Chapter 6 Avery
AVERY
“Swanky,” Ian said as he marched through my cabin’s screen door without knocking. He surveyed the sparse but cozy space. “Being the only female in this sausage festival rarely has its perks, but this is definitely one of those times.”
I tucked in the final corner of the sheet on my twin bed. “Clearly I need to complain to management about getting a lock.”
“You do.” He threw himself onto the empty bed situated against the opposite wall.
Since I would not have a roommate for the eight-week duration of Guardian Training Camp, the extra bed would serve as Ian’s couch and a depository for my dirty clothes.
“Or,” he went on, “maybe I should just sneak in after lights out and sleep here. Help keep out the riffraff.”
“And leave your boyfriend alone in a cabin full of hot shifter males?”
He scoffed. “We’re rooming with Joon and Nico. Those are the straightest boys alive.”
True. Both were bobcats and part of Brody’s feline crew of besties. I’d never seen either of them in a social situation without a girl hanging off their arm, and it was rarely the same girl twice.
I waggled my eyebrows at my brother. “You and Brody sharing a bunk? Who’s top and who’s bottom?”
He winked. “We’ll switch. It’s going to be a long summer.”
“Why did I even ask?” I said with a roll of my eyes. “And also, ew. I can’t imagine anything less sexy than four guys crammed into one small cabin. The stench.”
“I beg you to remember that when the call of the wild with respect to a certain quad becomes especially persistent.”
With a few aggressive strokes of my hand, I smoothed my purple quilt, and then I sat down on my neat little bed and glared at my brother. “Sounds like you don’t have any confidence in my resolve.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “I have all the confidence in you, Aves. But… I don’t know. This is a Fated bond. It’s rare and powerful. I hate that you’ll have to deal with that on top of all the regular bullshit of just surviving whatever camp has in store for us.”
He and I both. I needed to be on my game. An ice-cold bitch who cared about nothing except becoming the best wraith-killer in my class and ascending to the level of a Guardian, a valued member of the elite force, a protector of our community.
All so I could just have a modicum of safety and stability for myself and my tiger.
Because my mother’s beast was also a not-quite-white tiger, and she was murdered for it. I could not, under any circumstances, allow my family to experience that kind of pain again.
What I was not here to do was get distracted by Elijah’s haunting yellow eyes, always so hungry and desperate when he looked at me.
I also wasn’t here to entertain Wyatt’s shameless flirting and needling me into giving him attention.
Or to allow Aiden to flex his forearms while condescending to me about the academic theory that he claimed justified their dickish behavior.
Or to get into libido-revving dominance games with Heath.
My beast licked a claw and flicked her tail. Aloof but not disinterested.
You’re a real problem, I told her.
It’d only been two days since the guys blindsided me by appearing in the streets of my neighborhood. For weeks, I’d been steeling myself, building my walls, and preparing to be stuck with my not-mates nearly 24/7 for two months.
But then, there they were.
Ripping the Band-Aid off early.
The sight of them, first Heath and Wyatt, then Aiden and Elijah, was as easy on the eyes as ever. They seemed a little more haggard, a little more worn down, but it did nothing to detract from how stunning they’d always been.
And that little flicker of desire, the tiny fluttering of butterfly wings in my belly, the perk of my beast’s ears, that moment of longing for the way things had been before they came back from spring break and turned on me, had sent me straight into a boiling rage.
This is what you wanted, Wildcat. We told you the cold, hard truth. You aren’t it for us.
The fucking nerve of them riding to my rescue like I was a damsel in need of protecting. Like I hadn’t spent an entire semester proving just how well I could protect myself.
And how dare they decide to care now, after what they did?
I still couldn’t close my eyes at night without seeing Callista wrapped around Wyatt on the dance floor, her lips on his neck, while he looked me straight in the eyes and smiled like he was enjoying it all.
I couldn’t even perform my monthly ritual of Moon-blessing my blades without Aiden invading my brain, the memory of his genuine praise at my skill drowned out by the sound of his silky tenor announcing to his date that I was no one.
Then there was Elijah’s abandonment.
And Heath’s cold dismissal.
And, of course, the haunting nightmares that still plagued me of my flesh being torn from my beastly body.
Fuck them. They’d ruined everything.
Ian cleared his throat and raised a brow.
