Wynter's End

by K. R. Thompson

  Wynter’s End

  The Keeper Saga

  K.R. Thompson

  Wynter’s End

  Copyright © 2018 K.R. Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical or ethnic events/traditions, locales, real people, living or dead, are used fictitiously and are a product of the author’s imagination.

  Cover Design: Alchemy Book Covers/Keri Knutson

  Editor: Novel Nurse Editing/Angie Wade

  For Olivia, Echo, and Karlee

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  When is the next book coming out?

  Shifter’s University

  Exclusive Excerpt

  Also by K.R. Thompson

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  “So why didn’t you just use the book to figure out what she was?” Ronnie asked as we walked outside.

  My little sister, Emily, had warned me to be careful when we’d left—which tended to be serious, coming from this seven-year-old. She’d been giving me strange omens and predictions for a while now. At first, I’d thought it mere coincidence, but she’d taken a look at Ronnie before we left and whispered in my ear, “You’d better keep an eye on her,” as if she’d known something was going to happen.

  “Honestly, Nikki. If I had something that powerful, don’t you think I’d use it?” Ronnie continued as we walked toward the edge of the forest at my backyard. “That book could change things for a lot of people.”

  The book she was referring to was currently hidden in plain sight as a charm in a locket Adam had given me. In its pages, it held the ability to trap the power of magicals. And being as the majority of people in town had magic in some form or another, this book would definitely be in high demand—likely from the wrong sort of people…if they knew it existed. Luckily for me, there were only a handful who actually knew I had it.

  Ronnie being one of them.

  She’d been necessary to tell though. There were a precious few of my friends who knew anything about flying, much less shifting into a bird and teaching me the ins and outs of what I needed to know.

  A month earlier, I’d trapped the magic of a Skinwalker with this book, and in the process, four animal spirits came to haunt me, day and night. I had accepted their magic as my own, more to keep them from following me around like ghostly, dark shadows than anything else.

  The coyote and the wolf had been the easiest to deal with. So long as I ran with the wolf pack now and again, they were satisfied to stay below the surface of my consciousness. The bear had been even less of a problem. Other than the occasional urge to lumber around, she wasn’t a problem at all.

  It was the crow who was the issue. So far, my attempts at flying were going well. It was the landing part that was giving me headaches. Quite literally. Adam had suggested I learned from someone who actually knew how it worked.

  It made sense. When I’d asked Ronnie though, she was less than enthused to help me. “It will have to be in the daytime, all right? Right after lunch.”

  So now, instead of me saying why I didn’t want to use the book to see what sort of magic my little sister held, I swapped the subject back to Ronnie. “Why are we doing this in the daytime, anyway? I thought owls preferred flying at night.”

  “We do.” Her teeth were clenched. She looked nothing at all like the happy-go-lucky cheerleader I was accustomed to.

  I wasn’t going to let it slide. “Well?” I prompted.

  “The problem is when I fly at night, I hunt,” she replied, stopping to look me squarely in the eye. “I hunt things smaller than me. I hunt things like you.”

  Okay, I thought, giving her one of my huge, thousand-watt smiles. I probably shouldn’t have pressured her into helping me. No wonder Emily had looked worried when Ronnie showed up.

  “Just don’t kill me, and everything will be fine,” I joked. When she glared at me, I couldn’t help laughing. “Everything is going to be okay. Trust me.”

  She let out a huge sigh, then finally smiled. “Well, you are the Seer. It would kinda suck if you couldn’t foresee something happening to yourself, I guess.”

  Put like that, I had even less faith in going flying with her. While I did have the ability to occasionally know what was going to happen, more times than not, it had something to do with the Keepers, not me. But even my “sight” was struggling since taking on those four animal souls. Their magic seemed to be crowding mine. At this point, I trusted Emily’s judgment far more than my own.

  I was just getting ready to tell her to forget it and that we’d try this again some other day when she shifted into her beautiful black-and-white owl and flew up into the sky.

  “Here goes nothing,” I muttered, concentrating on the spirit of the crow not far underneath the surface. One feathery second later, I hopped along on the ground as a black crow and then took off after my friend.

  I flapped my wings a few times to gain altitude, struggling to catch up with her. She noticed and circled back around so she would be flying beside me. Her head swiveled my direction, and I stared into her huge blue eyes. While they were beautiful, there was something predatory lurking there, and I fought the urge to get as far away from her as I could.

  But she wasn’t out to get me…at least not yet. She looked at her wings and then moved them up and down to show me how she could use the current to soar higher or lower by using the slightest of movements. Then she folded her wings the tiniest bit and dove toward the ground. Soon she opened them and flapped a couple of times, landing easily on a tree branch.

  I decided to give it a whirl and folded my wings only to find myself hurtling toward the ground at an alarming speed. Freaking out more than a little, I spread my wings wide in hopes of stopping my rapid descent, but it only made things worse, and I spiraled end over end.

