by Bailey, G.
That’s the problem with all the guys.
“Take your time, take your time,” Shade says dryly. “It’s not like it’s almost dinnertime or something.”
I open my eyes and give him a playful shove, sending him stumbling back. “You’re making it hard to concentrate.”
Shade gives me a devilish grin that sends a swarm of butterflies moving through my stomach. “That’s the point.”
My eyes go wide, and I open my mouth to ask what he means by that, but think better of it at the last second. That’s opening a door I’m not sure I want to open.
Aside from Hazel, the siren shifter who I met on my first day at the Academy, most of my friends here have been guys. It’s not like that’s a problem, or anything—I don’t discriminate—but when I arrived here, I wasn’t used to being close to people. After a life of bouncing from place to place, never able to settle down and form real connections, I had almost forgotten what it was like to care about someone—let alone multiple someones. The fact that each of the guys is compassionate, handsome, and intelligent? That’s the issue, and it’s complicated even further by the fact that they, in a sense, made me.
I straighten up and redouble my efforts, forcing all thoughts of the guys, my past, and the Academy from my mind as I bring the image of a timber wolf to mind. Focusing on every detail, I back away from the pool of magic, allowing it to branch out and envelop my body. Within moments, I can feel the telltale prickling of fur emerging from my skin, my posture changing and my muscles shifting. It’s a bit like meditating, in a sense; the second you think about it too much, you lose the thread, and then you’re a human again. So instead I open my eyes as I become a wolf, focusing on something else instead—namely, the tall student who stands watching me with a crooked smile. Not for the first time, I find myself lost in his gray eyes, my wolf’s vision allowing me to see flecks of color and tiny details that I can’t as a human.
He’s so handsome, I think, and nearly kick myself. But I can’t help it, especially now; I can feel the heat rolling off him in waves, sending fresh shivers up my spine as we stare each other down like predator and prey… except which one of us is the predator, and which one of us is the prey?
The tension mounts until Shade finally speaks up, that cocky grin still on his face. “Take a picture, Boots,” he tells me. “It’ll last longer.”
“Ass,” I mutter, still struggling to form the words around my wolf’s snout and thankful he can’t see my embarrassment at being called out like that. And then, without thinking about it, I lunge for him, sending him tumbling to the ground as I pounce on him playfully. The forest floor is carpeted with leaves and fallen pine needles, cushioning the fall, and Shade lets out a laugh as I land on top of him, my weight pressing him against the ground.
Weird, I think. Usually I can’t hold the form this long.
And that does it. In an instant, the control slips away from me, and I pop back into my human form in a split second—which, as you might imagine, leaves us in a rather compromising position. For a moment we just lie there, staring at one another with me on top of him in a tangle of limbs. The seconds tick by, seeming to stretch on into infinity, and it dawns on me how close I am to him; my face is inches above his, close enough to make out the scar on his temple and the blasé look in his eyes. “You don’t look so bad from this angle, Boots,” he remarks, and I groan, rolling my eyes.
The moment broken, a familiar nervousness seizes me, and I scramble off him, dusting leaves and dirt off my pants as I hold out a hand to help him up. He takes it and gets to his feet, his skin cool against mine, and I realise my heart is pounding wildly. In spite of his arrogance, I think Shade realises it too; he tips me a wink before turning around. Through the trees, we can make out the shape of the Academy in the distance, a campus of stalwart brick buildings that have been on this remote Scottish island for years.
Even now, though, I can’t help but wonder—is it a refuge, or a prison?
The sound of the clock tower bell ringing shakes us out of our thoughts. “Come on,” I say, nodding in the direction of the quad. “You said you didn’t want to miss dinner.”
Shade smirks. “There are more important things than dinner,” he observes. “I could maybe be talked out of it, if it means spending more time rolling around on the ground with you.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Oh? Is that why you offered to help me get ready, then?”
“I’ll leave that for you to figure out, Boots.”
Shaking my head in a combination of exasperation and self-consciousness, watching as the wolf shifter turns on his heel and heads off in the direction of the campus without so much as a glance back over his shoulder.
A moment later, I straighten up, square my shoulders, and follow him.
Chapter 28
Even though I’m finally starting to learn my way around the main academic building, I find myself occasionally getting confused by the winding halls and endless doorways. The only way I’m normally able to navigate the place is by following the crowd and hoping it leads me where I need to go… unless, of course, we’re talking about the dining hall. When food is concerned, I have a sixth sense—although the fact that everyone else is heading in the same direction doesn’t hurt either. It’s a sea of starched uniforms and buzzing weekend energy, and all the students seem supercharged with the respite of a day off. I fall into step beside Shade as we allow the crowd to sweep us away and catch myself eyeing him out of the corner of my eye as we navigate the hallway that branches off the foyer. His hair is getting long, and a lock of it falls into his eyes as we walk; I’m struck with the urge to reach out and brush it out of his face, but manage to stop myself—that’s not a road I’m ready to go down right now. Or ever. Still, I can appreciate him from a distance, even if he does need a haircut.
I’m pulled out of my thoughts by a familiar lilt off to my left: “There you two are.”
