by Ivy Hearne
“My schedule is completely wrong.” I showed it to her.
“Let me see.” She tapped a few keys at her computer and then frowned at the screen. “You’re right. This is exactly the same schedule.” She tapped a few more keys, and said, “Yes, that’s really what showing here. Apparently, someone entered the wrong information for you. I’m so sorry, Kacie. I will see what I can do. I’ll put together a tentative schedule for you. If you come back in an hour or two, I will have it ready for you.”
I thanked her and left. This time, I really did head over to the library—I didn’t want to go back to my room and risk running into my roommate. I didn’t have a class to go to. And the cafeteria was likely to be packed full now. I wasn’t ready to see everybody yet.
I might very well hang out in the library all day. I didn’t want to go back to my dorm room in case Layla was there. I had no classes to go to.
The first day of shouldn’t be so hard the second time around.
Chapter 6
I had never spent a day on campus where I had no idea what to do with myself.
With a sigh, I dropped the Lusus Naturae: Monsters of the World book I’d been flipping through. It landed on the library table with a thump.
A noise behind me distracted me as a group of students made their way into the library. They were all first-years.
And there was Layla herself. We made brief eye contact, then glanced away from each other quickly.
Clearly, she liked me almost as much as I liked her.
So much for my plan to hide out from her in the library. I picked up my backpack and was about to head toward the door—now that I knew where Layla was, I could go back to my room—when I heard a commotion behind me. I turned around and realized that Souji had come into the library, too.
Was this his first class? If it was, then it was mine, too.
I was such an idiot. I should have asked him what our schedule was this semester. Or gotten the secretary to check his schedule. She hadn’t thought of it, either, though, so I didn’t feel as bad as I might have otherwise.
I opened my mouth, about to call my hunting partner’s name, when I realized that the commotion was caused by an entire gaggle of first-year girls who had surrounded him and were giggling at something he’d said.
Giggling.
I guess I should not have been so surprised. In his human form, Souji was improbably handsome. I’d realized it the very first time I’d seen him—it was when he’d been helping save me from my tutor the first semester I was here.
But I’d never lost my mind so much as to giggle at him. For one thing, it was generally a bad idea to do anything that might be construed as ridiculing the guy who can turn into a panther.
Actually, it was a good idea in general to avoid pissing off things with claws.
Not that I was all that good at avoiding it—after all, I was the one who provoked the Lusus Naturae every chance I got. Still, giggling seemed like an especially bad idea.
I wondered what rolling my eyes at a panther shifter would get me.
I rolled my eyes and started to turn away when Souji saw me. He beckoned me over, but I shook my head. I wasn’t about to deal with all those girls.
And then I realized that my roommate was one of them.
Oh, hell no.
She could come into my world, move into my room, take over my life, but she was not going to commandeer my hunting partner’s attention. Not even for a minute, if I had anything to say about it. I slipped my backpack over one shoulder and marched toward Souji purposefully.
I was almost close enough to him to say something when I heard one of the girls around him—I counted; here were five—say, “is it true that you’re hunting partners with the gorgon? Isn’t that terrifying?”
I froze. Souji glanced up and made eye contact with me. Apparently, he’d been aware I was there the whole time.
With a slight grin—one that just barely showed the corners of his mouth—and a twinkle in his eye, he said, “Oh, yes. She definitely scares me to death.” I tilted my head and raised my eyebrows at a he looked down at the breathless, wide-eyed first-year student who asked the question.
“I can only imagine,” she said. “I’ve heard that when she uses her magic, her face turns green and snakes pop out of her head.
To anyone who didn’t know him, Souji probably looked like he was being very serious. But I’d figured out his expressions a while ago. I knew he was trying as hard as he could not to laugh out loud.
“Only when she’s really, really seriously angry.” He nodded solemnly as if to back up his words.
“Really?” another one of the first-years asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said solemnly.
Okay. That was enough of that.
“Yes,” I announced loudly. “I am absolutely terrifying. Now. Pardon me while I borrow my hunting partner.”
Amidst the gasps of terror coming from the gaggle of girls, I reached through and grabbed Souji hand. Layla, who had spun around to stare at me, her eyes huge, literally flinched when my arm brushed against hers.
How was I going to get through this semester if this was the kind of crap that was going around about me? It was a good thing I had brought Caleb with me. If Reo was going to keep acting weird, Souji was going to use his connection with me to flirt with younger girls, and the whole campus thought I had snakeheads, I was going to need at least a couple of friends.
“What was that back there? I asked Souji as I dragged him out of the library.
He was laughing too hard to answer. Stumbling behind me, clutching his stomach with one hand and being dragged by the other, he tripped down the stairs and caught his balance. “That was so much fun,” he gasped.
“Don’t be an ass.”
“Cats can’t be asses,” he snickered.
“Cats are the biggest assholes in the world,” I said.
He just laughed harder.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked.
