Chapter 6 Avery
AVERY
George decided it was time to obediently slither over to Aiden about two minutes before class ended, so Ian and I were able to make a quick escape the moment we were dismissed.
Ian departed, headed for his Organic Chemistry class in the Math and Science building, while I only had to shuffle a few doors down to another lecture hall for Shifter History and Culture. I pouted about Ian’s absence for a second, but then I slapped my game face back on because I was a big girl.
This time I was earlier to class, so I was able to have my pick of seats.
I settled on a spot in the middle, intending to disappear into the sea of faces as other students began to file in.
As long as I didn’t get into a standoff with the professor or have George come looking for me, I had a real shot at this plan.
After a few minutes of peace, my beast twitched, snapping my attention from emails on my phone.
A second later, Wyatt Gale and Heath Blackwell entered the room.
Every eye turned their way as they prowled up the shallow stairs and made their way into the row behind mine.
They stopped—because of course they did—at the chairs directly behind me and sat down.
“If Elijah doesn’t check in by the end of training today, one of us should go after him,” Heath said in a low voice. It was a deep, resonant sound that carried the power of the most dominant and deadly of our kind. “We shouldn’t have let him go alone in the first place.”
“He’ll be fine,” Wyatt replied. His voice had a similar gravity but with a lighter, more lyrical tone—another surprise from this supposedly legendary bear shifter.
Bears were always big burly dudes with beards and the deepest baritone imaginable.
He chuckled, and it irked me to no end that I’d never heard a sexier sound in my life.
“If only he gave training and school the focus he’s giving this side project. ”
“I think him being this focused on anything is a positive,” Heath said. He cleared his throat, and then he muttered, “Incoming.”
“Hey, Wyatt,” a female voice purred. “Is this seat taken?”
Wyatt’s voice took on a classic fuckboy lilt. “Taken by you, Callista.”
She let out a flirtatious giggle.
Heath snorted, and his whisper just reached my ears. “No one to blame but yourself for this one.”
“Laugh it up, asshole. Looks like you’ve got company too.”
“Heath, hi,” another saccharine voice cooed. “Okay if I sit here?”
“Hey, Phoebe,” Heath replied diplomatically. “Sure, go ahead.”
“Perfect,” Phoebe said lightly. “Hi, Wyatt.” She paused, and her voice lost all the bubbly sweetness. “Callista.”
“Phoebe,” Callista replied, her tone just as caustic.
I couldn’t help my chuckle. Testy, aren’t we?
“Something funny, new girl?” Callista drawled at the back of my head.
Damn it. Where was George when I needed him to be a menace?
Not one to cower, I craned my neck around to look at her over my shoulder. Callista was one of the girls from the blue-bloods table in the dining hall this morning. She’d styled her dark hair in perfect waves, and her contouring was on point.
I could just make out Wyatt’s hot, stupid smirk from the corner of my eye.
“I apologize,” I said to Callista with my best contrite face. “As you pointed out, I’m new here, so it’s my first time being exposed to the hostile atmosphere of the competition for a Prime quad’s bond. I’m sure I’ll adjust soon.”
Wyatt snorted a laugh before he smothered it with a cough.
Callista’s dark-brown eyes narrowed to slits. “Watch yourself, b—”
“Wait.” Heath’s command had just the edge of a bark to it, the dominance saturating the air. It shut Callista up instantly. He leaned forward, his breath ghosting against the back of my neck. “What’s this?”
His fingers just brushed my shoulder. My beast’s ears flattened against her head, and I tensed at his touch.
“These look like George’s scales.”
Oh. I blew out a breath, glancing down at my other shoulder.
A few tiny, sparkly purple scales were embedded in the thick fabric of my sweater.
I met Heath’s burning hazel gaze over my shoulder.
He had more golden brown in his irises than his brother did, and I hated that I knew that.
“They are George’s scales. He came to visit my last class and decided he wanted to snuggle with me for a while. ”
Heath blinked, and then his eyes narrowed, hitting me with the full weight of that Alpha stare. “You’re lying.”
I scowled. Fuck you, wolf. “Ask your brother.”