I turn around to see Hazel muscling through the crowd to sidle up next to the two of us, smiling broadly when she sees us. “What are you up to?”
“Just trying to help Boots here practice her wolf form a little more,” Shade replies, elbowing me playfully. “She has a practical this week, and believe me, she’s screwed.”
“She is right here, you know,” I retort, pushing between the two of them and linking my arm through Hazel’s. “And she is going to ace that damned test if it kills her.”
“Well, I guess positive thinking is the first step,” Hazel says, smoothing things over as she shoots Shade a look over my shoulder. The two of them haven’t exactly gotten on swimmingly in the weeks that I’ve known them, and I suppose I can understand why: Shade’s personality is a bit abrasive—certainly more so than our other companions—and his reputation around the Academy precedes him. It sounds like he’s a bit of a problem child, which makes some sense—all of us are castaways, in some way or another, either separated from our families, with no families to speak of, or with families we don’t get along with. We needed each other, I think—more than any of us ever really expected to. That said, I don’t know much about Shade’s story other than the fact that he was adopted. From the sounds of it, he didn’t exactly get on swimmingly with his new family, either. He doesn’t seem too keen to talk about it, so I don’t push the issue.
The three of us make our way into the large dining hall, where the students are fanning out to find seats at the long tables and pounce on the buffet which is stocked with an assortment of delicious foods. I pause in the doorway, looking around until I catch a glimpse of a familiar face near the back of the room: Landon Thyme, the siren shifter, is sitting at one of the far tables, and he seems to have cleared a space for us. Next to him sits Hunter Ash, the surly vampire shifter who might as well be a self-parody, if it weren’t for the difficulty he also has changing into his form. We’re two of a kind in that sense, which is for the best, considering that we couldn’t be farther apart in every other way. His father is one of the Academy board members
, and it’s obvious from square one that it’s a family of stuffy, uptight over-achievers and high expectations.
None of this is helped by the fact that his sister, Amelia, is an overly protective upperclassman hellbent on getting her little brother’s shapeshifting abilities up to the same level as her own. She also seems to take issue with me on the grounds that I’m a hybrid, although part of me can’t help but wonder if her reasons go deeper than that. My origins, while clearer to me now, are still shrouded in mystery, but Hunter’s family has connections with the Academy and, most likely, to the experiment that brought me here in the first place. It was a bastardization, if the most vocal opponents are to be believed, a repetition of the kind of horrific rituals used by witches hundreds of years ago in order to combine shifter powers. A child, taken from the hospital as a baby, was used as a test subject, a blank slate for men in white coats to give her the powers of one of each of the other shifter species. I’ll give you one guess as to who that child was.
The twist, of course, was that the other children used to grant me my abilities turned out to be the same guys in my friend group now. The fact that we all ended up in detention together only lends credence to the idea that we’re all in this together, pawns in some game that we don’t understand just yet. All we know is that all subsequent attempts to recreate that experiment failed, but that hasn’t stopped the powers that be—the alliance in charge of making sure humans and shifters could coexist, without ever revealing our existence to the world—from continuing their attempts. It all came to a head soon after I arrived at the Academy, with Brody’s disappearance; one of the two recruiters who brought me to the Academy in the first place was overseeing the experiment that killed the poor guy, and if we hadn’t stumbled on the plot, others would no doubt have followed suit. She was hauled off by the bureaucrats and never seen again. But I don’t believe the conspiracy ends there.
Not for a second.
We make our way across the dining hall and to the table Landon’s saved for us; I slide into the spot next to him while Shade and Hazel take seats on opposite sides of the table. “I heard the two of you were getting up to some ‘extracurriculars’ out in the woods earlier,” Landon remarks, his eyes gleaming.
I groan, rolling my eyes. “It was nothing like that.” Shade catches my eye then, smirking, and something passes between us, but I push it away. “I’ve got an exam this week. Aaronson wants to see how long I can hold my wolf form.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard, should it?” Landon replies. “You held it for a while when we fought Samantha.”
“Yeah,” I reply, “but that was an emergency situation. I don’t know if I can replicate it. I certainly haven’t been able to with my other forms.”
Hunter frowns. “At least you can shift,” he remarks. “I’m stuck listening to Amelia give me shit every other day.”
“Why the hell do you put up with that, anyway?” Shade asks, turning to the vampire shifter. “You’re a big boy—can’t you just tell her to lay off.”
“Charming,” mutters Hunter, before sighing and running a hand through his red hair. “If your dad was on the school board, you’d be talking differently, Ivis.”
“If my dad was on the school board, maybe I’d have an easier time passing my Integration class,” Shade fires back. “I swear, now they’re just holding me back for the hell of it.”
“I seriously doubt that,” comes a familiar voice, and I turn around in my seat to see Silas Aconite, the tall dragon shifter, making his way over to us with a tray of food in his hands. He sits down next to me and leans forward, glancing at the others. “What did I miss?”
“Just Hunter bitching about his sister,” Shade replies. “You know—the usual.”
“You’re in top form today, you know that?” Hunter fires back at him. “You’re just trying to piss me off, aren’t you?”
