Cursed - book 8 (The Crush Saga) by Chrissy Peebles

Author:Chrissy Peebles [Peebles, Chrissy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Shadows Publishing
Published: 2015-10-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

The next morning, every member of the training camp reported for duty promptly at sunrise, lining up according to gender and rank, with Julie and me at the end. As we looked around at the others, we realized they must have sent recruiters out to various regions of the worlds, as there were bitten wolves from many different countries.

There was a baffled sheik on the men’s side of the line still, wearing his turban, and a surprisingly delicate Japanese woman next to Julie and me, looking just as delirious. Clearly, their leader’s decision to spare us had little to do with mercy; it was a calculated ploy to inspire kidnapped people to love them and want to serve them, (maybe even have a few babies with them) like some horrible social experiment gone bad, and I wanted no part of it.

A silent Natalia accompanied a gruff male instructor up and down the lines, critiquing posture, berating latecomers, and shouting assignments for the day. I wondered if she would be able to resist attempts at indoctrination. Her innate issue was that she was a kind-hearted person and assumed others were just as gentle as she was. That was seldom the case, though, so her receptive heart was poisoned more easily than the hearts of others. Nevertheless, I had to believe, had to have faith. She was stronger than I thought she was. I had to remember, for her power was hidden deep inside, ready to come out as it had when she drove the sword toward the wolf’s great mouth.

As she smiled up at me, I realized I’d been staring at her. I was just about to smile back, but the instructor was practically on top of us.

“Well, well. Making friends already, ladies? Isn’t that nice? Too bad you can’t learn to pay attention as quickly!”

I straightened and babbled an apology.

The instructor barked, like some nightmarish drill sergeant, “Your chitchat can wait till free time!”

“Yes, sir,” I said, nodding, the picture of military obedience as demonstrated by a hundred movies and a hundred more television shows.

He seemed to approve of my show and of Julie’s mirror of that show, then stepped back a pace. “New recruits, report to the red tent immediately. As for the rest of you, get to work!”

As if spurred by a starting shot, the trainees scattered in seemingly a hundred different directions. Julie, I, and the rest of the newbies all stood, totally disoriented.

“Well, we’d better go,” Julie said with a shrug.

We’d learned from our roommates that the entire camp and city had a charm cast upon it, very similar to a routine witch spell called Babel. To the listener’s ear, the language was almost always in their native tongue; to the speaker, it was theirs. That made everything a lot less complicated, as there were no real language barriers to deal with. When we first arrived through the portal, the guard had mentioned something about magic being able to let us communicate.

I was arrogant and felt somehow in control of myself, despite the danger we were in.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.