Summer Shifter Days

by V. Vaughn

  The screen flashed to life and she saw him on the video chat. His tidy mop of curly blond hair was gone, replaced by a severe side part like a banker.

  “Cassiopeia,” he said. “I was just about to call you.” He had an accent to his voice, something vaguely English and posh that the highborn affected. He was a blandly handsome man, with a strong jaw and narrow colorless eyes.

  “Nox,” she said, forcing a smile. “It’s been so long since I’d spoken with my betrothed, I simply had to call you.” She was doing the accent now, too. It came unbidden, a lifetime of training kicking in.

  She tried not to see all of the spells swirling about him, but it was impossible. She’d never used her analysis charm on him, it was quite a rude thing to do in wizard society, like rifling through someone’s medicine cabinet to see what secret ailments they had. Anoxamander—Nox—had dozens of glamours applied. One to straighten his hair, another to whiten his teeth, another to prevent anyone from using a lie detection spell on him. Another to hide his acne and another to make him seem taller. There were so many that she could even read the deeper ones, so obscured were they. In fact, she could hardly see his face once she focused on reading his charms.

  “Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?” he hissed. He was in one of his foreign offices. The far window looked out over Madrid. His desk was thin and made of glass and had only a notebook computer on it.

  “I’m taking steps, Nox. Please don’t worry. I’ve spoken with mother and I’m doing some extra credit. There was just a hiccup with the project is all. How have you been?”

  “Who gives a damn about your little project?” he sneered. “Do you know how many people have called me, telling me you’re swanning about with some dirty Afflicted trash?”

  A cold fire blossomed inside Cassie. “I am his tutor,” she said carefully, pronouncing each word like it was a slap in Nox’s face. “And he is not trash. It’s not his fault he’s a werewolf.”

  “Tutor,” he said in a voice dripping with condescension. “Is that why you’ve been wearing those revealing dresses? And he’s been half-naked too, I hear. Oh yes. I know all about it. Cerise Yang saw him carrying you in his arms back to his bedroom.”

  “That is not even remotely what happened,” she said. “And I cannot believe you would take Cerise’s word over your own fiancee’s!” It was a good thing the study carrel’s were soundproof, otherwise every librarian in the building would have flown to her to deliver their harshest shushes. “I needed to tutor him. It was the deal I made in order to get more time for my final project.”

  “Who cares about your project? Can’t you see how this looks? Important people have seen you with this shirtless scum and what do you think they think of me now? Behind closed doors they’re all laughing at me and calling me a goddess-damned cuckold!” Anoxamander was shouting into his phone, but his expression was still placidly handsome. The glamours were doing their work and making him blandly perfect in appearance, no matter what he said. “How could you go behind my back and screw an Afflicted and think I’d still want to marry you?”

  “Why?” Cassie asked after a long moment. She felt like she should have been crying. She should have been sobbing and begging forgiveness, but when she searched her heart for how she felt about Nox, all she found was a cold jar of hate with his name written on it in blood.

  “Why what?” he barked.

  “Why did you agree to marry me in the first place, if you have no respect for me?”

  Nox rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic, Cassiopeia. This is how marriages work in our world. They’re partnerships. Strategic. Our heir would have been the inheritor of two great houses.” He paused and Cassie could see the thought sinking in. He straightened his tie. “Forgive my outburst earlier. It is early here and the local food simply does not agree with me. Our deal can still stand. I can look past your naive mistakes and find a way forward. One must be magnanimous in these circumstances, yes?”

  “Oh, thank you, Nox,” Cassie said, but he didn’t notice the sarcasm in her voice. Nox didn’t notice a lot of things, she realized.

  “You will need to make some changes of course. You’ll have to swear to never see this filthy subhuman boy again. That’s obvious. And if your course load is too demanding of your intellect you’ll have to switch to classes that you’re equipped to succeed in. I’m sure your mother can pick some out for you. Something easy and not so stressful, I swear you do look a fright.”