  I’d always enjoyed roller coasters, but this was too much to bear. I saw the blue of the sky followed immediately by the green of the ground, then blue, then green, over and over again in an endless blur as air rushed by me. I braced for impact, knowing I’d hit the ground soon. Then a searing pain flared to life in my shoulder, and I was plucked out of my endless somersault by Ronnie, who had come to save me.

  At least, I thought she had come to save me. From the grip she had around my wing, I was beginning to wonder. Her talons were digging in hard, and I felt the warm, tickling sensation of blood running down my feathers.

  Okay, Ronnie, put me down, I thought as calmly as I possibly could. What I really wanted to do was thrash around in an attempt to loosen her hold on me.

  After what felt like forever, she brought me down and released me to fall the last few feet. I landed on the ground with a dull thump.

  She had shifted back before I could and rushed to me as I switched back and struggled to sit up. “I am so sorry,” she said, seeing the blood run from the wound in my shoulder. “I tried…” she trailed off and bit her lip.

  I tried not to kill you. It didn’t take a Seer to know exactly what she wanted to say. “It’s okay,” I lied. “It’s just a scratch. I’ll be fine. Honest.”

  She looked like she was ready to cry.
“I’m sorry. I’m not going to be able to help you. I tried. I really did…”

  “It’s okay,” I said firmly. “You did the best you could.”

  She gave me her hand and helped me up. I winced as I stood.

  “You’re going to need stitches.”

  I grinned in spite of the pain. “No, I’ll be fine. Just a scratch.” No need in worrying her about having to explain to the emergency room doctor what had happened, especially since Dr. Stevenson was Ronnie’s dad.

  It took several more minutes of swearing everything was okay, and even then, I didn’t think she was completely convinced.

  It didn’t help when Adam showed up, springing from the forest as his gigantic black wolf.

  One look at the two of us and he shifted to human. To his credit, his silver eyes merely flicked to my injured shoulder, then to my face.

  Are you all right? he asked silently, one dark eyebrow arching just the tiniest bit. The faintest bit of black mist edged around him, the only indication he was more worried than he was letting on.

  “I tried…I swear I tried,” she told him, her voice sounding small and defeated.

  “I understand.” He gave her a kind smile. “Sometimes instinct is hard to control.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I interjected, realizing his arrival had erased all my progress of convincing her everything was fine. “It’s just a scratch. Not the end of the world.”

  “Are you sure?” she said, uncertain.

  “Positive.” I gave a carefree shrug, which sent pain soaring through my shoulder and down the length of my arm.

  While the gesture had me gritting my teeth to keep up my façade, it seemed to put Ronnie at ease enough that she finally smiled. “I’ll call and check in on you later,” she vowed as we walked to her car.

  “Okay.” I nodded. “Talk to you then.”

  We stayed there and watched until she drove away, and the instant her tail lights were out of sight, Adam whirled around and took me by the hand, leading me toward the front door. “How bad is it, really?”

  There wouldn’t be any lying to him. Even if I had the ability to try, he’d know. “I don’t know. It’s stinging…a lot.”

  When we reached the door, it swung open, and Emily stood there with the first-aid kit from the kitchen in her hands. She took one look at me and handed it to Adam. “I told you so. You should have listened to me.”

  “You were right,” I said, trying to keep the smile off my face at seeing the scowl on hers. “I’ll listen next time.”

  “If you’re smart, you will,” she replied, then skipped up the steps and to her room.

  “Come on, sit down,” Adam instructed. “Let’s see what it looks like.”

  I perched on the edge of the sofa, and he sat beside me, opened the first-aid kit, and set it on the coffee table in front of us. Then he carefully pulled the sleeve of my T-shirt up. I bit my lip to keep from crying out when the fabric peeled out of the gouges in my flesh.

  “I’m sorry.” His eyes flicked up to mine for the barest second when he heard my breath come out in a hiss. “I just about have it all out.”

  “S’okay,” I managed to say, then looked away as the rest of my shirt came out with a tiny sucking sound that made my stomach turn.

  Adam didn’t say anything for a second, only set to cleaning the cuts. “The good news is they aren’t as deep as I thought they were, so I don’t think you’ll need stitches,” he said finally. “And they’ve stopped bleeding, which is really good.”

  I looked over in time to see him place a gauze bandage over the three diagonal gouges that ran from the top of my shoulder to several inches lower.

  “So what’s the bad news?”

  He grinned. “Your shirt is ruined.”

  “Ha! If that’s the worst, it isn’t bad at all.”

  “It was a cool shirt,” he said, giving the hem of it a quick tug.

  And it was—or at least, it had been. There was a black wolf on the front, head thrown back as it howled at the moon. Now the wolf’s head was covered in streaks of blood, and the moon had a giant rip in it.

