Etheric Adventures Boxed Set: Books 1-3

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Etheric Adventures Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 9

by S. R. Russell


  She dashed down the corridor and turned the first corner. Due to the age difference, she didn’t share any classes with the girl who stood in front of her, but she recognized Anne Jayden and her companion Jinx from having seen them in the halls at school.

  Christina saw two Weres who were piled on the ground against the wall. There was a boy whom she could smell was human kneeling on the floor holding his stomach in obvious pain, and another Were was busy backing away from the Jayden girl. Christina shrugged out of her backpack in case she needed to shift. If male Weres were trying to get away from the girl, there was more going on here than she knew.

  “What do you have against Weres?” She challenged the older girl.

  Anne heard a girl’s voice ask what she had against Weres. She turned to face the girl, who looked somewhat familiar although Anne couldn’t think why. “Nothing, except for maybe when Peter beats on me too much during practice,” she said, her nose wrinkled in disgust.

  “I heard you say ‘beat up some stinking Weres’,” the young girl contradicted.

  “Yup,” Anne agreed.

  The young girl shook her head with confusion. “They can’t help being Were.”

  “I know,” Anne told her. “No more than Josh here can help being homosexual. But that didn’t stop these mutts from ganging up on a defenseless human.”

  It took the girl a few seconds to process that information, then she held out her hand to Anne. “Christina Lowell,” she offered.

  Anne took her hand in her own, “Anne,” she replied.

  Christina didn’t miss the significance of being given only a single name. Her father had told lots of stories about vampires, and according to him the best place to be when a vampire was around was anywhere else. “So, what happened?” Christina asked.

  “Apparently Josh here,” Anne pointed at the human, still on one knee, “likes boys. Which, if you aren’t a raging homophobe,” she glared at the two Weres, who were just getting back to their feet, “you would know he has no more control over than you do being Were.” Anne turned her head to scowl at each of the three Weres in turn. “Do you think he likes being beaten up because he’s …” Anne used air quotes, “wired differently?”

  “But he …” Punching Boy had finally made it back to his feet.

  “Did he hit on you? Try to touch you inappropriately?” Anne asked, while Christina watched.

  “He was looking at us in the showers,” Punching Boy once again offered as an excuse.

  “Oh FFS, if you weren’t a first-class slime ball, I might want to check you out. Do you mean to tell me you don’t ‘check out’ pretty girls?” Anne asked in frustration.

  “Well, yeah,” the boy leered at her.

  Anne darted over, grabbed him by the neck, and slammed him against the corridor wall. Punching Boy scrabbled at her arm, his feet kicking futilely as she easily held him off the ground with one hand.

  Christina recognized the hypocrisy of Punching Boy’s answer. “You want me to hold his arms while you smack him?”

  “Thanks, but not necessary,” Anne replied, and demonstrated by lightly cuffing Punching Boy with her free hand.

  Christina smiled at how easily Anne handled the Were. “FFS?” She wondered out loud.

  Anne grimaced. “You know Bethany Anne’s rule about cussing?”

  It was Christina’s turn to make a face. She vividly remembered all the push-ups her parents had made her do when she’d repeated some swear words. “Yup, know it all too well.”

  Anne couldn’t help but smile at Christina’s disgust. “For fuck’s sake,” she whispered. “If I just use the initials, I don’t end up with endless push-ups. It’s not quite as satisfying as actually swearing, but the tradeoff in push-ups is worth it.”

  “What’s going on here?” A woman asked in a slightly accented voice.

  Ecaterina normally waited for Christina to get home from school, to help her with her homework if needed. When Christina was later than normal, Ecaterina had made her way to the school to look for her daughter.

  “Hi, Mother. I was just watching Anne talk to these boys about bullying in school,” Christina replied as she walked back to where she had dropped her backpack.

