Chapter 14 Aiden #2
Shit. The ring around my irises would light up a neon blue-green when my beast was really pushing, which he rarely did except in the heat of battle. Before I could blink it away, her blue eyes flashed lighter, hotter, like the center of a blazing flame.
“You think he could take me?” she asked, her silvery-blond ponytail caressing her slender neck as she leaned forward in her chair.
My beast half wanted nothing more than to try, apparently. I was as bad as the rest of my fucking quad.
“Put it away,” I growled, and she fucking smiled. “In this office and in my classroom, I’m the professor, and you’re my student. If you want to play power games with Primes, save it for training.”
She relaxed back in her chair. The headlights were off, but she was still eyeing me with something that may have been amusement.
What a fucking brat.
“I’ll take you up on that,” she replied. “If you ever decide to show up to training. Did you already go through it when you were a student?”
“I did. I competed as an individual in the Guardian class, and I practiced quad tactics with other Primes who needed an extra to make a full four. I drop into training every so often to practice as a quad with Heath and the others, and I’ll rejoin the program full-time this summer for camp.”
“Camp?”
“It’s what we call the off-campus field training that all of us who make the final-year cut must complete before the start of senior year. We’ll start going out on patrols. I used my senior year to start working with my own quad, so I didn’t go to camp.”
She nodded, her teasing smile returning. “I see. Are you excited to see a real wraith? Will it be your first time?”
I flashed her a warning look. I didn’t want to think about it, for some reason—the fact that she’d been out fighting wraiths with just her family, only one of whom was a Prime, for years. It was emasculating, yes, but it also sent something like dread creeping through my body.
She could have—and by all accounts, should have—been killed. Those vibrant blue eyes closed forever, never quite making it here, to school, to challenge me in my own space.
My beast rumbled an angry noise in my chest.
“I have seen a wraith,” I told her. “Two Giants once made it through the wards that surround the small suburb where my family has a lake house. I was ten. The local Guardian patrol was able to kill them, but I watched through the bedroom window as the wraiths killed four innocent shifters and ripped apart two Guardians before they were put down.”
Most shifter communities had wards to keep wraiths on the outskirts, though the quality varied depending on how deep the pockets were of the city and the locals.
But even the best wards, like those that surrounded this campus, could be breached by a high-level wraith, especially if it were able to consume a soul beforehand.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it. “I never had to witness something that horrible at such a young age. I didn’t see a wraith kill someone until I was sixteen.”
Her tone was so matter-of-fact, it took me a moment to process that statement.
“Who was it?” I asked quietly.
“Montana Mark.” She smiled, and it was sad.
“He’d moved down to Fulton City from Montana a year before it happened.
His beast was a mountain lion. Ordinary size and power, but feisty and a little crazy.
He ran a construction crew in the neighborhood, and some cycles he’d go out on patrol to help.
We had a particularly bad one that month, and two Rippers ambushed him.
Shredded his beast to pieces, then consumed his soul.
My family and I got there right as they’d finished, and it took all five of us to kill them. ”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. And I know you don’t believe me, but before they killed Mark, those two wraiths had managed to take some serious bites out of two drunk college students while they waited for a rideshare, completely oblivious to what was happening to them.
We found out later that one of them was in a coma for a year, and the other suffers from what human doctors think is young-onset dementia, but it isn’t.
It’s because a wraith turned his soul into Swiss cheese. ”
I sighed. “I do believe you, Avery. I just don’t understand why human injuries aren’t reported or tracked among wraith scholars, the Council, or Guardian leadership.”
“Oh I don’t know, Aiden, maybe because shifters don’t really give a fuck about humans?”
I didn’t correct her use of my first name because I liked the way it sounded coming out of her mouth, even if we were back to a borderline hostile tone.
“I suppose we don’t. We’re an insular species, and we have enough problems keeping our supernatural existence secret and maintaining a civilized society. ”
She studied me. “True. It’s rough out here. Who do you think kills more of us, wraiths or other shifters?”
It was time to get focused on what we were supposed to be doing, which was Runes 101. I had my own opinions on our archaic and often savage culture, but the way she asked the question was probing and serious, like she thought no one was truly safe.
That wasn’t a discussion I was up for tonight. Not with a student I met only yesterday.
I adjusted my glasses and put my professor face back on. “How about we begin your lesson, Miss Baxter? I’d prefer not to be here all night.”