by Elena Lawson
Not to mention, they wouldn’t like shifters skulking around in the woods so close to the academy grounds.
The other one clenched his fists as he turned to look at me. “Easier said than done,” he growled, never breaking eye contact with me. “We can’t stay away for more than a day without some thing drawing us back here.” He kicked a large rock and it soared through the air like a soccer ball, smashing loudly against a tree somewhere far into the woods.
I narrowed my eyes, letting them know I wasn’t happy about the situation any more than they were. “I’ll find a way. It’s not like I wanted this either.”
Some of the tension leached out of the tall one’s shoulders and jaw. His expression softened. “We didn’t think something like this was possible.”
I worried the pleats of my skirt, eyes downcast. “Neither did I,” I admitted. “What can I call you? My name’s Harper,” I added weakly, even though we were long past the point of civil introductions.
“I’m Adrian,” the blonde one who was still standing mere inches in front of me said, some of the ire gone from his voice. I got the feeling Adrian was the hotheaded type. Acting first and considering the implications later. “And he’s Cal.” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of his tall friend.
Cal grabbed Adrian by the arm, tugging him back a few feet. “I’d rather not tell Atlas if we don’t have to,” he said in a low whisper, and I looked away, pretending I couldn’t hear. A blush turned the sides of my face hot all the way to the tips of my ears.
I was trying not to eavesdrop, I swear, but I couldn’t help it. I gathered from their clipped, hushed conversation that Atlas was their leader—or their alpha, I guess. Watching the two Endurans argue, I suddenly wondered where they were from. They looked to be in their early twenties, if not even younger. But like the other races, they were blessed with extraordinarily long lives. Not as long as Fae lived, or vamps, but a lot longer than witches.
How far had they traveled from their pack land when they happened upon me in the woods?
It must’ve been far. I doubted any Endurans would purposefully live so close to a witch academy.
After a few more tense moments, the one named Adrian raised his honey amber eyes to rest a hard steady stare on me. “We’ll give you a week,” he said, and there was no room for argument in his tone. “Then we tell Atlas and resort to other methods of severing the bond.”
A week. They were giving me a week to do something that, to my knowledge, had never been done before. But I had to find a way to do it. They hadn’t said it outright, but it was certainly implied. If I didn’t succeed…
I shivered at the thought.
“Agreed,” I said before I could change my mind or say something stupid.
Without another word, the two Enduran males turned away. And in the same movement used to drop their shorts to the forest floor, there was a horrible snapping, popping sound like when your spine cracks all the way from the bottom to the top, except stronger, louder. And then before I could blink the two naked men were gone, and in their place were two wolves.
One with Adrian’s gold ones, and the other with Cal’s green ones, like oakmoss drenched in sunlight. They were both silvery gray, but Adrian had a flick of stark white on his forehead and paws. And Cal’s tail was tipped in black as though it’d been dipped in a paint bucket. They were magnificent.
They each cut me one last glance before racing off back the way they’d come, their claws turning up dirt in their wake.
They were fast. The fastest things I’d ever seen. And I waited until I couldn’t see them—until I couldn’t hear them anymore before the reality of what happened finally crashed over me and I sprinted back to the academy, feeling my body weaken and grow more sluggish with each step I took away from my familiars.
I couldn’t have run more than fifteen paces before I passed through the ward. My skin bristled at the foreign magic as my body broke through. She appeared a split-second later and I couldn’t slow myself down in time. We went down in a mass of bruised and tangled limbs—in plumes of blonde and red hair.
All the air was knocked from my lungs, and I wheezed. Waiting for it to return so I could scream at her. How long had she been there? What had she seen?
What had she heard?
Stupid! How hadn’t I noticed she followed me? I thought she’d gone inside!
I gulped air down, gasping. After a few labored breaths the tightness in my chest began to ease.
She moaned, holding her wrist as she moved to stand back up. Her eyes shot furtive glances at me, a worried furrow pulling her brows inward. She managed to look both guilty and completely innocent at the same time. I didn’t know what to think.
“What,” I began in a strained version of my voice, still trying to get air to my lungs. “The. Hell. Are you doing out here, Bianca!”
She gave me an impish half smile. Implored me to understand with an apologetic stare. “I saw you going into the woods alone… I—I was worried you were going to run away. I just—”
“You just what?” I practically shouted, brushing dirt and leaves off my backside as I moved to stand, my joints groaning.
“Didn’t want you to leave…” she trailed off, unable to meet my eyes. “And then I saw those two guys with you and I just knew they were Endurans. They looked so angry and I was afraid they might hurt you. So, I put up a ward to stay hidden in case—well, I don’t know, in case you needed help or something.”
Idiot, I thought. But an honest idiot. It was plain to see she wasn’t lying.
Deflated, I sagged, running a palm over the moisture on my forehead. She was lucky the Endurans hadn’t heard her or seen her coming. I shuddered to think what they might’ve done.
“Did you hear us?” I asked her, a chill creeping along my shoulder blades.
She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and gnawed on the baby pink flesh. “Not really,” she replied, shrugging. “But maybe I could help. Are you in some sort of trouble?”
