Free Chasing Shadows (Saving Galerance, Book 1) by Natalie Reid

forward. Soon they found the spot in
the road where they had torched the basket last night. A few charred strands of
the basket lay on the dirt, and several Pax boot prints circles around the
scene.
    “The shot came from over there,” Norabel said, pointing up
to the trees on the right side of the road. “Maybe we should see if we can find
anything.”
    Mason gave a relenting shrug of his shoulders, and she took
it as permission. Hurrying across the road, she happily entered into the thick
grass of the forest. She bent her arm down low as she walked, feeling the
blades of grass with her fingertips as she passed.
    Finding a small red bug on the tip of one, she stopped and
bent down to watch as it crawled across the long green stalk. Her grandfather
told her that her Guardian Albatross was always trying to show her things. Some
of it, he said, might seem very unimportant, when in fact it was the opposite.
A bug on a leaf, for example, or a half-eaten apple. The downcast expression on
a friend’s face, or a stranger across the street. Every day her guardian was
trying to show her what she needed to see, and she wanted to make extra certain
that she always received his message.
    Norabel studied the bug intently as it paused at the very
tip of the blade of grass. Then, coming to a decision, it flew off and landed
on a nearby flower.
    “I thought we were here to look for clues,” Mason commented
from behind her. “Not to stare at bugs.”
    “If you don’t stop to look at bugs, then you won’t find any clues,”
she reasoned.
    She glanced over at him from where she was crouched on the
ground and expected to see him rolling his eyes at her. However, when she
turned her head, she only had a moment to prepare herself as Mason’s body
slammed into hers.
    She gasped in shock as his heavy weight fell over her, and
she couldn’t remember having ever felt so incredibly small and fragile than in that
moment. Her lungs tightened with pressure, and a wave of fear washed over her
as she thought a Jotham’s attack might be coming over her. She had had several
of them when she was just a little girl, and they had been frightening and
horrifyingly painful experiences. What was worse was not so much the feeling of
suffocation, but the expressions she had seen on her parents as they were
helpless to do anything about it.
    Then, before the tension in her lungs could block out her
air-supply completely, the pressure on her chest lifted, and she opened her
eyes to see Mason staring down at her. His hands were on either side of her now,
supporting most of his weight, but he did not move to get off her. She tried to
keep her face from heating up as he stared down at her. She wondered why it was
he had so suddenly jumped her in the first place.
    “What is…” she started to ask him, when he silenced her by
placing a finger to her lips.
    He raised the finger to his own lips, telling her to be
quiet, before carefully rolling off her. Norabel took in a quiet gasp for air
as he did so, and watched as Mason crouched low in the grass, reaching out for
something that had fallen there. When he pulled his hand away, she saw that he was
holding a simple twig from a tree with a couple of green leaves still attached
at the end. She didn’t know why he had chosen to pick up this object, though
judging by the expression on his face, he looked just as surprised as she did.
    Before any more questions could build up in her head, she
saw something fly in the air above her head, and Mason swiftly caught it with a
jerk of his hand. Bringing it up to his face, he saw that it was the same type
of twig with leaves. Only, someone appeared to be shooting them off as arrows.
    Placing her hands in the soft grass on either side of her,
Norabel strained to sit up, and looked out to the trees where the shot had come
from. The branches of a tree a few yards away rustled, and a moment later
something dropped down from it. But “dropped” was not quite the right word.