“It took you long enough to catch on.” Shade turns to Silas, raising an eyebrow. “You look like you’ve been run over by a train.”
“Gee, thanks,” Silas replies, rolling his eyes. “Rehab hasn’t exactly been easy, for your information.”
Shade clears his throat, looking down at the table. “Right,” he mutters. “Ah, sorry. Forgot.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard the wolf shifter apologise, but we’re all treading a little lightly around Silas in the aftermath of our showdown with Samantha.
The tension propelling the current state of affairs hits closest to home for Silas. His parents seemed to be on the verge of acting against the humans overseeing the shifter community when they were taken away from him, never to be seen again. It’s possible they knew something about the experiment, and were on the verge of saying too much, but it’s never been clear. Silas was the one who discovered the truth about my origins, and my ties to the other guys, and that revelation nearly got him killed. If we hadn’t come to rescue him from an underground testing facility beneath the registrar’s office, he would have been, and that thought is enough to make my blood run cold.
I’m not sure if I can even put my finger on the nature of our relationship, exactly. It’s certainly not platonic, but even after kissing each other, we’ve been dancing around labels as if trying to define it will jinx it somehow. Maybe he’s picked up on my attraction towards the others, or maybe he’s shying away from anything that might put us in danger the way that his discovery of the truth did. Either way, my heart skips a beat when he settles into the seat next to me, and his presence is enough to make me flush a little. “Boots,” he says, nodding to me, “are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I reply, a little too quickly. “Just wondering how you were holding up.”
“Could be worse,” he says, shrugging his broad shoulders. “At least my powers seem to be more or less back to normal. Using them still takes it out of me, but they are coming back.”
I clear my throat, feeling a little awkward under the scrutiny of the others. “I’m… glad to hear it.”
He gives me his signature crooked smile, the one that always sends me reeling, and the feeling of his leg brushing up against mine is nearly enough to make my head spin. I was never a very romantic person before coming to the Academy—chalk it up to years of moving from place to place; I guess—but the kiss I shared with Silas seems to have awoken something in me, something as alluring as it is dangerous.
Fuck. Who would have thought university would end up being this complicated?
“Look,” says Landon, nodding, and the rest of us follow his gaze to the raised platform at the front of the room. The setting sun casts a bright glare through the side facing windows, illuminating the poised figure of President Hawthorne as he makes his way onto the platform and clears his throat. Something about his presence is always enough to instill a sense of awe and dread, in spite of the fact that he’s only human, and today is no different: a hush falls over the assembled students as they realise he’s waiting for them to quiet down.
“Great,” mutters Shade, “this ought to be good.”
“It’s good to see so many smiling faces here tonight,” Hawthorne says, clapping his hands together with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Before you get started on your meal, I wanted to address something with you while I have you all here today. This will save you from having to go to an assembly before class tomorrow morning, so bear with me.”
I exchange a look with Silas, who seems just as concerned as I am. The last time Hawthorne made an announcement to the school like this, it was to tell us that we were going on lockdown until further notice. There’s nothing quite so ominous as watching the guy speak, and a chill runs up my spine as his gaze sweeps the dining hall. “I’ll keep this as brief as I can,” he continues, putting his hands behind his back. “We are witnessing something of great concern for both the student body and the shapeshifting community as a whole, something I fear could have dire consequences for everyone at this school - faculty and students alike.”
My heart sinks, my stomach drops, and
my mouth goes dry, but not because of the words he’s saying.
It’s because, in that moment, Hawthorne’s eyes have settled directly on me. And no matter what I do, I can’t seem to pull my gaze away.
Chapter 29
I nearly jump at the feeling of a hand on mine, and my eyes are wide when I look to see Silas watching me with a concerned expression. “Boots,” he whispers, “are you okay?”
Wordlessly, I nod, swallowing hard as I return my gaze to Hawthorne. Whatever ominous spell he had me under seems to have broken, but the silence in the room is nearly oppressive, and an uneasy murmuring passes through the crowd of assembled students.
Hawthorne shakes himself and clears his throat. “We take great care to not cause unnecessary panic when a situation like this arises,” he continues, “but it’s also important to acknowledge the gravity of what is happening outside this island.” He takes a breath, moving back a step. “Some of you may have heard of a certain level of… unrest between the shifters of the world and the humans who know about their existence. Obviously, the human-shifter coalition exists in order to help keep this a secret from the general population, but there are subsets of humanity who know the truth about shifters.” There’s something I don’t like under his words, and it feels as though they carry a double meaning.
“These groups have been causing a bit of a stir amongst shifter communities around the world of late,” Hawthorne continues. “I can’t speak to any talk of a so-called ‘uprising’, other than to assure everyone here that they have nothing to be afraid of. That said, though…” He straightens his dark jacket. “This isn’t something to be taken lightly. Skirmishes in shifter communities are increasing, and more and more humans are beginning to buy into conspiracy theories about the existence of magical beings. We’ve seen it here, too, at this very school - the incident involving a missing student and one of our faculty members has been treated with the utmost severity.”