I laughed, and the sound was shrill and broken. I laughed because, well, what else could I do? Was I in trouble…
She had no idea.
Bianca looked at me like I was crazy, raising her eyebrows. “Are you okay?” she asked, worry lines creasing her forehead as she reached out to place a hand on my shoulder.
My laughter quickly morphed into horrible, wracking sobs. No, I was not all right.
“Oh, Harper,” she said, and tugged me into an embrace that smelled of sweet perfume and clean cotton.
I let her.
* * *
Being friends with the headmaster’s niece had perks. When I finally stopped crying and we walked back onto the academy’s grounds, Bianca had given the phys-ed teacher one sharp look and snapped, “I’m taking her to her room,” when he tried to stop us from entering the building.
He’d sucked in a breath and straightened his shoulders but said nothing. Having friends in high places wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
“Here.” She held a silver flask out to me after we’d entered our dorm room and shut the door behind us. “It’ll calm you down,” she explained when I didn’t take it right away. “Take some of the edge off, if you know what I mean.”
I took a long swallow and choked. The strong, acrid flavor of the liquor burned down my throat. Confused, I looked up at her from where I sat on the bed. “You really aren’t who I thought you were, you know.”
She rolled her light brown eyes, pulling her albino rabbit onto her lap as she sat down on the edge of her own bed across from me.
She absently began stroking its soft fur. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “My uncle is great. He’s a good man…” she trailed off and I wondered if she was trying to convince me or herself.
“But he has these—these expectations of me. As the headmaster of the academy, but also as a council member, he expects me to be…” She pursed her lips, considering how best to explain it.
“Someone other than yourself,” I offe
red. It didn’t make me feel better to learn the man responsible for ensuring I served my punishment was also a member of the Arcane Council. But it wasn’t surprising. Of course, he would be.
She nodded. “Exactly. And I get it, really, I do. He’s kind of a big deal, and what I do affects his image. It sucks, but that’s the way it is… and I don’t have anyone else.”
I knew what that was like. Trying so hard to fit into a mold created for you. Granted, other than never being able to set down roots or make friends, I never really minded living the life of a traveling gypsy. And Leo and Lara mostly let me do as I pleased.
But since coming to the academy, I felt the pressure to conform. It was suffocating. And I didn’t even come from a rich family with expectations. Not for the first time, I felt as though I could trust Bianca, regardless of her connection with the headmaster.
I gritted my teeth and stood, pushing the flask back into Bianca’s hand. She took a small sip before twisting the cap back on and tucking it away into a drawer in her vanity.
“They’re my familiars,” I said before I could stop myself.
Her face scrunched up in confusion and she leaned back, her eyes searching my face. I saw the moment what I’d said clicked in her mind. Her mouth fell slack and her eyes widened. “No freaking way!” she exclaimed, sitting bolt upright. “That’s—” she started, managing to look shocked, confused, excited, and horrified all at once. “But that’s impossible.”
I fell back on my bed, staring up at the yellowed stucco ceiling. “Apparently not.”
“Shit,” she said, and I heard the springs of her mattress creak as she stood, and the sound of her feet as she paced back and forth between our beds. “If you’re serious, we have to tell somebody. This is, like, the biggest thing to happen in the witching community since—”
“No!” I interrupted her, pushing myself up onto my elbows. “No, Bianca, you have to promise me you won’t tell anyone. Please.”
She stopped pacing. “Why?”
“Because if our—my plan works,” I said, hurriedly correcting my use of our. I wasn’t yet ready to tell anyone about Elias Fitzgerald’s offer to help me, or the strange connection we seemed to share. She wouldn’t understand… I wasn’t even sure I did. “There will be nothing to tell.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean there won’t be anything to tell?”
I licked my suddenly dry lips and clasped my hands together, squeezing tight. “Because—I’m going to sever the bond.”
12
Adrian
Cal ran his hands through his hair for the fourth time as he paced in front of the stump I sat on.
“She was telling the truth,” he said. “I could sense that much. She had no control over it.”
“Does it matter?” My jaw hurt from how hard I was clenching it. “The result is the same. We’re bound, Cal. To a witch. No better than her damn pets, for all we know.”
Our plan to wait a few days blew up in our faces. Whatever bound us now kept pulling us toward her, and we’d been volunteering for more shifts to try to find her. Apparently her midnight walks in the woods weren’t a routine thing, which was why we’d snuck away in the afternoon today. Riskier, but necessary. Cal somehow sensed that she was outside, and we followed the pull until we found her attempting to run and doing a damn poor job of it.
He wrinkled his nose and leveled a frown at me. “A week isn’t much time to solve this.”
“A week is all the time we can spare before Atlas starts noticing something’s wrong, if he hasn’t already,” I retorted. “And how the hell am I supposed to know that? I’m sure they have a library in that school. She can just go there and find the spell, then we’re done.”
“If it were that easy, she wouldn’t have looked so afraid.” Cal finally slumped to the ground and laid among the leaves and brush, arms folded under his head. “Why is it always me?” he grumbled under his breath.