“Our schedules are all screwed up. I was looking for you. I figured you’d be over here since nobody answered in your room.”
“Did you know that Erin left?”
“Yeah, I’d heard something about that. She got into the program in New Zealand, right?”
“Reo told me Europe,” I said.
Souji waved a negligent hand. “Yeah, something like that. Somewhere far away.”
“You don’t think was because of me, do you?” I asked.
“The reason she got into the program?”
“No, idiot. The reason she left this one.”
Souji turned to me, clearly taken aback. “Why would you think it was you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Everything just seems so weird this semester. Now everyone thinks I’m scary.”
“Not everyone. Just the first-years. And trust me, it’s not a bad thing to have the first-year students intimidated by you.”
I guess he was right. He could be worse.
After all, at least I was no longer a nobody at my school.
Chapter 7
“So what we can do about our schedules?” Souji asked. We were walking along one of the stone paths that ran between buildings.
“I stopped by Dr. Novak’s office, and the secretary said she’d work them out for us.”
“I told Reo I’d meet him to go for a run in the woods.” Souji glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “In fur, not skin, or else I would invite you to join us.”
“No problem.” I chewed on my lip for second before asking, “Is Reo mad at me or something? He was acting weird last night when I saw him at the Rathskeller.”
Souji snorted. “No. He’s just all full of himself over being the Hunter in Residence.”
I didn’t say so, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what had been going on. Still, if it was something Souji didn’t know about, then I would just have to work it out with Reo myself.
“If I don’t see before then, let’s meet at lunch—w
e can always go to our afternoon classes,” Souji suggested.
“Sounds good.”
My hunting partner gave a wave and started jogging off toward the clearing in the woods where all the shifters liked to start their runs.
“Kacie!” There was no mistaking the British accent. I turned around to see Caleb calling me from near the dorm. I waved, and he jogged toward me.
“Why aren’t you in class?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’ve got study Hall right now. I figure without anything to study, I might as well wait until tomorrow to attend.”
I shook my head. “It’s probably a bad idea to skip on the first day.”
“Better than skipping later, when I actually have a homework. Or, wait. Maybe I have that the other way around. It might be better to skip later and not get the homework.” He laughed aloud his own joke. I simply shook my head.
A strange intensity tugged at my shoulders, and I turned to glance behind me. Souji stood at the edge of the woods that surrounded the academy, barely under the canopy of the trees. his arms were crossed over his chest, and I could feel him glaring at me.
I couldn’t see his eyes from here, but I could feel his glare as he faded back into the shadows of the forest.
“What’s up with him?” Caleb asked.
“That’s my hunting partner. He can be a little protective. Over-protective.”
“Possessive?”
“Maybe a little.”
Caleb slung his arm around my shoulder. It was almost like he was trying to provoke somebody.
Maybe he was. “Why aren’t you in class?” he asked.
I explained about my screwy schedule. When he realized I wasn’t about to rush off, Caleb perked up.
“What do you say we go somewhere, get out of here for a while?”
I laughed. “You haven’t even been here long enough to need to get out of here.”
“What can I say? I’m a rebel.”
It was a terrible idea. I knew it. But it was so tempting.
Anyway, the school had messed up my schedule. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t have anything to do today.
“Okay. I’m with you.” I stepped to one side and let Caleb’s arm fall away from my shoulder, but grabbed his hand on the way down, just so he didn’t feel like I was trying too hard to get away from him. It was an awkward move, and I realized halfway through I probably should’ve chosen it.
“Let’s go see that town you told me about,” Caleb suggested.
“That’s almost half an hour away on foot,” I said.
“True. I could get there faster in my hound form.”
“Yeah, but humans the only form I have.” I thought about it for a minute. Really, Caleb was right. I had missed the entire first month my first year at the Hunters' Academy, and I hadn’t had any trouble catching up. Not with the subject matter, anyway. Missing one day of classes when I didn’t even know what my classes were was not a big deal.
“Okay. Let’s it.” I said.
The Academy is up the mountain from a tiny little Colorado town that aspires to being a tourist town. It’s not quite there yet, though. All it has is a couple of tiny restaurants and a few gift shops. And sometimes, like last Christmas, evil demons. But I assumed that wasn’t going to be a problem today.
Caleb bought me lunch and kept me laughing the whole time.
It was nice to be spending time with someone so apparently uncomplicated.
I mean, I knew that Caleb had concerns about the school, about being a shifter, about figuring out how not to hurt people, but those all seemed like normal concerns to me. They didn’t seem to consume his soul or anything.
We were almost finished with our burgers when a strange crackling sound sifted through my consciousness like it was invading my head.
I blinked and tried to brush it away.
It came back, almost like a radio static.
As soon as I thought that, it cleared up for a few seconds, exactly like a weak radio signal.
Only instead of any kind of song or radio show, this was Souji’s voice, saying “Kacie.... Come to me... Get me.”
“What was that?” Caleb asked.
