40. Aurora
AURORA
“Knew I’d find you here,” Larson snarled, entering the dorm.
“Leave me alone!” I put out a hand to stop him as I slowly backed away. “You can’t touch me! Ryse will kill you!”
“No, he won’t. Mating Flights are the one time he can’t lay a finger on me, no matter what I do to your pretty little body. I’ll just blame it on the dragon lust—nobody can argue with that.”
He looked at me with a savage lust in his tiny, no-color eyes and I felt my blood run cold. Was it true that no one could be blamed for anything that happened during a Mating Flight?
I thought of how no one wanted to explain it to me and how Jorn-o’s father had warned me to “make myself scarce” when a Mating Flight happened. Was this the Academy’s dirty secret—the other side of the honor and order they espoused during the day?
I didn’t know but it seemed very likely. In the space of a few minutes, I felt as though my whole world had been turned upside down. Everything I thought I knew was gone, replaced by a nightmare world where my body ached and yearned, but my mind was stunned by horror and betrayal.
“Leave me alone,” I said to Chud Larson, backing away and almost tripping over a boy who was laying in the middle of the floor, self-pleasuring. “If you touch me, Ryse will come for you—Mating Flight or no Mating Flight.”
He let out an ugly, barking laugh that had no humor in it at all.
“Skoren isn’t coming for you! Every time there’s a Mating Flight, he takes a draught of calming tea. Knocks him the fuck out and he doesn’t wake up until the next morning when the flight is over. Scream and cry all you want—he’s never going to hear you.”
I felt cold horror growing in the pit of my stomach.
I wanted to shout that he was lying…except I was pretty sure he wasn’t.
Of course Ryse would take something to help him sleep through the Mating Flight.
He would be even more affected by the dragon lust than I was.
I could only feel dragon emotions—he was part dragon himself!
How much worse would this all be for him with his bloodlines?
I was on my own with nowhere to run. Still, I wasn’t about to give up.
Turning, I dashed towards the end of the dorm.
I knew that Jorn-o had a blicket under his bed—a long, heavy, wooden paddle used in playing a game called “tursk-ball.” He and Toady and Leaper and Bugs had gotten me to play with them several times, but the blicket was so heavy I had a hard time swinging it with accuracy.
But that was before I’d started working out with Ryse. Now I was certain I could swing it—and I fully intended to.
Dropping to my knees beside my friend’s bed, I scrambled under, reaching for the blicket. But just as my fingers closed around its wooden handle, I felt a hand wrapping around my ankle and Larson pulled me out from under the bed.
“You think you can get away by hiding under the bed?” he snarled.
There was an evil light in his piggy little eyes, and he was already pulling down his pajama bottoms to reveal something short and squat and ugly.
“Think you can stop me, you little shit?” he went on, as he yanked me all the way out.
“I’m gonna pound your tight little arse tonight.
Gonna stretch you out on my big, thick—”
But I didn’t let him finish his threat. As soon as my arm was completely free of the bed, I hefted the heavy blicket and chopped him in the face.
I say “chopped” because I used the thin edge of the flat paddle, rather than the flat side of it. It hit him right in the nose and I heard a crunching sound, followed by a howl.
Blood that looked almost black in the dim light began pouring down Chud’s face. He let go of my ankle and grabbed for his nose with both hands.
“You broke by dose!” His voice was muffled, and his eyes were wide and wounded, as though he couldn’t believe I’d had the nerve to fight back.
“I’ll break more than that if you don’t leave me alone!” My voice trembled but I held the blicket between us like a sword and my hand didn’t shake. “I’ll fucking kill you if you try anything with me!”
I didn’t recognize the voice coming out of my mouth…didn’t recognize the calm, ordered world of the Academy now that it had turned to chaos. I felt like I was living in a nightmare—in an upside-down world where nothing made sense anymore.
This is a nightmare, I told myself. It has to be—just a really bad nightmare. This can’t really happen. It’s all a bad dream and pretty soon I’m going to wake up and go work out with Ryse.
But my wishful thinking nearly got me killed.
I took my eyes off Chud Larson and let the blicket sag, just a little.
Before I knew it, the heavy wooden paddle was being yanked out of my hand. With a swift jerk of his arm, Chud threw it away. There was a clatter as it landed on the other side of the dorm, and I knew that I was in trouble.
The clattering sound yanked me out of the daze I’d somehow fallen into, but it was too late. I tried to twist away again and got as far as getting to my knees to get back under the bed, when Chud grabbed me by the back of the neck.
With a swift yank, he pulled up the back of my nightshirt and jerked down my underdrawers, baring my ass.
“You little shit,” I heard him mutter thickly. “You’re going to be fucking sorry!”
Then I felt something blunt and wet rubbing against my cheeks. I screamed and struggled but it was no use—Chud was kneeling on my legs, pinning me down, holding me in place. There was nothing I could do, no-place I could go. He—
Suddenly I heard a deep, familiar voice say,
“You sick bastard, get off him!”
Chud uttered a thick, garbled cry and then he was yanked off me as quickly as you might yank a quilt off a sleeping man. I heard some thudding sounds and some cries and when I turned, Ryes was on top of him.
His golden eyes were glowing in the dim room, and he was pounding the other cadet mercilessly, his fists rising and falling as Chud tried to cover his face with his hands and arms.
“I…told you…to leave Auri…the fuck…alone!” He growled as Chud moaned for mercy.
“He tempted me! He wanted it!” He protested. “Told me to…come see him…during the Mating Flight!”
“Bullshit!” Ryse growled.
“Ryse, please!” I sat up and reached out to him. “Please,” I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say.
My voice seemed to cut through his rage because he looked up at me, his golden eyes wild.
“Did he hurt you?” he demanded and I saw that both his fists were bloody and that Chud Larson’s face was ruined.
His nose was broken—but of course I had done that.
Also, though, both eyes were swelled almost shut and his lower lip was busted.
From the way one cheek was caved in, I was pretty sure his cheekbone on that side was broken as well.
He’d been ugly before—now he was going to be hideous.
No, he’s going to be dead if you don’t stop Ryse right now, whispered a panicked little voice in my brain. And then they’ll kick him out of the Academy or bring him up on murder charges. You have to end this now!
“No, he didn’t hurt me,” I told Ryse, who looked like an executioner waiting for the sentence to carry through on his job. “He…he tried to, but he didn’t…didn’t get it in.”
That was as close as I could come to saying what Chud Larson had been trying to do to me. My mind wouldn’t let me go further than that.
Luckily, it seemed to be what Ryse needed to hear. He stood abruptly and wiped his knuckles on his trouser bottoms. His chest was bare, and he was also barefoot, I saw—he was wearing nothing but a pair of long, dark blue sleep trousers.
“Come on,” he said, but this time, instead of taking me by the hand, he reached for me and swung me into his arms.
“Wait—where are we going?” I gasped, as he stepped over the bloody form of Chud Larson, still moaning on the floor.
“Someplace safe,” was all he would say.
And then he carried me out of the dorm and down the hallway.