  “Is that all?” Cassie asked. Everything was on fire now. Her world was burning down at the edges. Who had she thought Nox was? Where was the charming-enough handsome-enough successful businessman she’d been planning on joining her life to?

  “Well, there’s one more thing. It’s not that I don’t trust your word, Cassiopeia, but we’ll need to verify your virginity before the wedding. My family doctor is very good at this kind of thing. I’ll make an appointment for you straightaway. That way we can dispel these nasty rumors that you’ve been rutting with beasts behind my back.”

  “And when,” Cassie asked, “is your virginity test to be conducted? Shall I have my OBGYN stop by? I’m sure she knows the proper charm to check that sort of thing.”

  Anoxamander shook his in disbelief. “Don’t be absurd. The prenuptial agreement says nothing about my virginity. I haven’t been a virgin for five years.”

  “But we’ve been engaged since I was sixteen. That’s six years ago.” Fire blossomed on Cassie’s fingers. Blue flames that formed into tiny people they danced and fought and jumped around but they did not burn her.

  “You didn’t expect me to remain a virgin until we were wed, did you? What a silly, ridiculous notion.” Nox smiled his bland smile at her. Behind him, in his office, little blue people made of fire waved at Cassie and clambered up onto a bookshelf.

  “You’ve been unfaithful?” Cassie said, her tone cold and bright. She flicked her fingers and the fire people crawled into Nox’s books and began gleefully consuming them.

  “Unfaithful? Please, don’t be so dramatic. We aren’t even wed yet. A man has needs. You know that.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Cassie said. Her posh accent fell away and she spoke to Anoxamander in her normal voice. “I can’t tutor a boy because he’s too pretty for your friends to see me with, but you can screw whoever you want?”

  Nox smiled widely at her. “I’m glad you’re finally understanding how the world works. It’ll make our marriage so much easier for us to navigate.”

  “I do finally understand,” Cassie said. And then she added, “By the way your bookshelf is on fire.”

  Nox spun around and shrieked in alarm as Cassie hung up on him and then blocked his number.

  Her world was unmoored. She was a kite without a string, blowing too high and too fast. But she’d cast magic on instinct, without even trying. She’d summoned flame elementals and sent them halfway across the world to ruin Nox’s day. He’d have no trouble banishing them or catching them, it was simple magic. But still, she’d found a deeper connection to her magic, and it’d only taken having her life completely upended to do it.

  Her phone buzzed in her hand. Her father was calling, but she thumbed the button and refused to answer. Then her mother called, and she refused that, too.

  Cassie stuffed her things back into her bag and walked out of the library, staying far away from the seven hundred shelves, where the shadows looked particularly deep and hungry and throwing a little wave at Lily on her way out. She needed to talk to someone. To tell them her future had collapsed and that for the first time since she could remember, she felt terrifyingly free.

  But who could she tell? Maddie wouldn’t understand. Nor would any of the other girls that she though of as her social circle, in fact, half of them were probably on the phone right then trying to get their parents to match them with Nox.

  The only person she wanted to tell was Mal.

  But she’d ruined that.

  Cassie dismissed her analysis
charm and every glamour she’d hung on herself. The world could see her as she was that day. She stopped by the campus grocery on the way home and picked up one of every flavor of ice cream and then went back to The Keep.

  10

  The important thing was he didn’t shift.

  She’d hit him square in the heart, when he was least expecting it, and he didn’t shift.

  For a moment his control slipped, he could feel the rush of the pulling at him, like he was standing in hip-deep water and an undercurrent threatened to suck him out to sea. But in the space of a breath he pushed the wolf away.

  Cassie stormed off, headed straight for the library and he let her go. Why did he let her go? Because she was her own person. She made her own choices. And if those choices meant she didn’t want to see him ever again, or that she thought they couldn’t be friends because they lived in different world, then he had to respect that. He couldn’t make her talk to him or like him.

