FERAL BITTEN
Book 3 of the Fur ‘n’ Fang Academy Series
C. S. Churton
This is a work of fiction. The characters and events described herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places or to living persons alive or dead. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.
Cover by May Dawney Designs.
Copyright © 2021 by C. S. Churton
All rights reserved.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter One
Home sweet home.
I mean, sure, it wasn’t my home, and the last two months aside, the last time I’d spent more than a few hours here hadn’t exactly been the time of my life, what with the werewolf attack and all.
But as I looked up at the freshly decorated and newly restored farmhouse, I couldn’t help but feel a small amount of accomplishment. I’d finally upheld my end of the bargain with Uncle Bob, and returned Oak Ridge Farm to its former glory.
“Hey, Jade, are you going to spend all night drooling over that house, or are you going to help us light this fire?”
I hadn’t done it by myself, of course – I’d had a lot of help from my boyfriend, Cam, and our friend Dean, as well as from Mei when she’d visited for a week earlier in the summer. I cast one more look at the magnificent building, then turned and headed out into the field, where Dean and Cam had built a huge bonfire of broken planks and sawn-off branches – minus the actual fire. There were a few singed twigs here and there where they’d obviously tried to get a fire started, but the wood was damp, and it was going to take more than a lighter to get it going.
I grinned, conjured a fireball between my hands, and with one flick of my wrist, sent it crashing into the pile. The wood ignited at once, and flames leapt from the bonfire, casting an orange glow to the scene.
I strolled the last few paces and dropped onto a log the boys had dragged up here. Cam wrapped his arm around me, the firelight glinting off the metal cuff on his right wrist. We all wore them – as did every shifter until they graduated, and I’d become so used to mine that I barely even registered it was there most of the time. I leaned into Cam, resting my head on his chest.
“Eugh,” Dean protested, shaking his head in mock disgust. “Please tell me I’m not going to have to spend my last night here watching you two make gooey eyes at each other.”
“No one said yer had tae watch,” Cam said with a smirk, and pulled me tighter against him.
“Fine,” Dean said, grabbing a bag from the floor. “Guess you won’t be wanting your share of the marshmallows then, if you’re busy.”
“Now hold on a wee minute there, lad, there’s nae need tae be hasty.”
I shook my head and shoved Cam off the log to go defend our share of the marshmallows. There was no honour amongst shifters when it came to food.
Cam sprang into action, chasing down Dean and attempting to wrestle the bag from him. I sat back and watched them. It was weird to think that this time tomorrow, we’d all be back at the academy, ready to face our third and final year – the last thing that stood between us, and our freedom. Freedom that had been a long time coming, in my case. I hadn’t been born a shifter, I’d been bitten, and before the cursed druid-shifter hybrid had come romping through my uncle’s farm and taken a lump out of me, I’d had plans for my life. Shockingly, none of them had involved spending three years studying at the Sarrenauth Academy of Therianthropy. But the law was the law, and my time at Fur ‘n’ Fang hadn’t been all bad. You know, aside from the people trying to kill me.
Gotta take the rough with the smooth, I guess.
Cam came back triumphant, the bag held aloft. He had a black eye from the scuffle, and Dean had a split lip – both of which would be healed before morning. They were both grinning. If there’s one thing a shifter likes more than food, it’s a good scrap.
“You two better not have squashed the marshmallows,” I said, getting to my feet and casting around for something to skewer the sweets on. Fighting, they were good at. Advance planning, not so much. “I’ll be right back.”
There was a small wooded plot to one side of the field we were in, and there were bound to be a couple of twigs we could use. The moon was still waxing, and as I moved further from the fire, it cast more shadows than light, and the gentle breeze in the air made the branches shift and twist, so that the small copse seemed like a living thing.
I snorted under my breath. Too many horror movies, that was my problem. Anyway, I was something out of a horror movie now, and I was pretty damned sure I was the most dangerous thing in this copse.
And then I heard a twig snap.
My head whipped round, searching for the source of the sound, even as I tilted my nose up and sniffed the air. I smelled him before I saw him, and started to back away.
“Wait! I just want to talk, I swear.”
My eyes adjusted to the gloom and I could make out the figure with his hands raised. There was no cuff around his wrist.
“Ryan?” I glanced over my shoulder at the two silhouettes sitting beside the campfire, paying no attention to me.
“I’m alone,” Ryan said. “Promise.”
He lowered his hands, and I sniffed the air again. If he was lying, then the others were far enough away that I couldn’t smell them.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I hissed at him. “Draeven has patrols combing the country for you.”
“I know. But this is my last chance to speak to you, before you go back to the academy.”
