Their Shifter Academy 2: Unclaimed

by May Dawson

  No book.

  I stormed back downstairs. Jensen was still sitting on the steps, and he looked up when he heard me behind him.

  I plucked the book out of his hands. It wasn’t his usual, ever-present paperback; it had a dark leather cover and thin, fragile pages.

  “Watch it,” he warned.

  “Is this mine?” I demanded, turning it over to see the front cover. Was this the book Dani had left for me? In gold letters, the text on the front said A Manual of Simple Witchcraft.

  “Nope.” He rose to his feet, holding his hand out impatiently.

  “Why are you reading this?” I demanded. “Your kind hate—” I broke off, because I’d never heard Jensen say anything about witches. I’d just assumed he hated them.

  To be fair, Jensen hated everyone, so I didn’t feel too badly about my assumptions.

  “Do we?” he drawled slowly. “Do you think I could have my book back, Northsea?

  “Dani left a book for me. Did you take it?”

  “You and the witch are close now.” His golden eyes watched me curiously, as if I was a puzzle he didn’t understand but still felt fondly about. When he looked at me that way, a strange, restless tension raced through my body. “Just like her and Lex, her and Rafe, huh?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to be distracted by his games.

  “I didn’t take your book,” he said.

  “Fine.” I crossed my arms over the book, pressing it against my chest. “You still owe me another book, Jen. My poetry book. I’ll swap you.”

  He took a step toward me, his tall, broad-shouldered body intimidating although his eyebrows arched over his eyebrows mischievously. “Or I could just take my book back.”

  “You could try. You know we’re a pretty even match.” My chin rose in response to his dominating presence. He wasn’t wearing his school blazer anymore, and the sleeves of his shirt were turned up, revealing his muscular forearms. He’d be irresistibly sexy if he weren’t such a damn pain in my ass.

  “I think you’re flattering yourself,” he shot back.

  “Funny, I thought I was being kind.”

  He looked me over for a long minute, then said, “All right. Come on up with me.”

  I eyed him warily. It couldn’t be that easy.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Really.” He jogged up the steps, which put his very nicely shaped ass right in front of my face. “We’re stuck together for four days. Let’s start it out on a note of goodwill.”

  “What do you want, Jensen?” Because I knew it was not my goodwill.

  He didn’t deign to answer. But he did stop and hold the door open for me, fake-gallant as usual.

  The two of us went to his room. It looked just like mine, except the bed on one side was lofted, the desk tucked beneath it. There were photos tacked to the wall and although there were other people in the photos, Beckett starred in every photo, grinning or staring out Blue Steel style. That was definitely Beckett’s side.

  There was next to nothing personal on Jensen’s side, besides a guitar in a stand by the bed and an old-fashioned silver alarm clock on the nightstand. Apparently, Jensen and I shared a wall. His bed was on the same side as mine.

  I hoped like hell he hadn’t heard Penn and me.

  “How are things with Beckett?” I asked.

  He pulled a familiar red Moleskin book out of his packed bookcase and said, “I thought we were going to be nice to each other.”

  “I am being nice. I’m asking about your best friend.”

  “He’s not really my best friend anymore.” He winked at me. “Job’s open if you want to apply.”

  “I don’t think you really want to be my friend, for some reason.”

  “Nonsense. I like you.”

  I pursed my lips, shooting him a dark look, and he grinned. He tossed my book onto the floor in front of me.

  Fucking asshole. Now I had to crouch or kneel in front of him to pick it up.

  “Give me mine.” He raised his hand, waggling his long fingers in a come-here gesture.

  I started to toss his book next to mine, then hesitated. “Are you using magic, Jensen?”

  “Why?” he asked. “Are you going to turn me in, witch?”

  The word sent a chill racing through my stomach.

  “I’m not a witch.”

  “Right,” he said. “I felt your magic when my staff broke.”

  I shook my head. Yet another of Jensen’s little traps.

  “Fine,” he said. “You keep your secrets. I’ll keep mine.”

  “I wouldn’t hold it against you.” After all, the two of us had little reason to trust each other.

  And yet, sometimes, I could’ve sworn there was a thin, fragile bond between us.

  But that bond was nothing either of us could count on. We could easily lose the little bit of goodwill we managed toward each other. The thought made me anxious, and that really worried me.

  I couldn’t trust Jensen with any knowledge of my magic. I shouldn’t trust Jensen at all. It could be my undoing here at the academy when our truce broke.

  “Maybe you wouldn’t hold it against someone else,” he disagreed.

  My sister had fought for magic to be a bigger part of the curriculum here, but the curriculum still only included the handful of defensive tricks approved by the Alpha council. That was part of how my sister lost her position as dean.

  “I thought your father took a firm stance against magic at the academy.”

  “I’m not my father,” Jensen said, and his voice was level but laced with irritation. He knew how to goad me so well, but I wasn’t half-bad at goading him either.

  “I know your pack does magic,” he went on. “It’s why no one trusts them. Well, part of it.”

  “Yeah? What’s the other part?”

  “Your sister,” he said. “As alpha.”

