Most Ardently

by Sheena Austin et al.

  “Eeeuuww.” Ella wrinkled her nose at my coffee. “How can you drink that stuff? It’s disgusting.”

  I ignored her question. “Did anything strange happen to either of you last night?”

  “Strange? Why? Are you all right?” Henry’s concerned question sent a little thrill of happiness up my spine.

  I waved away the concern, though. “I’m fine. But...” My voice trailed off.

  The twins both leaned toward me.

  “Yes? What happened?” Henry asked.

  “I’m not entirely certain. But last night—or early this morning, I guess—someone came into my room.”

  “What did they do?” Ella asked.

  “Nothing. Whoever it was stood over my bed for a few seconds, then left.”

  Henry frowned. “What did they look like?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t see their face.”

  Now both the Tyson twins were staring at me with frowns on their faces. “Why not?” Ella asked.

  “Because I was under the bed.” When the twins simply kept staring, I added, “In my cat form.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t dream this?” Henry ask.

  “I’m certain. I never did really get back to sleep.” I waved my mug in Ella’s direction. “That’s why I need the coffee.”

  “You should stay with me tonight,” Ella said.

  “Or better yet,” Henry said thoughtfully, “we should all stay in Kitty’s room. That way if anyone tries sneaking in again, we can catch him.”

  “Or her,” Ella said.

  “Or it,” I suggested. “But don’t you think I ought to report all this to someone?”

  “And say what?” Henry’s tone turned tentative. “Um. Hi. I had an intruder in my room, but I don’t know who or what it was or what they looked like. What should I do?”

  “Okay, okay.” I flapped a hand toward him. “We can try it your way first. I’m on the third floor.”

  “Great. Let’s just hope it comes back tonight.” With a grin, Henry scooped up a giant forkful of sausage and eggs and shoved it into his mouth.

  “Yeah. Perfect. Let’s hope.” I drank the rest of my coffee, wondering just how hopeful I really had to be.

  THE VERY FIRST SEMINAR we went to that morning was run by the Hunter-in-Residence—the same one that the Tyson twins had said wanted so badly to meet—along with a student.

  “Hi. I’m Reo Souji, and this is Kacie DeLuca.” The Hunter gestured toward the girl at his side as he introduced them. “You can call us Reo and Kacie. We are two of the leaders of the Academy pack.”

  The two were a study in contrasts. Reo was tall, muscular and wiry, with shiny dark hair and beautiful skin. Kacie was much smaller than Reo. With her pale skin and blonde hair, she could have fit in perfectly in any Nordic country.

  “We’ll be going to go for a shifted run later in the afternoon,” Reo continued, “but before we head out, want to talk about and demonstrate some of the advantages that the Hunters’ Academy pack has over other packs.” He gestured to Kacie to pick up where he left off.

  “Our pack is extraordinarily well-connected to one another,” Kacie said. “And that means we are better able to communicate and work together when we come up against a foe of any kind.”

  Foe. Students at this campus use words like foe.

  The thought made my stomach hurt.

  I glanced around the room to see if any of the other ten or so shifters in there felt the same way. Instead, I caught sight of Henry. As Kacie spoke, he tilted his head back a little and sniffed, a frown creasing his forehead. He and Ella gave each other confused glances. They were clearly thinking the same thing, whatever that might have been.

  I had one way to find out.

  I focused on shifting my mouth partway, just enough to create the Jacobson’s organ that would allow me to figure out what kinds of shifters were in the room. I hadn’t been entirely honest with the Tyson twins before. Cats do rely mostly on their vision—but our sense of smell is certainly superior to humans’.

  Wolves—or at least their shifter cousins—tended to keep their enhanced sense of smell no matter what form they were in. I, on the other hand, had to shift a little in order to gain that particular extra sense. In my human form, I maintain particularly good night vision.

  But in my cat form, I can take apart smells, figure out what they were and where they came from.

  Now, I could smell a mix of shifter types in the room. Mostly predators. Wolves, another bobcat, a couple of birds of prey.

  Reo, standing at the front of the room, was some kind of big cat.

  And then, from the girl standing next to him, I smelled... something different.

  Kacie Deluca didn’t smell like any shifter I’d ever encountered. She smelled all wrong, in fact. Every shifter I had ever encountered, no matter their animal type, smells wild, like the ocean or the sky or the forest.

  Kacie didn’t smell like that at all. She didn’t smell like she belonged in the forests. She didn’t smell like she belonged among the animals.

  Moreover, the sense of power coming off her was almost palpable. The air around her crackled with electricity. But she didn’t smell like a magician, either. She was something I had never encountered before.

  And that something frightened me more than a little.

  “Our stronger connection comes from more than mere training,” Kacie continued. “It gives our pack a huge advantage over the Lusus Naturae. We are better prepared to go up against them than most other packs.”

  Reo jumped in. “We’re hoping that eventually all the packs on our side will join us. In the meantime, though, every shifter who attends the Academy is required to participate in our ceremony.”

  Ceremony? What kind of ceremony?

  Kacie kept talking and I listen more attentively, hoping she would answer my question without me having to ask it directly.