  “I’ll get you another one,” Adam promised, knowing I’d gotten it at the Res’s gift shop.

  “No, you won’t. It was the last one they had. It’s fine though. It isn’t like I don’t have plenty of clothes.” I smiled. “Thanks for patching me up.”

  “You’re welcome. I hope I didn’t scare Ronnie too much by coming over. I just knew something had happened, and I had to check and make sure you were all right.” His words were reassuring, making me remember the bond we had. As a Keeper, his magic held the power of always knowing when I was in trouble and when I needed him.

  “She’s all right, and I am too.”

  “I’m glad of that. I’m going to assume the flying lesson didn’t help though,” he said wryly.

  “Not at all.”

  “I had an idea earlier today when I was thinking of you. You remember William’s twin brother?”

  William was a dragon shifter. I’d thought of asking for his help with teaching me to fly, but I’d opted to ask Ronnie instead. Now I wondered if maybe taking my chances with a fire-breather instead of a pretty owl wouldn’t have been a better idea.

  I hadn’t ever met his brother, but I knew who Adam was referring to. “Logan, right? He’s the one you were telling me about in Shifter’s University?”

  “That’s the one. His girlfriend, Claire, is a Yokai—a multi-shifter. I bet if we asked, they could come down and visit. She might have some insight on how to deal with multiple animal spirits, and she might be able to even help with the flying.”

  “That sounds like a really good idea.”

  “I’ll stop and see William on my way home.” He started to say something else but then paused, his smile melting away.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing…I just had something I wanted to ask you.”

  I waited, and when it seemed like he was going to say something, I waited some more. I felt the wall he’d put up between us, effectively blocking his thoughts from me. I’d felt it for a few weeks now. He’d gotten really good at hiding what he didn’t want me to know beforehand.

  Finally, I blurted, “Well?”

  That seemed to get a reaction. He closed his eyes and took a breath. “I was wondering if you’d like to go to the spring dance with me.”

  Way to ruin a romantic moment, Nikki, I thought.

  When I didn’t answer right away, he opened one eye cautiously, and a tiny sliver of silver gleamed, halfway hidden. Then both opened.

  “I’d love to,” I said, tackling him in a hug as I completely forgot about my shoulder for all of one second. It didn’t take me long to remember it. “Ye-ow!” I sat back just as quickly with a thump against the back of the sofa and held my arm tight against my stomach, willing the pain to go away.

  “Be careful with it,” he warned, carefully touching my forearm.

  “Yep, or you’ll end up in the hospital,” Emily said from her perch at the top of the stairs. I wondered how long she’d been sitting there watching us.

  “Is that going to happen?” I asked with a wince.

  She rolled her eyes. “Mama always says if you don’t take care of things that are hurt, you could end up in the hospital.”

  I huffed a sigh of relief, more than glad that my little sister’s prediction wasn’t a prediction at all this time but rather her repeating one of our mother’s favorite sayings.

  “I need to head back,” Adam said as he stood. “I promised Dad I’d help him when he got home. If I go now, I’ll have enough time to stop and talk to William on the way.” He looked up at Emily and gave her a big grin. “Do me a favor, Em. If she does something she shouldn’t with that arm, you call me and let me know?”

  She gave him a solemn nod, then laughed when I stuck my tongue out at her.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I offered, getting up to follow him.

  Once we were out, I shut the door behind
us. It didn’t take but a second for his hand to lift to cup my cheek. “Promise me you won’t do anything crazy,” he murmured as he rested his forehead against mine.

  “Until the shoulder heals up, or is that like…forever?” I joked.

  “I would say forever, but I know you,” he said and closed the gap between us with a kiss that stole my breath away.

  I wrapped my one good arm around his neck and pulled him closer. “For you,” I whispered against his lips. “I’ll promise anything.”

  Chapter Two

  “What is this even supposed to be?” William asked, his nose scrunched in disgust as he stared at his tray. He grabbed his fork and poked at the food carefully, as if fully expecting it to move on its own accord.

  “Let me see,” Erik said, peering over William’s shoulder and setting his own tray on the table. “Oh, yeah. That’s a hamburger.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. See, there’s the bit of gray between the two pieces of green bread. That’s the hamburger. If it has more of a reddish tinge to it, it’s a sloppy joe,” Erik replied with a resolute nod of his head. He sat beside William and dug into his own questionable lunch.

  “It ain’t happening,” William said, pushing his tray away. “I’ll wait until school is over and then I’ll go home and eat something I don’t have to wonder what it is.”

  “Lucky you. At least you get to go home after school,” Tommy complained when he and Michael joined us.

  Neither of the cousins looked pleased. Michael ended up being the one to explain why. “We have to stay afterward and do research for history class. Mrs. Graham is keeping the library open…just for us.”