“Souji,” I said absently. “Something’s going on. I think we should head back to campus.”
I pulled a twenty out of my backpack, but Caleb waved it away. “I’ll get lunch.”
I stood up, but another message hit me so hard that it almost knocked me off my feet again. “Come back.”
“I think something’s really wrong,” I murmured to Caleb when he’d finish paying.
“Do you think Souji in trouble?”
I nodded. “It feels that way.”
“Can you carry my backpack?” At the apparent non sequitur.
“I guess.”
“If you can, I can cover more ground in fur. I’ll make sure he’s okay. I can get to him faster in my hound form.”
“Thank you.” He waited until we were in the woods to strip down enough to shift. He shoved his clothes into his backpack, handed it to me, and shifted. Then Caleb was gone, leaving me to jog back to campus by myself. I was glad that Caleb was going to help Souji. But I really didn’t like making this walk alone—especially not when I was as terrified as I was right then.
I broke into a jog, then let my fear carry my into a sprint up the mountain toward campus.
Chapter 8
I arrived on campus completely winded. I’d been away from the thin mountain air all summer and hadn’t fully acclimated yet.
I couldn’t see Souji anywhere. It had been a while since I tried using my psychic communication powers, and I didn’t want to blast my question out to the whole campus like I used to, so I very carefully sent a tentative message.
“Souji? Where are you?”
Nothing. Not even the staticky noise I’d gotten earlier.
That was weird. Souji was better at psychic communication than I’d ever been.
I headed toward the woods, where I’d seen him last. As I approached the tree line, Caleb—still in his giant hound shape—came loping out.
“Any sign of him?” I scanned the trees anxiously.
Caleb shook his dark, shaggy head.
Why would he called me and then just disappear?
I glanced to Caleb. Surely that wasn’t the reason.
Souji wouldn’t interrupt my lunch with Caleb and completely terrify me just because he was cranky about me going out for a meal with some other guy, would he?
I bit my lip. He might, I admitted to myself.
But enough horrible stuff had happened since we’d started at the Hunters' Academy that I needed to take it seriously. I carefully closed my eyes and concentrated, drawing my attention down to single-point focus. Trying to make it like a laser beam, I sent my message out to Reo.
“I was in town with Caleb and got a message from Souji that he needed my help. Have you seen him?” I asked mentally.
The answer came back whip-crack fast. “No. I thought he’d be in class.”
Reo sounded like somebody’s dad.
“Just a big brother,” Reo responded.
Oh. Guess my laser-beam message wasn’t quite so tightly focused after all. “Sorry, didn’t mean for that to get through to you.”
“Sounds like you could use more psychics practice. Why aren’t you in class?”
“Souji and I have the same courses. The wrong ones. The ones we took last semester. Souji and I didn’t have anything assigned to us. We’re still waiting for new course schedules.
“I will check his dorm room and let you know,” Reo said.
“Sounds good. I’m in the woods where you were supposed to meet for your shifter run.”
“What shifter run?”
Reo’s question stopped me in my tracks. “When I saw Souji this morning he told me he was meeting you to go for a run in fur. Did that not happen?”
“We didn’t have a run planned at all,” Reo said.
That worried me.
; Now my heart was pounding again, and not from the thin air or the run up the mountain. It was sheer terror. Far too many horrible things that happened for me to be okay with Souji lying to Reo or to me about going for a run with him.
“Caleb, do you have a sense of Souji’s scent?”
Caleb tilted his head and looked up at me reproachfully.
“I know, I know. You’re not a bloodhound or anything. But I was hoping maybe... then again, you haven’t ever even really met him, have you?”
I never actually seen a dog shrugged before, but Caleb managed it.
I took off my jacket where Souji had slung his arm across my shoulder that morning. “Try this.” I held it out and Caleb sniffed it all over.
But honestly, I didn’t have much hope that he would pick up on anything significant. After all, there is no telling how many people a touch that jacket.
The crunch of leaves behind me made me spin around, hoping I’d find Souji. Instead, it was Reo. “He’s not in his room,” his brother said.
“Caleb was trying to get his scent off my jacket, but I don’t know how helpful that’ll be.”
Reo picked up the jacket and sniffed it. “Yeah, he’s on there. But it smells as much like some hamburger joint as it does my brother.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“The best we can do is try,” Reo said. “Let’s go ahead and split up. I’ll head up the mountain and you two can head downhill.”
“Which way is his usual run?” I asked.
“We don’t really have a usual one. I encourage the pack to take different routes every time. If we get too predictable, too habit-driven, it gets easy for the Lusus Naturae to track us. So we’ve been working on disrupting our own patterns.”
“Which is great,” I said, “right up until one of us needs to find you. And then we’re just out of luck.”
“That’s the hell of being a hunter,” Reo agreed.
Chapter 9
An hour later, I was near tears. We had searched everywhere we could, and I was almost ready to let the rest of the academy know he was missing.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Reo said.