Chapter 9 Heath
HEATH
Wyatt and I climbed into the stands behind the control booth.
I was exhausted, though the power of my beast would recharge me quickly.
My back still ached with the phantom pain of claws tearing out my skin, and I was lucky I didn’t have a broken leg where the Giant had smashed my wolf’s hindquarters like it was returning a tennis serve.
Still, my beast was thrumming with the sated bloodlust he experienced from even the simulated kills of high-powered wraiths.
I loved the arena, the competition, and even more, I loved showing the other quads who thought they were nipping at our heels why they’d never be as good as we were in their wildest fucking dreams.
“New girl sure is full of surprises,” Wyatt mused as we watched Avery Baxter stride confidently onto the arena floor. “We thought we had her figured out, didn’t we?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed, then tried to figure out where the hell that flash of anxiety had come from. “There’s no way the school fast-tracked her admission for this.”
We didn’t take an interest in every transfer student, but the school so rarely took upperclassmen transfers, especially those with no previous magical education. Avery’s arrival in the second semester of her junior year was notable.
Also notable—the fact that she was smoking hot.
Hot girls were abundant at a shifter college, but my wolf half had decided to take particular notice of this one. She’d challenged me in class earlier, and my beast was very interested in getting her underneath us.
Wyatt was experiencing similar urges, so after class this morning, I sent a demand-disguised-as-a-request to one of the ordinary wolves who was a computer science major. Within an hour, I had her university file on my phone.
Junior. Fulton City resident. Community college credits. Shifter blood—obviously, since no one was allowed admission to Proteus without it—but undisclosed status. The file did contain a conspicuous note that Avery’s father was an Alpha wolf named Rand Baxter.
Case closed, or so I’d told Wyatt. A female, likely latent despite her apparent unwillingness to disclose it, from a Prime bloodline.
The administration was tossing her to the unbonded quads like a piece of meat.
Because the situation at the Blackwell home had escalated over the holiday break, my quad had resolved to get focused on finding the right girl for our central, and soon. If Avery was on the menu, all the better.
Then she showed up to Guardian training, wearing two wakizashi blades strapped to her back, and our little bubble of cautious interest had burst into fucking vapor.
Prime-blooded latent or not, it appeared she was here to stir up trouble and get herself killed.
Wyatt chuckled at my disapproval. “You heard Trent—they enrolled her brother in training, but not her. The admission staff has no idea what kind of female they let in here.”
Avery reached behind her head with both hands and unsheathed her short swords.
She spun the grips expertly before slashing the blades in a pattern as she warmed up.
She moved like a dancer, her lean muscles flexing deliciously.
Her long blonde hair appeared almost silver in the soft glow of the magic that was still thick on the floor.
She still wore it in the no-nonsense ponytail from earlier today, when I’d spent half of class trying not to salivate over the elegant curve of her neck and her enticing scent, which reminded me of springtime.
Her skin-tight leggings left no part of her toned legs and ass to the imagination, and every guy in this room had fucking noticed.
I shook off my wolf’s irritation. Cut that shit out.
“Damn,” Wyatt muttered, his gaze glued to her every move. “Check out the runes etched into her blades. Those are Moon-blessed, man. Maybe she really has killed a wraith?”
“It would be a weird thing to lie about,” I agreed. “But wraith attacks in the city? Where it’s mostly humans? That makes no sense.”
Wraiths were attracted to shifters because they needed to feed on them to survive, and they were especially attracted to powerful shifters.
The higher the concentration of Primes in an area, the higher frequency of attacks and the more dangerous breed of wraiths involved.
While there were certainly a few shifters scattered around the urban areas, they were few and far between.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Avery’s Alpha father was the only Prime living within the Fulton City limits.
“All right, Baxter,” Cash said into the mic, sneering at her.
He was a dick, but his quad were three-year veterans of the Guardians and had the most kills in their division, an especially impressive feat given they weren’t bonded yet.
I tolerated him because he and his team knew their shit.
“No training wheels. You clearly think you’re hot shit, so you’re getting the real deal, same as everyone else in your class year. ”
“Except that none of this is actually real,” she shot back, glaring at him.
Wyatt laughed. “She really is disgusted with all of us. Is that hot? Why do I think that’s hot?”