My anger dissipated at the agony in his voice. He’d been through more in his life than anyone as nice as him should have to endure. Cal cared about others before himself, even if they weren’t shifters, which I knew was the driving force behind his reluctance to tell Atlas about the witch. Atlas, though a good alpha, was fiercely protective of the pack and rarely asked questions first. Cal had more patience than that.
I slid off the stump to sit beside him, elbow on knees. He’d never admit it, but physical reassurance had always calmed him down. It was one of the reasons we’d stayed together when we came of age instead of asking for separate cabins. Ever since we were kids, even before his parents died and mine had taken him in, something as simple as a hand on his shoulder helped when he felt stressed.
Anyone else who eventually noticed saw it as a sign of weakness, but no one else knew him like I did. Cal was far from weak. He was stronger than I ever was.
“Just because fate has a hard-on for messing with you doesn’t make it your fault.” I forced a grin to my face; I hated seeing him when he was like this. “Maybe it just means you're important. Fate messes with heroes a lot more than the average Joe.”
Cal snorted in disbelief. “Yeah, okay. So just throw me into the fire, see if I burn?”
“You could heal from it faster than anyone else in the pack,” I said with a nonchalant shrug. We were both born shifters, not changed, and as a general rule we’d heal faster than the rest.
“Physically speaking, sure,” he replied. “It’s the rest I don’t know that I can deal with.”
My eyebrows pulled down and I lightly punched his knee. “Where is this coming from? You’re not normally a downer.”
“Because there’s nothing for us to do but wait and see if she comes up with an answer, for one.” Cal huffed and impatiently shook his caramel brown hair off his forehead. “I don’t like sitting by and doing nothing while something out of our control just happens to us. Not to mention the fact that we can’t even fight the urge to keep going back to her.”
“Yeah, that’s been pissing me off, too,” I agreed. “At least your goody-two-shoes ass doesn’t have to worry about performance issues.”
My muscles locked up when I realized what I’d said. I hadn’t meant to admit it out loud, but now it was out there and I fought to keep the embarrassment off my face. My sex life wasn’t exactly a secret, but last night was aggravating and I blamed the witch for it. She wouldn’t leave my thoughts and I couldn’t do anything with her hovering around in my head space.
Cal blinked up at me, confused. “What?”
I looked away and directed my ire at a nearby tree. “When I went out last night. Because of this… bond, or whatever, I couldn’t… I ended up just coming home, instead.”
“You?” Cal laughed, and I wasn’t sure if I should feel relieved to see him smile or punch him. “You couldn’t get it up?”
“Screw you.” I shoved his chest and he rolled with it, bouncing to his feet.
“Oh, no,” he replied, shaking his head. “It sounds like you need it more.”
Barking out a laugh, I surged forward and tackled him. “That whiny attitude of yours is why you’ll be a virgin for the rest of your life.”
Cal landed a painful hit to my ribs. “I wasn’t the one who almost creamed my pants when she shoved me.”
“Not fucking true.”
I’d felt something, sure, but it wasn’t that. Well, not entirely that—Harper was a lot prettier in the afternoon light than I’d noticed in the dark that first night. It felt more like she’d picked something heavy up off my chest and I was taking my first deep breath. But the light banter had brought Cal back to himself and I didn’t have it in me to fight him on it.
“We should head back,” he said, helping me stand. “We’ve got sparring to get through later, and a full moon to survive tonight.”
He shuddered.
“Ah, don’t worry about tonight. Mom said they got extra ribs. Apparently there was a sale at the butcher.”
“Your mom is my fucking hero,
man,” Cal groaned and patted his stomach, making me snort a laugh.
We turned in the direction of the camp and walked in silence for a few minutes before the squat wooden structures came into view. He flexed his hands at his sides and I knew what he was feeling. “I hope she finds something soon. We won’t be able to hide this for much longer.”
13
Harper
Bianca was appalled at my plan to sever the familiar bond. I could tell she was still reeling from learning that something like bonding to an Enduran—never mind two Endurans—was even possible, but it was finding out my intent to break the bond that seemed to shock her the most.
She’d looked at her own familiar, with a sad fondness in her gaze, likely imagining what it would be like not to have her.
I couldn’t say I fully understood that feeling. But even though the bond between Cal, Adrian, and I was still new and hadn’t had a chance to fully strengthen, the thought of cutting them away made my pulse quicken and my stomach turn.
It was unnatural to break a familiar’s bond. And the wrongness of the idea made my skin crawl. But I’d promised them I’d find a way, and I intended to.
Which was how I found myself hours later searching the academy for Elias after dinner. I hoped he’d been able find something, or at least had a lead or two. I would have to tell him about what happened in the woods, and of our new time constraints. We now had seven days to make the impossible possible.
After what felt like at least an hour of wandering the hallways, I found him where I’d first bumped into him. He had his nose in an old tome, furiously scouring the pages with brows knit together and a tight jaw as he came around the corner from the faculty wing of the building.
I wondered if he had an office down there.
As though sensing my presence, he looked up, doing a double take when he realized it was me coming toward him. Was that a small smile twitching at the corner of his mouth? I grinned at him, rushing past Headmaster Sterling’s office on my toes. Trying to make as little noise as possible.