“Where you should be, too.”
His lips twisted into a bitter snarl. “In a prison cell, more like. Or dead, if Draeven has his way.”
“You don’t know that. Turn yourself back in, let it go to trial.”
“We both know a Bitten cur has no rights. This is an alpha’s world.”
“I know that running away never changed anything. Ryan, please, come back with us. I’ll speak for you.”
He nodded. “I heard what you did for Dean last year.”
That caught me by surprise. He’d been on the run at the time, and since. “How?”
“We’re not totally off the grid, you know.”
“We.”
“Me, and Laura… and Brad.”
The other Bittens. The last time I’d seen them, Brad had done his best to kill me, and Laura ha
d hit me with a silver knife that almost finished the job. I was right. He was still with them.
“You’re not coming back, are you?”
He shook his head.
“You know I can’t. But there’s more than one way to change the world. You should join us.”
“Yeah, I’m sure Brad would love that.”
“He’s agreed to let bygones be bygones. They both have. The four of us together, Jade, we could really make a difference. Think about it.”
“I don’t have to,” I said, testing the air again – because Brad had never been great at handling rejection, and I didn’t think he’d have let Ryan come out here alone. “Killing people isn’t the answer.”
“Really? Because they’ve got no problem killing us, and persecuting our kind for something we can’t control.”
“Our kind?”
“Come on, Jade,” he said, and the moon drifted behind a cloud, deepening the shadows across his face. “Don’t be naïve. We’re not like them. At best, we’re Bittens. Our very existence is a crime. But in their eyes, we’re curs, and we’re halfbreeds, and there’s not one of them who wouldn’t put us down given the chance.”
“There are two of them right over there,” I said, flinging my arm at the bonfire. “They know what I am, and they don’t care. They don’t see a halfbreed cur, or a Bitten. They see me. And they saw you, too.”
My last words were little more than a breath, because it didn’t matter that a whole year had passed – his betrayal still stung. And knowing why he did it didn’t make it hurt any less.
“You won’t come with me, then?”
I shook my head. “I won’t.”
“If you change your mind, come to The Wolf and Sheep. I’ll be there the first Friday after every full moon. Something’s got to change. Think about it, Jade.”
I glanced over at Cam and Dean again, and when I glanced back, Ryan had already melted away into the shadows. I could track his scent if I wanted, but where was the point? He’d made it pretty clear he wasn’t going to come back in, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to inform on him. He was right about one thing – there were certain elements of the shifter community who wanted nothing more than to see us eradicated.
I backed out of the copse, checking the shadows as I went, in case Brad decided everyone would be safer if I was silenced, then turned and hurried back to the fire.
“Hey, where’re the sticks?” Dean asked as I reached them, staring at my empty hands.
“It’s getting late,” I said, with one eye on the treeline. “We should head back inside.”
Chapter Two
“So all that remains,” Alpha Blake said, “is to wish you the very best year possible here at Sarrenauth Academy of Therianthropy, and to remind you that my door is always open. Thank you.”
Blake stepped down from behind the podium at the head of the hall, and the students began to break up and move away in clusters. As usual, Blake’s speech had been short and to the point, which was fine by me. Being sat in the middle of a row of seats surrounded by all the other students had always felt a bit too much like being back at high school to me. When I imagined continuing my education after college, this hadn’t been what I’d had in mind, and frankly I wasn’t a fan of there being only a couple of hundred students here – it was way too intimate for my liking. And the instructors also seemed to give a damn if you skipped their lessons, which was just plain irritating. But at least second and third years were trusted to come and go from the academy as they pleased, so there was that. Which was good, because if I had another year like my first, I’d probably go back to trying to climb out of bathroom windows. But I like to think I’ve moved on since then.
“Dorm room?” Mei suggested, hefting her bags in one hand.
“You do realise that if you’d managed to run half an hour later, you could have skipped this little get together entirely?” I said, grabbing another of her bags from the floor.
“Don’t,” she groaned. “I almost didn’t make it at all – the academy didn’t send a portal for me, and my father never learned. We had to find someone who could conjure portals. You know, someone who didn’t mind conjuring one for one of us.”
Mei was a leopard shifter, and for some reason I still couldn’t understand, that was frowned upon by the shifter community, which was made up almost entirely of wolves. It meant non-wolves had a community of their own, one that had been left in turmoil last year when there was a suggestion Draeven might be overthrown as Alpha of Alphas. He was a dick, but apparently less of a dick than the dozen or so who’d gone before him.
“You, uh, you don’t think it was intentional?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even.