  His wolf howled within him, low and mournful. “I know, man,” Mal said out loud, as if the wolf was listening. “I feel it too.”

  The concentration spell clung to him. It felt weird, like the world was slightly more in focus than usual, but also like he was wearing clothes that were a size too small. He had no idea how it worked, just that it did. In so many ways, magic was exactly like technology—you tapped a button and flipped a switch and things happened. How? Electricity. Code. Magic. Runes. It didn’t matter. It was just another tool to do what you wanted.

  For the first time since he’d been bitten, Malcolm was in control.

  He walked around campus, enjoying the sleepy feeling of a Spring Break afternoon and trying to keep Cassie from his thoughts. He tried to do normal things—he bought a burrito, he browsed the old record store that only sold vinyl. But after an hour, the thrill of normality wore off. In just half a week, Cassie had been able to teach him more than any of his professors had. He needed to repay her, somehow.

  Mal was still carrying the battered old guitar case. He found a vacant picnic table in a cul-de-sac park just off Crowley Avenue and flipped open the latches. The wobbly clunk sound they made was like hearing his mother’s voice again. It was like coming home. The acoustic guitar inside he’d had since high school. The last time he’d tried to play it, he’d shredded the strings with his claws and snapped the neck in a fit of shifter rage. But he’d kept it, hidden under his bed in the case, like a reminder of the normal life he’d never have again, he kept it. Ash repaired it the next day. He’d said that a broken musical instrument cried out to him in anguish and that he had no choice but to heal it.

  Mal was glad he did.

  The first song he played was an old one of his, from the old band. His fingers remembered their placements, flying up and down the neck in a blur. The words came, too, but his voice was out of practice and his wolf, howling within him, didn’t help either.

  As he played, passerby stopped. He’d thought he was out of the way in his little pocket park, thought that no one would see him. But a professor wearing a brown corduroy jacket with patches on the sleeves stopped to listen. And then two old women walking hand in hand with a big sheepdog on their heels stopped. And then a group of six girls who had the sweaty, disheveled look of post-practice athletes paused. And by the end of his third song, he had an audience.

  For his fourth song, he played some Taylor Swift. The crowd went wild and the professor tossed a twenty into his guitar case. The music was almost too much for his senses, but he kept it together long enough for an encore.

  Cassie would flip when she found out that he’d sang and played guitar without tearing it to pieces.

  But, no. She wouldn’t. Because she’d never find out.

  His wolf kept howling within him, over and over, without stopping.

  Mal thanked the professor for the twenty and packed up the guitar. One of the athletes gave him the look. She had black hair with a crimson streak in it, pulled back in a ponytail. A smudge of dirt on her upturned nose. She was tall with wide shoulders and thick thighs. There was a glow about her that could have been magic, or could have been something natural.

  For a moment, Mal could see a future path laid out before him. He could go home with the girl. They could split a bottle of wine and make out until the sun came up. He had the control now, as long as the enchantment held. He hadn’t been laid since getting bit, for obvious reasons. But now it was a possibility. He could scent the attraction on her, even from ten yards away.

  But no, of course he couldn’t. Because when he pictured kissing someone, it was Cassie. When he thought about drinking wine and laughing and dancing around with someone, he thought of Cassie.

  His wolf howled louder within him. Was it mourning? Was it frustrated at being caged up inside after living just under the surface for so long?

  Keeping Cassie out of his thoughts didn’t work. At all. So he tried the opposite. He decided to focus on her, to just let her fill his mind as he walked home.

  With the concentration charm still looped around his limbs, his recall was excellent. He could see her before him, as if she was really there, walking him home. He could smell the moonlight of her skin, could see the way her nose crinkled when she smiled. The dream version of her was lecturing him, one of the many lessons she’d delivered during their study sessions. He’d missed so much of what she’d said being busy keeping his wolf in check or trying not to stare at her bare thighs or the swell of her breasts under her cardigan. But she spoke about her knowledge she was so animated, so alive. It was intoxicating.

