Chapter 42: Scent
The foot came off my head.
I pushed myself up from the dirt slowly, one hand braced on the ground, and found Shan Pei standing twenty feet away in the gap between the trees with the grey cat on his shoulder and the spirit stone in his hand.
Then her eyes moved to Shu Shu.
The spirit beast had grown to twice the size she'd been on the gatepost. Her head sat level with Shan Pei's ear, the ambient field drawing inward around her in the same compressed signature as the woman’s had.
I could see the enormous channels in the visualization. I watched her read her brother's beast the way I had been reading her.
She released it.
The field pressure dropped in a wave I felt through my chest. The claws shortened. The teeth receded. She straightened and cracked her neck once to the left and once to the right.
The silence held for one long breath.
Then Zhu Rong let out a sound that started in her chest and came out somewhere between a bark and a laugh, loud enough that it disturbed the branches above us.