  “By joining in the ceremony, you are agreeing to participate as a member of the pack,” she said.

  “That means we can call on you to join the fight against the Lusus Naturae at any moment, at any time,” Reo emphasized. “If you want to leave, now is the time.”

  For a brief moment, I considered walking away. I wasn’t sure that I was committed enough to the fight against the Lusus Naturae to take part in some weird ceremony designed to bind me to the rest of my pack.

  Anyway, my pack was the bobcat clowder.

  At least, it had been.

  Although people often joined different packs when they went away to school, I had never heard of them ending up joining a mixed pack. As far as I knew, this is the only one like it in existence.

  I raised my hand.

  “Yes, Ms....” Reo glanced down at the list in front of him. “Ms. Moore. You have a question?”

  “Yes. I was wondering...what kind of binding will we be doing?”

  Kacie and Reo glanced at each other. “It’s magical,” Kacie finally said.

  “It has psychic elements,” Reo added.

  “And there’s no way we can join the Academy unless we participate in it?” another shifter asked—another wolf, if I was reading him right.

  I have to participate.

  I didn’t have any option. My parents had been academy graduates, and I needed to be one, too. Whatever ritual these two were expecting me to participate in, I would do it. If I had to leave this odd, mishmash of a pack later, I could do that, too.

  At the front of the room Kacie reached up and wrapped her hand around the pendant she wore dangling from a chain around her neck. Whatever she was doing started with a greenish glow seeping out between her fingers on the pendant. Within a few seconds, however, that slight glowed turned into bright green ribbons of light and power that spooled out and waved around her, looking somehow familiar.

  I realized there were twelve of the ribbons—enough for all the people in the room. They began to strike out and wrap around each of us in turn.

  Not like ribbons, I realized. Like snak
es. With all those tendrils of green light waving around her head, Kacie looked like an ancient painting of Medusa. And the tentacles felt like power, pure magic as they tightened around each of us, holding us still in our seats. The final two wrapped around Kacie and Reo.

  When she had all of us in the grasp of her power, Kacie closed her eyes and—the best way I had to describe it was that it was like she was taking over my mind.

  There was nothing I could do about it. I wanted to scream as I felt her rifling through my memories, tasting and testing for whatever it was that she was looking for. When she was satisfied with what she saw, that tendril of power burrowed deep inside me even as it stretched out to touch someone else, too, ending up back with Kacie, diverting some part of my essence to her.

  As she waved her hands in the air, she called the magical tendrils back and braided all the snakes together, taking the disparate parts of each of us, the sum of who we were, plaiting them it into a long cord of power that drew from all of us.

  Then Kacie began adding it to a much thicker rope that she had developed at some point.

  That rope contains some part of all the shifters in the Academy pack, I realized.

  Kacie might not be a shifter animal, but she was clearly an indispensable part of the pack. I was sure of it.

  A new sense of all the other shifters in the room slammed into me as Kacie used the braided rope to pierce each of us with it, one after the other.

  When she was done, I could almost hear the thoughts of the others around me.

  I could certainly sense their emotions.

  It was a disconcerting sensation, and I could imagine how it might help in a battle. Assuming you didn’t get too distracted by your packmates getting hurt.

  “Welcome to the pack,” Kacie said softly when she was done.

  “Now we’re going for the shifted run,” Reo said. “It will give you an opportunity to begin getting used to your new packmates. Please note that although this bond attenuates was distance, meaning it gets thinner and less pronounced, it never completely goes away. You will always have some sense of your packmates’ well-being from now on.”

  The thought of what it might be like to be seventy years old and sensing my packmates from my school days beginning to die off flashed through my head.

  I could deal with that later. Right now, it was time to run with the rest of my pack.

  THE RUN THAT DAY WAS absolutely glorious. I hadn’t expected it to be so amazing. But when we shifted and took off into the woods that surrounded the academy, high in the Colorado mountains, it was like every dream of shapeshifting I had ever had that had not been fulfilled.

  As an only child, I had missed out on what it was like to have an extended family, to grow up surrounded by packmates other than my parents. We attended clowder meetings, but that was about it.

  Running with the Hunters’ Academy pack was what I had always imagined having a huge family would be like.

  As we crisscrossed through the woods, we practically danced with each other, leaping over and across not only our pack mates, but obstacles in the woods—streams, fallen logs, and anything else that got in our way.

  I could hear the rustling of small creatures, prey, not only with my own ears, but with the senses of my packmates.

  We were that closely connected.

  Henry and Ella ran beside me. Their wolf forms were beautiful, silver and gray, a beautiful contrast to my own tawny fur.

  by the time we finished, we were exhausted. We descended on the cafeteria en masse, all the shifters ravenous after their energy expenditure, both running and shifting. When we were done, all I wanted to do was collapse and sleep.

  As I devoured a giant plate of spaghetti, I saw Reo and Kacie watching over us, smiling benevolently.

  Whatever Kacie was, it apparently didn’t extend to allowing her to shift and run with us. She might be the glue that held this pack together, but she wasn’t really a shifter at all, just as I had suspected.

  She was interesting. I would have to keep an eye on her over the next semester. I wasn’t entirely certain where she fit in.