  “She’s not really the alpha,” I said. “She’s something more.”

  She was something better, if you asked me. Women were better leaders much of the time. They were calmer, cooler, more empathetic. Women were better able to negotiate a satisfactory outcome for all parties.

  Okay, not me. I fit in here with these loudmouth, cocky male shifters. I couldn’t imagine being as simultaneously sweet and commanding as my sister was, but I wanted to be more like her.

  I crouched down, reaching for my book, and Jensen knelt across from me in one smooth movement. I pressed my poetry book against my chest in relief.

  “You know it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I already made copies.”

  Ugh. I expected that. “Of course you did.”

  “And I memorized the good lines.” He winked at me.

  “I’m sure you’re quite the poetry critic.”

  “I happen to like poetry,” he said. “Some of yours are actually pretty good. It’s weird reading about Lex, though.”

  I eyed him skeptically. “Do you think I could get my hands on the copies?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I won’t tell everyone you’re studying magic in your free time.”

  “You won’t tell people that anyway,” he said. “You shattered my bo staff with your magic, little witch.”

  “You can’t prove I did.” I cursed myself even as the words crossed my lips.

  I should’ve denied it. Saying he couldn’t prove it was practically the same as a confession.

  It bothered me to lie to him for some reason. Not that Jensen deserved the truth from me.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But you and I both know it.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jensen

  I could feel Maddie following me.

  There was just something that sent me into high alert when she was anywhere near me. Even now on the quiet campus, as I headed to the Dean’s office.

  My father had been pissed at me for being on restriction. He wanted to take me with him on this trip to visit my grandparents. It was bad enough Will was busy at the Hunters’ academ
y and couldn’t go, but at least he could brag about that. Will was special.

  I was just specially gifted in the fucking-up department, as far as Dad was concerned. Ruining the trip he’d planned for months

  It was almost as if I didn’t want to be there.

  I let myself into the academic building. I’d borrowed his keys to have copies made this summer. It was a waste not to, if he was going to be drunk and stupid and leave them for me.

  I hadn’t found anything about Eliza in his desk, but sometimes at home, I caught him looking through papers he hastily shoved into his locked briefcase. Once I’d seen him with tears in his eyes.

  Another time, I’d glimpsed a crime scene photo. There wasn’t much of Eliza’s face left beneath the ragged wound left by the bullet. She had her sword in her hand, as if she died fighting. Not like people said about her. The council had told us enough to ruin her memory. Then the rumors had spun the story until it was even worse.

  As soon as he saw me, he’d whisked the photos away, bitching at me over something stupid, like usual. I didn’t bother listening, because it all really boiled down to the same shit. Why can’t you be more like Eliza?

  Why does she have to be the one who’s dead?

  He’d lost the one who reminded him of Mom. I didn’t know what I reminded him of, but it didn’t seem to be anyone he wanted to remember.

  When I let myself into his office, I closed the door softly behind me. I hesitated, my fingers brushing the lock, then left it open. Would Maddie follow me all the way in here?

  Not that I should want her.

  The anteroom where my father’s secretary worked was quiet. The curtains were open, and moonlight leaked into the office. I’d waited until I was sure everyone had left for the day. The janitor had come and gone. The guard wouldn’t be by again for twenty minutes if they took their usual route. And, if Maddie didn’t give me away, I might have a chance at hiding from them anyway.

  I let myself into his office. Moving quickly and quietly, I searched the parts of his office I hadn’t been able to get to yet. I already knew he didn’t keep the files anywhere in the house or even in the hunting cabin. Ever since I’d realized he was collecting information about Eliza, I’d tried to find his files.

  I’d learned plenty of other things about my father. He kept the empty liquor bottles for a month, so scared for his reputation that he wouldn’t even put them in the trash bin. He carried them into the city once a month and dropped them off at a dumpster.

  The files that went into his briefcase must come back here to his office.

  But I hadn’t found it in my previous searches, when I had checked his desk and the first filing cabinet along the wall. I needed time to get into the last two filing cabinets.

  As I headed for the one in the center, I pulled the roll of lock picking tools out of my inner jacket pocket. On the one hand, I might be haunted by my sister’s memory, but on the plus side, I’d gained some valuable new tools in my search for justice.

  It took me a few minutes to jimmy open the cabinet. I couldn’t scent Maddie. She must have stopped outside the Dean’s office, with two doors and all those walls between us.

  Hopefully she wasn’t drawing any attention to herself or to us. I didn’t think she would. She was smart, at least.

  I had to go through the files to make sure he hadn’t hidden them in something else. And then, sure enough, there they were in the bottom cabinet, hidden in some fake student files.

  The photos from the crime scene.

  But wait. I frowned as I flipped through more files, slowly beginning to realize that there was a lot in here, hidden in other, mislabeled files. Transcripts of interviews from people who knew her patrol. Shit. I was going to have to go through the next filing cabinet too. As I checked my watch, my heart beat faster in my chest.

  When I started trying to hack into the lock on the third cabinet, my hands were clumsy.

