The image on the screen soared over foggy mountains decked out in autumn reds and golds, and then dissolved into a wide shot of an enormous stone mansion—castle?—that looked like something from a BBC show lonely housewives watched. Young adults strutted down the sidewalks in the happy, contrived clusters and pairs you’d find in any college’s promo material. Similar shots followed: students laughing over pizza in a cafeteria, students playing Frisbee in a courtyard, students pouring over books in a library. All of the things I’d been imagining doing at solid, no-nonsense Keller Park State College for the next four years. If this had all just been some other college’s attempt to recruit me, it seemed rather… extreme.
I opened my mouth to say, No thanks, take me home, my new BFF Hickoree is very worried about me, and I’m definitely in trouble with the R.A.s for missing the mandatory sorting ceremony, but then a set of broad, muscled shoulders filled the screen. My mouth snapped shut.
The camera zoomed out, revealing the guy’s entire shirtless back as his chiseled arms moved through a series of slow motions, like some sort of yoga or Tai Chi. He turned his head to one side, revealing the most perfect human ear I had ever seen, set just above a five o’clock shadow that pulled my eyes down a sharp jawline to a strong chin and enigmatic smirk. Hazel eyes smoldered out from under a swoop of dark, faintly curled hair.
I felt a rush of relief, among other things. This dream was getting itself back to familiar territory. Now if only I could get rid of the talking critters and crack open that screen…
The guy turned his face away, and while there was much to be said for the way his hair brushed the nape of his neck, I wanted the face back. I leaned forward, fighting the urge to touch the screen.
Come back…
The guy began running and the camera followed, never letting the frame drift lower than his lean waist.
Oh, come on! This has been a long, stupid dream. Help a girl out!
My future husband—if this dream ever cooperated—picked up speed, every muscle in his back rippling as he crossed a bright green lawn toward dark green mountains. I guess they hadn’t shot the video all at once. The camera person probably kept fainting. I mean, just look at my baby go!
Suddenly, without missing a step, his shoulders lunged forward and thick yellow fur blossomed down his back as he leapt. When his butt finally rose into the frame, it was covered in fur and sporting a thick lash of a tail. The camera panned down as the mountain lion skidded on the grass, spinning around to swipe at the lens, flatten his ears, and unleash a blood-curdling roar.
Majestic letters appeared over the vicious beast:
GLADWELL ACADEMY OF SHIFTERS.
And then smaller letters underneath:
Where you can learn to be yourself.
The screen faded to black, and so did my brain.
CHAPTER THREE
I awoke to the sound of tires crunching over gravel and glass bottles tinkling against each other. My eyes fluttered open and I stared cross-eyed down the length of my steely gray snout at my moist black nose.
Well, this can’t be right.
I sat up on my haunches and scratched behind my left ear with my left foot.
Or this.
My vision felt strange, sharper in some ways, blurrier in others. My peripheral vision took in more than I ever imagined possible. I didn’t have to turn my head at all to see the green blur rushing by outside the window over the seat. Even with the heavy tinting, I knew from the way the sun shone a little past straight down that it must be the middle of the afternoon. Ahead of me, through a dark plastic partition over the other curved end of the seat, there were two heads silhouetted in the driver’s area.
And to the left, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the black TV screen. Turning my head fully, I locked eyes with a large gray wolf. And the bear-lady had been right—I did have some very striking markings around my eyes.
I screamed, but it came out as a high-pitched bark.
Why hasn’t this stupid dream ended?!
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” the Vice-Chancellor’s oddly seductive voice came from behind me.
I yipped two more times and tried to spin around on the seat, but consciously moving this strange new body turned out to be more of a challenge than it had been last night when it was doing its own thing without much input from me. My gangly hind legs plopped onto the floor as my front paws scrambled for a hold on the smooth leather seat.
“Please try not to do any more damage, if at all possible.” The beautiful black woman from last night sat by the rear door, typing away on a small white laptop. She glanced up and gestured around the space. “We were hoping you’d sleep all the way there.”
My eyes widened and traveled around the limo’s formerly luxurious interior. Fluffy white tufts of stuffing exploded from several rips in the leather seating, and a few floated freely around on the floorboard, which I now registered as being sticky and reeking of liquor. Looking up at the bar, there didn’t seem to be quite as many bottles as I remembered.
I tried to ask what happened, but of course my mouth didn’t work like that anymore, so instead I whined high in my throat, like a puppy.
What the hell, Remi?
“I’m sure you have a lot to ask, but intentional inter-species telepathic communication is an advanced skill you do not yet possess. However, it is one will you have ample opportunity to learn as a student at the Gladwell Academy.” The Vice-Chancellor closed her laptop and smiled. “While I could easily hurdle your mental blocks, peruse your thoughts, and respond to any pertinent questions, I would rather not violate your privacy again. So, for now, if you wish to chat, one of us will need to shift.”
Everything about that sentence should have infuriated me with its nonsense, but seeing as how I had a furry gray snowsuit growing out of my skin, hearing the woman out seemed like the most rational course of action. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to get back into my human skin.