  Ecaterina may not have seen what had preceded the current situation, but she was intelligent enough to figure out who the bullies were when three Weres were involved with one human boy. “Why don’t you let him down, young lady, and I’ll take them to have a talk with my husband.”

  Anne knew who Ecaterina was, and by default, who her husband was. She couldn’t keep the smile off her face as she watched Punching Boy and his friends go pale. “Certainly, ma’am,” she acquiesced, opening her hand to let Punching Boy fall to the ground. Anne watched as Ecaterina put an arm around Christina and started her down the corridor saying, “Come along, little wolf,” and, sweeping the three Weres with her gaze, she continued, “and you sheep follow as well.”

  As the five Weres left the area, Anne went over to Josh and offered a hand to help pull him to his feet. “Are you going to be all right?” She asked him.

  “I’ll be bruised for a few days, but that is nothing new,” he informed her.

  “You mean this has happened to you before?” Anne was outraged.

  Josh wanted to take a step or four away from the girl whose eyes had just turned blood-red. However, considering she had just rescued him, he managed to hold his ground, and reached out to grab her arm when it looked like she was going after the Weres. “If not them, then it would be another group of guys,” Josh replied bitterly.

  “That’s not right!” Anne was in a righteous fervor.

  “It is what it is,” Josh said, shrugging carefully, mindful of his still sore abdomen, and started to leave.

  Anne watched, still very upset about the beatings, as Josh carefully headed down the corridor. “Meredith,” she said quietly as she and Jinx continued their journey toward the apartment they were sharing with Tabitha, “let me tell you about some of the things that are happening around the school, things you need to be on the lookout for.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It had been a week since the incident with Josh and the Weres, and Anne was finally starting to accept her new self. She had gone from struggling to pass to the top of her class in grades.

  Even after daily workouts with the Guardians and Guardian Marines, she still seemed to have more energy than she knew what to do with. While she didn’t want to be seen as sticking her nose into Josh’s business, her talk with Meredith had resulted in cameras being installed and ensured that Josh was constantly monitored to and from school. She hadn’t noticed any new signs of abuse.

  Some of the Weres looked at her like she was a skunk or porcupine to their wolf, but since she had never been a popular person in school it didn’t bother her at all. She did have to resist the temptation to go all vampire on some of them just to see if they’d put their tails between their legs and run. And despite her tribulations with the Weres and her historical lack of friends, she was slowly being accepted by some of her peers.

  Jinx looked up from where she was walking beside Anne. You are thinking evil thoughts again, I can tell from your expression.

  Umm, possibly? Anne tried to make it sound like a question.

  Jinx chuffed her version of a laugh. Admit it, you like that their hackles go up when you get close.

  They’re lucky I don’t show them what Josh went through and make them fear walking to and from school.

  You aren’t that sort of person. That’s one of the reasons I chose you. You are a protector, not someone who hurts others just because they can.

  Does it make me a bad person that I can think about it? Anne was trying very hard not to cry after hearing Jinx’ unconditional approval.

  Jinx kept pace with Anne as she thought about the question. I don’t think so. There are times during training when I feel like I’d really like to take a big chunk out of Jennifer, but I don’t truly want to hurt her. That’s just my fru
stration surfacing. I think it’s the same with you and those boys. They were bullies, and they are treating us like we were the ones who did wrong. I think it’s normal to have some extreme thoughts in a case like that.

  Anne couldn’t help but laugh, I like how you managed to keep it polite by using the word ‘extreme’.

  Anne and Jinx normally decompressed after a day in school by walking through one of the parks that had been built in the Meredith Reynolds. Anne liked taking some of the smaller paths through the park. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people, but for the purpose of decompression, the fewer the better. The two of them had only been on the path for about five minutes when a voice caused them both to stop and look at each other.

  “F F S, W T F C I G T R!”

  Anne had only told one person about her alphabet swearing, so she and Jinx recognized the voice. They resumed walking, and it wasn’t too long before they could hear a thump-thump noise along with more letters of the alphabet. As they cleared the end of a flowering hedge, they could see Christina banging her head against a tree.