  “Ready to go up to your room and see if we can catch a ghost?” Henry asked.

  “I know you don’t really believe me,” I started.

  “Ignore him. He thinks he’s funny. He’s wrong.” His sister rolled her eyes.

  “Seriously, whatever it was that you saw, we need to check it out,” Henry reassured me.

  “Do you think we should tell someone official? Like maybe Reo work Kacie or someone?” I glanced at the two pack leaders, who were sitting across from each other eating now. Another pack member had joined them. I didn’t know who he was, but I could feel him through the link that connected me to all the pack—and he looked an awful lot like Reo. I’d be surprised if they weren’t related somehow.

  “We could tell them,” Henry said. “But how will you feel if it turns out to be nothing? If it’s just me and Ella helping you, then no harm, no foul if it turns out to be a big fat nothing.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted reluctantly. “But what if it turns out to be something more than we can handle?”

  “Then we have these fancy new pack connections. I bet we can use them to call for help.” Ella flipped her hair back behind her shoulder. Now that I’d seen her in her wolf form, I could see the silvery glints in her dark hair. Henry had the glints, too.

  Their identical expressions, eager and interested, delighted at the thought of ghost hunting, cracked me up. “Okay, okay. Give me an hour to wind down, then come on up. I’m in room 332.”

  “Why are you up here all by yourself?” Ella demanded as soon as I opened the door. “It’s totally creepy.”

  “It is a little weird,” Henry agreed. He glanced up and down the hallway. “It seems like they could at least give you a temporary space down on floor two with the rest of us.”

  “Is everyone else on the second floor?”

  “As far as we can tell,” Ella said.

  That made me feel more than a little odd. Why would the academy officials assign me a room so far away from everyone else? It was like they had painted target on me. That didn’t seem quite fair.

  “Come on in.” I pulled my door open wide, and the Tyson twins strolled in, glancing around interestedly.

  At the last minute, I thought to whip the stuffed lamb I slept with off the top of the bed and shove it under a pillow. When I glanced up, though, Henry’s blue eyes were twinkling at me. He’d clearly seen the move.

  “There are only two beds,” I said lamely. “I don’t know where everybody can sleep.”

  Ella waved her hand airily. “No problem. Henry can sleep on the floor in his wolf form.”

  “Me? Why don’t you do that?”

  “Oh, I could. But I don’t want to. So you can instead.”

  I laughed at the way the twins picked at each other. Through our pack connection, I could feel the affection between them.

  And if I let my senses stretch out just a little farther, I could feel more, sense the ways that the various pack members interacted. Even the ones who didn’t really like each other all that much felt the pack bond. It seemed, at least from what I could tell, to override any personal dislike.

  “I wonder if we could use the pack bond in any way to search for the ghost?” I mused aloud.

  “It’s deathly worth a try,” Henry said.

  “Kind of like a séance.” Ella immediately plopped down on the floor and started scrabbling her purse. “I’ve got a washable marker somewhere in here. We can draw a circle on the floor and see if we could summon the spirit.”

  Henry and I cast skeptical glances at each other. “Doesn’t that only work for magic users?” I asked.

  Ella shrugged. “I don’t know, but it can’t hurt.”

  “Should we wait after dark?” Henry asked.

  Ella heaved an irritated side. “I guess so. What are we gonna do until then, though?”

  “Maybe we could just hang ou
t and talk,” Henry suggested.

  So the three of us settle down to talk together until after the sun had set. Then we could do a séance and see if we could get whatever it was that had interrupted my sleep last night to come back.

  I DON’T KNOW WHEN WE all fell asleep.

  Sometime around the point that we had started talking about family history. Sharing the similarities and differences among our packs.

  Our old packs, that was.

  This time, though I woke up as my door was slowly creaking open.

  The moon was no brighter tonight than it been the night before, but whatever it was opening my door was less careful.

  Either that, or I was more alert.

  I sent a frisson of worry shimmering across the pack lines connecting us.

  I felt it when Henry and Ella came awake, though neither of them showed any outward sign of it.

  After a few seconds, Henry flicked one ear up, then back down, as if you were dreaming.

  The creature outside my door stepped into the room.

  I still couldn’t tell much about it. It was roughly human-sized and shaped, but beyond that, I didn’t really know.

  Maybe it was a vampire, coming to feed on me?

  I wanted to attack immediately, but I could almost hear Henry saying, “Wait another minute.”

  I suppose it wasn’t fair to have already decided it had nefarious intent. But I simply couldn’t believe that anything that wished me well would come sneaking into my room in the middle of the night without any warning.

  No. This was definitely not the kind of creature I wanted snooping around without supervision.

  Even if it wasn’t part of the Lusus Naturae, it was at least not a part of the official program this week. And that creeped me out.

  As it came closer, I got a better look at it. A female of some sort. Her hair waved wildly around her head. And when it got close to the bed, her voice rasped, “I’m sorry.”

  “I have to do this,” she continued. “We can’t allow you to be here. You have to die. I have to kill you.”

  I felt more than heard it take deep breath and, then saw it silhouette as it raised its arms high above me. “This is for the Lusus Naturae.”