The woman began unbuttoning her blouse.
Um, what’s happening here?
“You seem to be a little stuck at the moment, so I’ll come to you. You may look away or observe the change. The shame most humans feel with nudity is something every shifter must transcend in due time, but we don’t expect miracles overnight.”
I closed my eyes, not because I was some kind of prude, but because Foster Dad #4 had been obsessed with hokey old horror movies and if this transformation was going to be anything like some of the scenes in those, I really didn’t want to know.
“Ah, that’s better.” Her voice came into my head a few moments later. “Now tell me, Remi, how much of last night do you remember?”
I opened my eyes. The white wolf sat where the woman had just been, next to the laptop and her neatly folded clothes. Her high heel shoes were still on the floor. Climbing back onto my side of the seat, I mirrored her erect posture, curling my tail over my front paws, and thought hard about last night—which was really just a few seconds ago, since of course this was still just part of the same crazy lucid dream I needed to get to the bottom of.
“I remember my dorm, my roommate… feeling like I had to go into the woods, and then following a delicious smell…” My stomach rumbled just thinking about it.
“I apologize for that little sensory trick. We needed to speak to you in a private location, and since your human mind is so… closed, we had to appeal to your animal instincts. Tonight’s feast will more than make up for today’s empty stomach.”
My mouth watered. “Feast? What feast?”
“We’ll get to that. Go on, tell me what else you remember.”
I shook my head and my ears made a funny flapping sound. “There was a clearing. You were there. A black wolf with dorky dad jokes… Um, a bear? Who ate my socks.”
The white wolf snorted. “You’re lucky you slept through that rest stop.”
My tongue rolled out of my muzzle in a nervous pant. “I know we got in the car and there was some sort of movie maybe, but
then…”
She chuckled. “But then you became excited by the sight of one of our rare ailuranthropes and shifted on the spot. I hope you can remember the valuable lesson you learned about shifting while dressed?” She lifted her muzzle to indicate something behind me.
Following her gaze, my eyes landed on the clothes I’d been wearing last night. Someone had gently laid their remains on the other curved section of the seat. My T-shirt was a shredded mess, my jeans two distinct denim tubes. Only my shoes seemed unscathed.
I racked my brain, but couldn’t remember anything that went down after the video ended, and the video itself was pretty hazy. A castle. A cafeteria. A library. A guy.
No, Remi, not just a guy. The hottest guy you’ve ever seen.
Turning back to the white wolf, I asked, “What’s an ailurthroat?”
“Ailuranthrope,” she corrected. “A feline shifter. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s not uncommon for them to send lupine shifters over the edge.”
He had sent me over an edge alright, but I’m not sure it was the same one she was talking about.
“A lupine shifter is a lycanthrope. That’s you,” she went on. “There are also ursanthropes—or people who shift into bears—like Dean Belhollow. You’ll meet all three at the Academy, though wolves make up most of our student body.”
The Academy. That’s what the video had been—a promo to talk me into attending a college full of freaks. As more details came back to me, so did more of my human thinking. I had my life planned out from start to finish, and there was no time to squeeze in a four-year degree in absurdity.
“Yeah, about that… I’m not going.”
The white wolf blinked. “Of course you are. We’ll be there within the hour.”
A sharp bark escaped me. I jumped to all four feet. “What?!”
“Please sit down, Remi. It’s not safe to ride like that, you’ll—”
The limo clunked over a pot hole and tossed me into a tangled heap of legs and tail on the floor.
The Chancellor’s voice crackled over an intercom. “Everything okay back there?”
“Yes, dear,” the white wolf replied. “Remi is awake. We’re having our first advising session.”
“We are?” I asked, staggering up onto all fours. “Wait, how is he driving?”
“He’s in human form, of course. Dean Belhollow, too. We’ve been taking turns.”
“You don’t have a chauffeur?” I asked, because it was an easy question, unlike all the others bouncing around inside my brain.
“Depends on where we’re going and what we’re doing. We didn’t want too many hands in the pot on this mission.”
My head throbbed. I wanted to rub it, but had no hands, so I pressed it against the edge of the leather seat instead. “Tell them I want to go home.”
“Hmm. And where would that be?”
I glared at the white wolf. That was a low blow. “I want to go back to my dorm. My roommate’s going to be worried about me.”
The wolf thumped her tail dismissively. “Oh, that’s taken care of.”
A low growl rose in my throat. I barely knew her, but Hickoree and her damn magic wands were starting to grow on me compared to all this. “What did you do to her?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” The Vice-Chancellor rolled her icy blue eyes. “We’re part-time animals, Remi, not cartoon monsters. After you shifted and began attacking the car, we had no choice but to sedate you. Normally, that would release a freshman shift, but yours held on, so what could we do? Leave you in the hay field and hope you found your way back before the farmer shot you?”
“So you kidnapped me?! You could have just waited for me to wake up and then asked what I wanted to do!”
“Time was of the essence, Remi, so we took you into our protective custody,” the Vice-Chancellor said firmly. “Don’t worry, we have all of your belongings in the trunk. After you were asleep, we found your phone, and Dean Belhollow called your roommate and pretended to be your aunt. She told the girl—what was her name, Oakley?”
