Free Traitor's Son: The Raven Duet Book #2 by Hilari Bell Page A

sleeping. When he wasn’t carrying on an imaginary argument with his grandfather (in which the old man was forced to admit he was wrong on every point) Jase thought about Raven.
    If magic really existed, could she be telling the truth about the rest of it?
    Alien shapeshifters, at war with his own world over . . . What was it? Leys?
    Jase had been so shocked by her transformation, he hadn’t paid enough attention to what she’d said. And even if Gima’s grandmother could whistle up the wind, that didn’t mean there really were shapeshifters. From another dimension, that shared rivers of magical power with this world. Right.
    Maybe she’d hypnotized him?
    After a restless night, from which he woke way earlier than he’d wanted to, Jase resolved again to let the whole thing go.
    Which didn’t stop adrenaline from slamming into his bloodstream when Raven stepped around the side of his garage and waited for him to pull the car up.
    He had to stop to raise the garage door, and on a day this beautiful the top was down.
    “Where have you been?” Exasperation poured off her in waves. And where he went was none of her business. Jase didn’t owe her any explanations. But as she leaned over the passenger door, he couldn’t help but notice that her top was both tighter and lower cut than the others she’d worn.
    “I thought I’d give you a night to think it over,” she continued with less heat. “And that maybe we should talk somewhere quieter than your school. But when I got here the next morning you’d vanished! I’ve been checking back since yesterday.”
    “My parents will be here,” Jase said. His heart was pounding. Fear? Or something else, mixed with it.
    “They left about an hour ago,” she said. “With a couple of tall bags of shiny metal rods, with thick blades on the ends.”
    “Golf clubs.” The fact that she didn’t seem to know what they were added weight on the alien side of the scale, and despite his wariness, Jase’s curiosity roused. He put the garage door up and saw that his mom’s car and both parents’ golf bags were gone.
    Raven stood away from the car as he drove in and parked. He kept an eye on her in the rear-vision projector, and saw that although she took a step toward the garage, she didn’t follow him in. He could put the door down. Escape into the locked house.
    She was giving him the choice.
    That made up his mind, and he turned the motor off and came back out into the sunlight where she waited.
    “Follow me.” He led her around the house and up the steps to the deck. Even an alien-shapeshifter-hypnotist had to stop a moment to take in the view.
    “It’s gorgeous at night too,” Jase told her, as she gazed out over the basin that held the city. “The lights spread out like a . . . a glowing carpet.”
    That hadn’t come out as beautiful as it was, but he couldn’t think of a better way to say it. He sat down on one of the shaded benches and waited for her.
    “I saw it last night,” she said. “It looks even bigger then. And for its size, it’s astonishingly clean. For most of your history, a city half that size would have been a cesspool. Or a toxic furnace.”
    She sounded as if she’d seen those cities herself, and Jase’s skin prickled.
    “You’re not, like, immortal or something. Are you?”
    “No.” She smiled at that and came to sit beside him. “I can die. Beyond that, it gets complicated. But I wanted to explain, now that you’ve had some time to adjust to the idea, why healing the leys matters so much. To both your world and mine.”
    She didn’t look like an alien, smiling at him from the other side of the bench.
    “Do you really come from another world?” Jase held her gaze steadily as he spoke. Though if she was an alien, would he be able to tell if she was lying?
    “Yes.”
    “What’s it like?”
    She sighed. “In some ways much like this one, in others utterly different. But what I said about the leys being vital to its survival,