“That’s your bear talking. She provokes the urge to dominate.”
His grin widened, slow and lascivious. “Mmm, yeah. That does sound like fun.”
Cash rolled his shoulders, and we heard him mutter, “Cocky fucking bitch,” before he nodded at Trent, who was still behind the SWIM controls.
Eight swarmers materialized on the floor.
Wyatt swore. “What the fuck is he doing?”
“Trying to humiliate her,” I replied, grimacing.
A SWIM sequence of eight L2 swarmers was a quad challenge in our sophomore year, or one for a full Support Squadron unit of six ordinary shifters in the junior year.
It was not something we threw at single fighters, and certainly not at a non-shifting female on the first day of training.
Avery’s brother, Ian, was leaning over the bleacher railing across the way, watching his sister with something like lazy amusement on his face—not an ounce of concern to be found.
He was snuggled up next to Brody Dara, a lynx shifter and one of the more talented Support Squadron trainees in the junior class.
It would’ve been unlike Brody not to warn Ian how bad this was about to get for his sister.
Both Baxter siblings were too fucking cocky.
The wraiths coalesced into their swarm and charged at Avery. This group were all identical mutant crocodile things, if crocodiles had agile feline legs and four vacant eyes brimming with the SWIM’s magical glow. They were the size of pit bulls and would be ten times as aggressive.
She twirled her swords, unbothered, and then ran straight into the fray.
My dread morphed into confusion and then into… something else, as I watched Avery Baxter skillfully and systematically destroy every single wraith on the floor.
Every croc that lunged for her with a gaping maw received a violent stab straight into the mouth and through the brain.
She whirled, chopping off legs, leaping onto backs and hacking at those thick necks, the kills ringing up as she went.
It’d been an even bigger dick move by Cash to choose this form of swarmer from the magical array because the thick croc-like neck made decapitation difficult work, unless you were swinging a battle-ax like Wyatt’s.
When the last wraith flickered out, a few whistles sounded from the crowd.
“Fuck” was all I had to say.
“Fuck,” Wyatt agreed.
“She’s better with a blade than just about everyone in this room.”
“Yeah, and there’s not a chance she’s latent,” Wyatt muttered. “Not with how she moves. She has to have a beast soul.”
“Disappointed?” I asked wryly.
“Not sure.” He peeled his eyes off Avery, who stood defiantly in the middle of the floor, catching her breath as she gave Cash a cold stare. Wyatt waggled his dark red brows at me. “Doesn’t mean I—we—can’t fuck her.”
“That’s the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
He grinned. “Liar.”
Cash was back on the mic. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded. “You can clearly shift, Baxter. What’s your beast?”
“I don’t have to disclose my status to you or anyone else,” she shot back.
My wolf half rumbled irritably, and I agreed. What are you hiding, Avery Baxter?
Cash snapped his fingers angrily at Trent, and without warning, two L3 Rippers appeared on the floor.
They were vaguely bear shaped and just as huge as Wyatt or any of his fathers, except they had curved demon horns, snouts the size of a wolf’s, and sickles for claws that could run a girl of Avery’s size straight through.
“Cash, what the fuck?” I snapped over the railing.
“Problem, Blackwell?” he drawled.
“We only let Prime shifters go one-on-one with a Ripper, you asshole.”
“This bitch needs to be put in her place. Or do you want her in this training class? How about at camp this summer? Or running around the front lines during the lunar eclipse this fall?”
I scowled. He was implying that she was a weak link and would fuck everything up once we were allowed out in the field, but that shit bothered me for a different reason I wasn’t able to examine because the wraith bears roared and converged on Avery.
She remained where she was, shifting lightly on her feet. Her shocking blue eyes pinned to the wraith that reached her first.
It leapt at her. She ducked underneath it and thrust both of her blades straight up into its gut as it soared over her head.
“Holy shit,” Wyatt said.
Bellowing in outrage, the wraith crashed to the floor.
The second wraith swiped its claws at her head.
She dodged, rolling to the floor and severing the wraith’s hind leg as she went.
It screeched, losing its balance and toppling over.
She sprang from the floor and ran for its head.
In two vicious swings of the blade in her right hand, she’d hacked its head from its body.
“Trent!” Cash barked, his face turning a deep shade of maroon.