“Hickoree. Like the tree. With two ee’s. Like a tree,” I muttered.
“Right. So, Dean Belhollow retrieved your suitcase and explained to Hickoree that you had a relapse and were being sent to rehab.”
“Relapse?! Rehab?! I’m not—I’ve never!” My brain made the words, but my mouth was making barks.
The white wolf sighed. “Should we have told her you were a long lost princess on an emergency flight home to Belgiastan to claim the throne before your evil uncle could?”
“Yes! She would have loved that!” I spun in tiny frantic circles, as if chasing my own tail. “You didn’t need to assassinate my character!”
The limo slowed and then stopped. A moment later, the rear door opened and the black bear’s massive head poked in. Instinct launched me toward the space over her head. If I could just get out of the car, I could find my way—
The Vice-Chancellor knocked me out of the air. I landed on my back, paws flopped over my chest, with the much stronger wolf straddling me. Another instinct told me now was the time to expose my throat.
As soon as I did, she backed off. The limo rocked as the bear squeezed inside, and a second later, the black wolf followed.
“What’s going on back here?” he demanded.
“Remi doesn’t appreciate the story we—” she gave the bear a hard look “— told her roommate.”
The bear sighed. “I’m sorry, sweetie. But that little crayon was sharp. She wasn’t going to fall for just anything. I had to make it believable.”
I rolled over onto my stomach, facing away from all of them. I didn’t know who to be angrier with. These creatures that had kidnapped me, or myself for making the kind of first impression on Hickoree that would make it easy for her to believe I was some sort of troubled addict.
“Where is my phone? I need to text her right now.” I didn’t care if I didn’t have thumbs, I would figure it out.
“Your phone is still in your jeans pocket, but I’m afraid there’s no signal out here. You’ll have to wait,” the white wolf said.
“’Til when?” I groaned.
“Our winter break starts the day before Thanksgiving…” the black wolf offered cheerfully.
I jumped up and spun around to face them again. “Are you saying I can’t tell anyone where I really am until Thanksgiving?!”
The black wolf tilted his head and kind of shrugged. “Well, technically, you can never tell anyone where you are…”
A series of guttural grunts and snarls erupted out of my jaws, and while they didn’t have exact translations into English, I somehow knew these were not sounds young wolves should make in front of their mother… or to school administrators.
Suddenly weirdly embarrassed, I turned away from them and dropped to the floor with my paws over my nose. “Sorry.”
“Remi, my dear girl,” the black wolf said in a fatherly tone. “We know this can’t be easy for you to understand, but you are a shifter, and shifters must attend an Academy.”
“It’s not safe out there on your own,” the bear—Belhollow—said.
“You must learn self-control if you ever wish to lead any kind of life among other humans.” The white wolf gently nudged my ear with her nose. “We can teach you those skills, and so much more. And, in time, you may even come to see that being a shifter means never being without a family.”
Family. Did she really think that sort of sentimental—
Family!
My claws scrabbled against the floor. I spun around, unable to stop the wag in my tail. “My brother! Have you found him yet?”
The animals exchanged glances. The white wolf tilted her head. “Your brother?”
“Yes!” I did a puppyish spin in the tight space between the bar and the seat, kicking up a whirl of white stuffing. “My brother! Rahm! My twin! If I’m a shifter, then he must be too!”
The looks on their faces carved all the joy out of my heart and splattered it on the floor.
My tail drooped. My ears fell flat against my head.
“I mean… right?”
Belhollow touched my cheek ever-so-gently with her claws. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that, baby girl.”
“There is no genetic component,” the Vice-Chancellor said carefully. “The chance of two people in one family—even twins—being shifters… well, it’s astronomical.”
“Shifting is a gift, Remi,” the black wolf chimed in. “Given at random.”
My haunches sank to the floor. “Then why didn’t you give it to someone who would want it? Like Hickoree. She’d be all over this.”
The Chancellor shook his head. “The gift is not within our power to give, or to take. You are what you are, Remi. All we can offer you is the knowledge needed to embrace it.”
“But my brother… he’s been missing. What if he’s looking for me? And he tracks me down at Keller Parks, but Hickoree tells him I’ve gone to rehab, and he’s looking all over the place while really I’m just stuck in—I don’t even know where!”
Overwhelmed by the emotional roller coaster of this stupid, never-ending dream, I threw back my head and released a mournful howl.
Instantly, the other two wolves joined me, our voices filling up the limo and leaking out the open door into the vast forest beyond. Again and again and again, we howled, and as we sang, my pain became their pain, and I felt flashes of their own, of children dreamed of but never born, of the sorrow that drove them to build a school where the strange and lost never had to be alone.
Our song faded. Outside, birds chirped and bugs droned and the leaves rattled and the tree trunks creaked, but inside, no one spoke, not for a long time. The other animals seemed to be communicating with each other now on a channel I wasn’t tuned into.
Academy of Shifters: Werewolves 101 Page 3