stranger onto his back. I was about to say I had my own ride, but glanced around and realized Wolf was missing again. Great.
    “Come on, Primrose,” I said with what I hoped was a nice smile. “Let’s ride a lion.”
    If Alek was a dire tiger, Carlos was definitely a dire lion. His ruddy mane reminded me of Narnia movies and I struggled not to make an Aslan joke. It didn’t hurt that my brain was so fried and in pain that I couldn’t come up with a good one anyway.
    I put Primrose up onto lion Carlos’s back and then climbed on. He rose up and I gripped his mane with one hand and held onto the little girl with my other arm. Alek and Carlos moved through the woods in big, ground-eating strides.
    It seemed to take no time at all to get back to camp. I felt the hum of the wards on the boundary stones and then we were through the ferns and out of the woods. The People were gathered around the big house, much as they had been when Alek and I arrived.
    Sky Heart was there, standing over an indigo-wrapped body laid out on a stretcher. Wildflowers in little bunches were strewn around and the air was solemn, no one talking until we emerged into the big