  “What did the poor tree do to upset you?” Anne couldn’t keep the undertone of sarcasm out of her voice.

  Christina had been so absorbed in her troubles that she hadn’t even noticed Anne and Jinx, so hearing the voice caused her to spin and take a defensive stance. Shit, her parents would bar her from operations for a month if they knew she’d been taken this unaware.

  Seeing Anne and Jinx both looking at her quizzically, she relaxed slightly. Two girls and an extremely large German Shepherd stood looking at each other. Eventually, Anne raised an eyebrow in question.

  “What?” Christina asked, just now realizing that she’d missed Anne’s original question.

  “You were beating up the tree.” Jinx chuffed her laugh. “Anne wondered how it had offended you.”

  Christina looked at Jinx, then Anne, then the tree, and she put a hand to her face and rubbed her forehead. That’s when it clicked that they’d seen her beating her head against the tree.

  “It’s my parents.” Christina let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s just not fair! They forbid me from some operations because I can’t change.” She almost wailed her complaint.

  “Wait a sec,” Anne cut in quickly. “We’ve seen you shift, what are you talking about?”

  “Oh! Wolf is easy. Heck, if you listen to my dad, he swears I was born puppy instead of human.” Christina stuck out her tongue as she said this, letting Anne and Jinx know exactly what her feelings on that situation were. “It’s the Were combat form Pricolici they want me to change to. No matter what I try, I just can’t get angry enough or upset enough to make the change.” Christina wailed her frustration.

  “Sorry, what? They want you to change into that big form that Peter transforms into occasionally?” Anne asked, trying to understand the situation.

  “Yes! And all the Weres who can do it have to be able to get really angry about something to get the shift to work. Look.” The end of Christina’s arm morphed from a hand to a paw with two-inch-long claws. “I can do this, but I can’t change! It’s not my fault I haven’t experienced anything I can get that mad about,” Christina complained.

  Anne frowned. “Something just doesn’t sound right about that.” She held up her hands to placate Christina, who had started to bristle. “I’m not arguing or saying you’re wrong, it’s just that from the position of someone who’s never heard about this before, something doesn’t make sense. Come on, let’s get you home.” She put her words into motion by wrapping an arm around Christina’s shoulder and beginning to walk towards the entrance. “I’m going to do some research and see if I can figure something out that will help you.”

  Christina had been subtly resisting Anne’s movement. “Really?” She asked.

  Anne nodded and smiled at the younger girl. “Not promising results, but I’ll do my best to help you figure this out.”

  With someone willing to help her, Christina stopped resisting and accompanied Anne and Jinx from the park.

  The next day Anne hurried from school to the main training room. She and Jinx pushed into the women’s locker room and found Christina changing from her school clothes into workout gear.

  “Wait!” Anne called to Christina. “Get back into your school clothes.”

  Christina turned toward Anne with a confused look on her face. “What … why?”

  “Pricolici. I thought about your situation last night and I think I might have figured out your problem, but I want us to be alone so we can work on it without an audience. Tabitha won’t be home now, so let’s go to my place and I’ll explain.”

  Christina looked at Anne and then Jinx. “You’re not pulling my chain, as my dad would say?”

  “What? No!” Anne felt a little hurt that Christina would even think such a thing. She straddled the bench and sat so she was facing Christina. “I think it has to do with energy. If you channel your anger you can hit harder, right?” Anne waited for Christina to nod in agreement before she continued, “Anger releases adrenalin, which lets your muscles work more efficiently. I think that’s what your mom and dad do when they change. They think of something that makes them angry and then they channel the energy those emotions create to change form. That’s why not all Wechselbalg can turn Pricolici. Their anger either doesn’t create enough energy, or they are unable to channel the energy well enough to achieve the form.”