“Careful, lass, yer paranoia is showing,” Cam said, relieving me of the bag. I rolled my eyes.
“I do have shifter strength, you know.”
“Aye, but that doesnae change the fact that I’m a gentleman.”
“You’re not a gentle anything,” I said, but stretched up on my tiptoes to kiss him anyway.
“Eugh, are you two kissing again?”
I turned round to see a wiry, six-foot-tall idiot watching us with an amused expression.
“Leo! How’s it going? We missed you at the farm this summer.”
“Yeah, sorry. Kelsey’s new job has been keeping her busy. She couldn’t get any time away.”
Secretly, I was glad. I was doing my best to get over what Kelsey had done to me, and honestly my life wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it was going to be when it first happened, but it was going to be a long time before my mixed feelings sorted themselves out. But hey, that was what I had counselling for.
“First ever druid-shifter hybrid on the Druidic Council, right?” Dean said, saving me from having to work out what to say. “You must be pretty damned proud.”
“Too right,” Leo agreed, as the five of us headed out of the hall. “Some of them are giving her a hard time, but she’s taking it in her stride. Wouldn’t even let me remove any of their limbs.”
I wasn’t entirely sure he was joking, so I changed the subject.
“We get our electives this year, right? Are you guys taking any?”
“Portalling,” Mei said at once. “It would be nice to actually be able to get somewhere on time for once.”
“You don’t need a portal for that,” Leo said. “You need a miracle.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“I’m going tae be taking healing,” Cam said. “So as I can be o’ some use tae the pack, y’ ken?”
He glanced around, and then his face fell.
“Sorry, Dean. I didnae think…”
“It’s fine,” Dean said, forcing a smile that barely reached his lips, never mind his eyes.
Cam was the only one of us who had a pack – leopard shifters didn’t move in packs, I’d been bitten, and Leo had been cast out year before last when he’d been accused of being the one to bite me. But Dean had been the son of an alpha – until his alpha tried to overthrow Draeven last year. He’d been killed in the fight, and Dean’s pack had been disbanded as punishment. That sort of wound took a long time to heal.
We walked through the hallways in silence for a while. That was probably why I caught the raised voices before we reached the next corridor. That, and shifter hearing.
“Give it back!”
“Why, what are you going to do about it, cur?”
“Yeah, your kind isn’t welcome here, cur.”
I shared a quick glance with the others, and then I hurried round the corner. There was a group of four shifters – three girls and a guy – and one of them was holding a backpack that clearly belonged to the fifth student, a dark-haired girl with a pale face and lips pressed into a frustrated line. I didn’t recognise any of them, and the academy wasn’t that big. They had to be first years.
One of the girls – the blonde holding the backpack – tipped it upside down and the contents scattered over the floor by her feet.
“Oops,” she said w
ith a smirk. “I slipped. Guess you’d best get on the floor where you belong, and pick it up.”
“Hey, knock it off,” I shouted, stalking up to them. It never bloody changed. Fucking vultures, they saw someone who was just a little bit different, and they couldn’t help themselves.
The four of them turned to glare in my direction, probably wondering if they could take me down, and then they took in the group standing behind me.
“Come on, Christy,” the guy said. “There’s a bad smell around here.”
The blonde dropped the bag on the floor, and the four of them sauntered down the corridor away from us.
I curled my lip as I watched them go. “Cowards.”
The girl stooped to grab her bag, ignoring us completely. One of her books had bounced off to the side so I grabbed it, straightening out the creased pages.
“Tara, are you okay?” Dean asked.
I twisted my head round to stare up at him.
“Tara? As in, your sister?”
“I’m fine,” she snapped, cramming her stuff back into her bag. “And I don’t need any help from you.”
She snatched the book from my hand and glared at me. “Any of you.”
I bit my tongue, because that was a shitty reception for anyone coming into a new academy, and she was probably entitled to be a little snippy. Personally, I thought she was directing it the wrong way, but some people didn’t react well to embarrassment.
“How are you keeping?” Dean asked, not making any move to close the distance between them. “How’s Mum?”
“Better for you not being around, you traitor.”
“Hey!” I said, stepping between them. She turned her glare on me.
“And you’re no better, you filthy Bitten cur. It’s your fault he turned against his family. I wish Beta Laith had killed you both last year!”
She spun around and marched away, leaving me with my mouth hanging open. After a moment, I snapped it shut. Nice way to thank your rescuers.
“That is quite the mouth your sister has on her,” Mei said.
“I’m sorry. It’s been hard on her, you know, with Dad, and losing the pack and everything.” Dean swallowed. “Can we, uh, get going? I want to get my bags unpacked.”
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