  His wolf howled louder. There was an anger in it now, but not directed at Mal for once.

  The lecture replayed as they walked, and dream Cassie smiled at him and his heart broke. He’d never see that smile again. He’d never hear her condescending tones or see her eyerolls or the way she blushed when the topic of sex came up. He should have been relieved, but instead he found himself cherishing those gestures. She rolled her eyes at him because she expected better of him. She condescended, because she knew he could be so much more than a poor Afflicted shifter kid on the verge of washing out.

  When no one else did, she believed in him.

  But it was all gone now.

  Trouble, a voice said.

  “What the hell?” Mal jumped and looked around. He was outside Spenser Hall, but there was no one around. “Is this some weird prank? Some mind magic thing?”

  Trouble, the voice growled.

  It sounded like it was coming from inside him.

  His wolf had stopped howling.

  Our mate, the voice said. Trouble.

  “Holy shit,” Malcolm said, looking down at his chest. “You can talk.” It was his wolf. The calls were coming from inside of the house. His wolf was talking to him.

  Trouble.

  “Cassie is in trouble? Where is she?”

  The wolf howled in frustration.

  “I swear, if you tell me she’s fallen down a well and this is some weird Lassie joke I will be so pissed off.”

  But it wouldn’t say anymore. His wolf paced within him, growling and snapping with its teeth. It was too caged up to help.

  Mal ran through Spenser up to his room. As usual, the sounds of Nico and Ash arguing greeted him when he entered.

  “Finally,” Nico said when he saw Mal. “You can be our tie-breaker. See, we’re having an issue with—”

  “I’d love to help, but I’m kind of having an emergency,” Mal said.

  “Dude, I feel terrible about what I said to your friend.” Ash lumbered to his feet. “Could you like apologize to her a thousand times for me?”

  “Actually I can’t. She said I don’t need her anymore and that we can’t be friends.”

  “Dude,” Ash said. He had a thousand ways of pronouncing the word, each carrying an unmistakable weight.

  “That’s too bad,” Nico said, still focusing on the game board before him. “She seemed nice.”

  “Tell me how I can find her, even though she�
��s wearing an anti-scrying charm. There’s got to be a way.”

  “But if she wants to be left alone,” Ash said, “you gotta respect that.”

  “She’s in trouble. Well, my wolf says she’s in trouble.”

  Nico’s head whipped around. “Your wolf is talking to you?”

  “Yeah?” Mal stashed his guitar back under his bed. “Or I’m going crazy.”

  “No no, this is a good thing. I’ve been reading up on your—err—condition, and they say that fully integrated shifters can communicate with their animals. This is progress. Real progress!”

  Ash rubbed a hand across his stubbled face. Neither he nor Nico had showered—let alone shaved—in a week. “If you had something of hers, you could find her. You couldn’t see her or anything like that, but you could locate her. That’s a pretty easy one. But you need to have something intimate of hers.”

  “Like underwear?” Mal asked. He wasn’t following. Not for the first time he wished he’d paid more attention in class.

  “Do you have her underwear?” Nico asked in a shocked voice.

  “Underwear wouldn’t work,” Ash said. “Because it gets washed frequently.”

  “Not yours,” Nico snarked.

  Ash ignored him and continued, “But like any of the classic sympathetic items would be great. Jewelry. An old photo of her. A lock of her hair. They all retain a connection.”

  “Arcane entanglement,” Nico offered. “It’s like quantum entanglement but—”

  Mal cut him off with a gesture.

  Hair. He had three strands of her hair woven around his neck, holding the charm she’d given him when they first met. But removing it meant removing his privacy. He’d feel the eyes of the administration on him again, waiting and watching and judging. Well, let them watch. He’d show them what he was capable of.

  Mal snapped the strands with a quick tug and handed the strands to Ash. “A lock of hair. Tell me where she is.”