  “You think you have a way of getting me angry enough?” Christina asked, still not quite sure she understood the older girl’s plan.

  “No.” Anne smiled as she shook her head. “I want to find an energy source that isn’t based on your emotions.”

  “But that’s not how it’s done.” Christina complained, her confusion was clear in her expression.

  Anne held a hand up. “Wait. I’m going to tell you a stupid little story that I heard from my mother.”

  “When my mother was a little girl, my grandma taught her how to cook. When she was cooking a roast, she always cut the end off the roast. Mother asked Grandma why she did that, and Grandma said it was what her mother had done. My great gran isn’t alive anymore, but she was still alive when this happened, so the next time my mother visited her, she asked about the roast. You know what the answer was?”

  Christina shook her head, completely baffled by the conversation.

  “Apparently my great gran didn’t have a pan big enough for the roast to fit into, so she had to trim it to fit the pan. My grandma did have a pan big enough to fit a normal-sized roast, but she cut the end off because that was what her mother had done.” Anne started to giggle at the open-mouthed look of shock on Christina’s face.

  “You’re saying we’ve been cutting the end off the roast?” Christina asked in bafflement.

  Anne nodded. “Think about it. The Kurtherians have been on Earth for at least a thousand years. No one knew what was happening, and back then it must have been thought of as a curse or magic or a gift from the gods. Humanity wouldn’t have been advanced enough to understand the explanation even if they had been given one. It would have been word of mouth, like ‘I was afraid my daughter was going to be hurt, and the next thing I knew I was a monster’. Then it would have been that person telling another, ‘He told me he was upset his daughter would be hurt’. Given enough time and with every new person adding their own twist to it, the original story might be lost altogether. Thus we have today’s information that making the change is anger-based. You don’t need an emotional trigger to change into your wolf form, do you?”

  “No, just have to think about becoming the wolf,” Christina replied.

  “Why would it be different changing to Pricolici then?” Anne asked rhetorically. “I just think it needs more energy to switch into that form. It’s like walking and running; it uses the same muscles, but it requires more energy to run for an hour than it does to walk for an hour.”

  “Well, you’d get farther if you ran for an hour.” Christina couldn’t help but
state the obvious.

  “True, but you’re still powering the same muscles. You just have to run more energy through them.” Anne nodded, a big smile on her face.

  “You think you have an answer already, don’t you?” Christina felt a shiver of excitement.

  “I’ve got an idea I want to try,” Anne nodded again, “but it’s not something we are going to want an audience for.”

  Christina started changing back into her street clothes. “If I had a big sister, I’d trust her word. I’m going to pretend you’re my big sister and trust you. Please don’t be leading me on.”

  Anne had to wipe her eye as she moved to hug Christina. “Deal,” she said quietly. “You can be my little sister. I can’t promise it will work, but I do promise I have an idea I think will work. Good enough?”

  Christina gave Anne a quick, hard hug in return. “That’s fair,” she admitted. “Honest failure I can deal with. I just don’t want to be someone’s joke.”

  “While I can’t promise never to pull a joke on you, I will promise that it would never be done at the expense of something this important to you.” Anne held up her pinky finger.

  Christina had finished dressing by then and wrapped her pinky finger around Anne’s. “Fair enough,” she said with a smile.

  Anne was sitting on the couch watching a naked nine-year-old on the floor singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” when the insistent tone of a tablet’s messaging app sounded. Considering the tone in question was a wolf howl, Anne knew it wasn’t her tablet. Since Christina was ignoring the noise while continuing to sing, Anne dug through Christina’s backpack until she found the tablet.

  “Shush!” She implored Christina.

  “Christina Lowell’s tablet, how may I help you?” Anne had swallowed hard before answering, considering the incoming call was identified as “Mom”.

  Ecaterina looked out from the tablet, a frown on her face. “Wait, I know you. You’re the girl who … Anne, you’re Anne. I met you a couple weeks ago.”

 

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