Phoebe gave his arm a sympathetic squeeze. “Ignore her, Heath. Just a new girl making a desperate bid for your attention.”
Ooh, burn. “Nice friends you have there, Alpha,” I said drolly to Heath.
He continued to glare at me, the golden starbursts around his pupils flaring with the pulse of dominance from his beast. My own beast rumbled a warning within me, and I whirled around in my chair to face the front of the class before my eyes lit up like fireworks.
Just in time, too, because our professor had arrived.
“Good morning, everyone,” she said brightly. “Welcome to the first day of Shifter History and Culture.”
Professor Oglethorpe was middle-aged, with the tall, solid build of a female with shifter blood while also appearing soft around her generous curves.
She wore a stack of diamond-encrusted bands on her ring finger—the modern hallmark of a latent female who was the central bond of several partners.
I was sitting too far away to be able to count the bands.
She sauntered over to the desk at the front of the room and dropped her heavy beaded bag on top of it.
Unlike the illustrious Professor Blackwell, she eschewed the lectern and slide deck for a more informal vibe, hopping up on top of the desk and taking a seat, cross-legged like she was a kindergarten teacher about to read us a story.
“I’ve been teaching this class for a decade,” she said, beaming her pleasant smile around the room. “And I’ve discovered that my students are most interested in beginning with the seminal legend of our people.”
I ground my teeth together. Fucking perfect.
“And that is the legend of the First Guardians,” she continued. “Who can tell me a little bit about them?”
A few hands went up, and she called on an eager girl sitting in the front.
“They were the first Prime shifters,” she chirped. “An Alpha wolf, a polar bear, a Barbary lion, and the White Tiger. The tiger was the only female and the central bond of the group, but most people today still call them a quad, since they were four Prime beasts.”
Right. The formal erasure of the bonded mate came later.
The “bonded quads” running around this place were actually a quintet with the addition of their central bond.
A bonded trio would be three shifters and their central.
It was considered the ideal formation among Primes, and some of the more powerful ordinary shifters worked the same way.
The further down the power and dominance scale you slid, the less necessary it was for the beasts to form a quad or trio and bond around a central.
Some animals, like wolves, preferred the mini-pack structure of a group of four or five, but most of us ended up in monogamous pair bonds like Mallory and Allen.
In the modern age, a pair bond could get legally married, which made navigating the normal human world as a couple easier.
My parents had been a true quad, a mix of Prime and ordinary shifters, before my mother was murdered.
Professor Oglethorpe nodded at the girl.
“Very good, yes. While we suspect the existence of Prime shifters dates back much further than this, shifter culture only began keeping records a few thousand years ago, at the time our First Guardians lived in a small settlement on the European continent. We believe this was the first appearance of the wraiths, as the legend suggests, which spurred our ancestors into more meticulous record keeping.”
Another hand went up. “Was that when the wraiths first came into existence? Or was it just the first time they broke out of their realm?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure you’ll cover this in Lunar Magic class, but we don’t really know.
We can theorize that as long as the Moon has been blessing our kind with beast souls, there have been the souls unfit to meld with us that go on to become so violently corrupted.
The magical universe requires balance, and the wraiths are the darkness to our light.
Now….” She cast her gaze around the room, an encouraging smile on her face.
“Who can tell me the story of the First Guardians and how it endures this day?”
By being fodder for zealots.
She shot a sly smile over my head. “How about you, Mr. Blackwell? I suspect our top Guardian candidates are well-versed in their history.”
Heath blew out a quiet breath that was only just tinged with annoyance.
“Sure. The legend says that the first wraiths attacked the shifter settlement during a New Moon. They took many lives. The First Guardians, as the strongest shifters, fought valiantly through the night. They’d tear the wraiths apart, but then they’d regenerate and continue to attack.
It was the leader of the quad, the Alpha wolf, who discovered that it took a Moon-blessed blade to truly kill a wraith.
They vanquished the remaining wraiths and held the line until the sun rose that morning. ”
“Excellent,” the professor said with an indulgent smile at Heath. “But the story doesn’t end there, does it?” She glanced to Heath’s left, where Phoebe was sitting. “Yes, Miss Atkins? What happened next?”