  My palms were sweating. I wiped them off on my jeans. Get it the fuck together, Jensen.

  Eliza deserved better. She’d believed in me for some reason—the only person in our family who did—and I’d abandoned her these past few years.

  My father and the other shifters told me it wasn’t Eliza’s fault—that women just weren’t meant for that kind of work—and I should have known they were lying. I should have hunted out the truth. I’d abandoned her.

  Click. Finally. I pulled the top drawer in the file cabinet out and flipped rapidly through the files. The minutes ticked down. I kept adding to the pile I’d made that my father had collected on Eliza, and I moved to the second drawer.

  There was so much here. What the hell? How long had he known there was more to the story? He should’ve fucking told me.

  There was a soft click as the door opened behind me, and I froze.

  “I don’t know what you’re up to,” Maddie said, very quietly, paused in the doorway. “But the patrol’s headed back. They’ll be in the building in two minutes. They’ll probably be back up on this floor in five.”

  I shuffled through the files, searching as fast as I could, so I didn’t even look her way. “Why the hell would you help me?”

  “Because I want something in return, of course,” she shot back. She moved to my side on quiet feet.

  The quick intake of her breath when she saw the pile and realized what she was looking at made something squirm through my stomach. Something vulnerable.

  I hated that feeling. But I ignored it, thumbing through the files as fast as I could. “What the hell do you want, Northsea?”

  “Did you get to the last drawer yet?” she asked instead of answering my question.

  “No.”

  Without comment, she knelt at my feet, her shoulder brushing my leg—funny how that touch sent sparks flying down my skin—and pulled open the bottom drawer. She began to flip through the files.

  “You don’t want to get caught in here with me,” I warned her in a whisper.

  She yanked out a file and laid it carefully on top of the pile, already returning to flipping through them. “We aren’t going to get caught.”

  “I like your optimism.”

  “You didn’t come in here without a plan,” she said. “The files don’t do you any good if you get caught with them.”

  “Maybe you’re putting a little too much faith in me.” Unlike my father or brother, the people who knew me best. Or at least, the people who should. The words came out barbed, but the spikes weren’t meant for her, this time.

  “If there’s one thing I’d put my faith in when it comes to you, Jen, it’s that you’re crafty.”

  I knelt to pick up the files, forcing myself to ignore the photos, as I slipped them all into my leather backpack. She pulled out one more file and handed it to me over her shoulder.

  “Time’s up,” I told her. My fingers brushed hers as she took it, and she stiffened, but I couldn’t read how she meant it.

  “One second,” she said, paging through faster and faster as I zipped up the backpack and threw it over my shoulder. She yanked out one last file and stood, nudging the drawer shut with her foot.

  Out in the hallway, there was a faint creak. A footfall.

  She looked at me with wide eyes.

  I grabbed her hand. I was on the verge of telling her not to let go when her warm, lithe fingers closed around mine. She didn’t need me to ask.

  “Dissipati peribunt,” I muttered, finishing the spell I’d started earlier.

  Who was she going to tell?

  The magic washed over both of us, tingling between our fingers, flooding my skin with a warm rush. Maybe there was a reason magic was so addictive for the witches.

  Just in case, I tugged her with me behind the long curtains that hung to either side of the big windows. She twitched the curtains into place around us just as the guard walked in the door.

  She pressed her back against me. I wrapped my arm around her waist to hold her there, resting my hand on her taut abs, feeling the flu
tter of her breath under my fingertips. When she craned her head to look up at me, I couldn’t read the look in her eyes in the dim light.

  The guard shone the flashlight around the room, then left. I exhaled softly under my breath, but we stayed there, giving him time to leave the building.

  Maddie’s hair smelled like strawberries. I’d never noticed that before. It mixed with the scent of her body, which reminded me of grass and fresh earth and sunshine and the faintest citrus note, like just-squeezed lemons.

  This close to her, I could feel the tension in her lean muscles as she held very still. Her soft blond hair shone a little even in this dark space, and the curve of her ass was pressed firmly against my jeans.

  “Jensen,” she ground out, the word a whisper that even I could barely hear in this room, but it certainly carried some emotion.

  “I can’t help it,” I whispered into the shell of her ear. “I might hate you, but you have a nice ass.”

  She pulled away slightly, but not far, the two of us still hidden in the curtains. The guard might not even be finished with the floor.

  Her struggles caused her shapely ass to brush back and forth over the swell of my cock, until I was so painfully stiff that I gritted my teeth. Great.

  She twisted, giving me a dirty glare, although I could’ve sworn her body was heating against mine as if she were aroused by our proximity too.

  “It’s not personal,” I whispered.

  “It feels personal.”

  Oh my god. I gently disentangled myself from her, slipping out from behind the curtain. I couldn’t handle one more second with her body pressed against mine. It should be safe now to break the spell.

  The two of us waited in the dark, giving the guard time to leave the academic building entirely.

  After a minute, she closed the small distance between us and leaned up on her tiptoes, catching my shoulder. It always amazed me that she was so damn tiny when she was so fierce too. I leaned forward so she could whisper in my ear.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked softly.