I climbed out of the hole I’d been descending into. “Are you finished unpacking?” I asked. “Is that why you’re in here bothering me?”
“Yes and yes.” He slid languidly from the bed, getting to his feet and smoothing his white Guardian T-shirt and shorts—one of a dozen pairs we’d all been issued. “And I came to escort you to dinner. I heard it’s chicken-fried steak night.”
I shucked my forest-green Proteus College tank top and pulled on a black Guardian T-shirt over my sports bra.
After strapping the harness that affixed my two wakizashi blades in their X-shaped scabbard to my back, I shoved my phone into the little compartment on the thigh of my compression leggings.
Unlike a real summer camp, we were allowed access to our phones because our weekly schedules and other pertinent communications would be pushed to our email throughout the duration of the program.
According to the blast leadership sent out an hour ago, we would start bright and early tomorrow with a four-mile run through the wilderness. My beast and I needed that chicken-fried steak.
I heaved a sigh and faced the cabin’s screen door. There was no putting this off. “I’m ready.”
Ian and I ambled out into the waning evening daylight.
The clean mountain air caressed my nostrils.
The grass was soft and lush under my sneakers.
Ahead, the waters of the camp’s lake reflected the setting sun, deep-blue waves lapping softly against the rocky sands of the small beach on its north shore.
Surrounding us on all sides was a thick forest of maples, oaks, and hickory trees that completely covered the terrain save for the narrow path that’d been cleared for the camp’s entry road.
We passed a cluster of a dozen cabins situated in two opposing semicircles around a larger building that contained the bathrooms and showers.
Shifter males streamed from the area, all in the same white T-shirt Ian wore, indicating they were Support Squadron trainees.
The herd moved at a leisurely pace toward the front of the grounds, where the chow hall was located.
A door slammed, and Brody trotted out with Joon and Nico in tow. Brody’s dark curls bounced as he ran, his brown eyes bright and pinned to my brother like it hadn’t been less than twenty minutes since he’d seen Ian.
Joon had slicked his black hair into a short little mohawk, and he carried his blade, a Sain-geom, in a simple sheath strapped to his back.
Nico was the shortest of the crew, coming in a few inches shy of Ian’s and my five-foot-ten. He was built like a rugby player and looked like he’d waltzed straight off a yacht in the Mediterranean.
“Greetings, Baxters,” Nico said, twirling his tactical Tomahawk ax. “Please allow us to escort you to chow.”
“Is that why you’re all armed?” I asked. “Are we expecting a wraith to jump out of the bushes?”
Brody fixed me with the world’s most patient look. “Of course not. But this place is crawling with Prime quads, and some of them may decide to… bother you. Safety in numbers, Avery.”
He didn’t just mean my not-mates. Cash and his quad of losers were lurking somewhere, and I had no idea whether any of the recently graduated seniors had a problem with me. This would be my first time training with the Guardian candidates in the class above mine.
“Also, you’re armed,” Joon pointed out.
“Yeah, but I’m always armed.”
I’d learned last semester that I couldn’t walk around a campus crawling with shifters and expect to be left alone. If I wanted to retain any sort of discretion as far as the tiger soul I was harboring, I had to have other means to defend myself.
Ian nudged me as we walked. “There are the Guardian cabins.”
Perched on a rolling hill overlooking the baseball field and sand volleyball courts were several more clusters of cabins.
These were larger and a bit boxier than the Support Squadron cabins, so I suspected leadership wasn’t forcing their power quads to squeeze into twin-sized bunk beds like they were the ordinary shifters.
In another reality, I’d have put up at least some resistance to being sequestered away from the Guardian trainees, stuck over in the cabins reserved for the scant few female staff. I was here to become a Guardian, not be treated as something other just because I was female.
But in actuality, the distance between me and the Blackwell Quad suited me just fine. It was going to be hard enough to ignore them as it was. I didn’t need to sleep two doors down or risk running into any one of them on my way to the bathroom.
I also didn’t exactly desire to share a bathroom with half the males in the program, so I’d accepted my cabin assignment with a grateful nod and zipped lips.
The chow hall was located next to the large faux-log cabin that housed leadership’s offices and the more utilitarian structure that was the camp infirmary. The lake beckoned from across a hundred yards of freshly mowed lawn.