Chapter 9 Aiden
AIDEN
We hadn’t even been at camp for a full twenty-four hours yet, and already Elijah and Wyatt had both managed to take one step forward and then two giant fucking steps backward with Avery.
I looked on glumly as she finished up her lunch, surrounded by her brother, his lynx boyfriend, and their other feline friends. If I could just get her to talk to us….
“At least we’re split by year for the classroom sessions,” Heath said as he tried to burn a hole in Kellan Crimson’s head with his stare. “A solid ninety minutes when those assholes can’t salivate over her.”
The Crimson Quad was sitting four tables down from us, Hank looking no worse for wear.
We’d found out that two shifters from rival quads had gotten into it during our sparring time, and one of them had nearly fatally stabbed the other.
This had occupied Cash and meant someone else had the dubious honor of being the first to report to Dr. Lee in the infirmary.
The property destruction was another issue. Not only had Wyatt demolished one of the weapons training frames by throwing Hank through it, but he’d also apparently punched a hole in the back wall of the field house.
We had just enough time to shower and change into fresh training clothes after lunch before we had to report to our classroom session. The main administration building housed several small lecture halls in addition to the offices of Guardian leadership, including Ward.
When we arrived, we grabbed seats in the back row, Elijah on the end so that he could stick his long legs into the aisle.
Avery strode into the room, instantly snagging our collective focus.
She’d changed into leggings and a fresh black Guardian T-shirt, and her long hair was a little damp and braided over her shoulder.
A faint hint of her lavender-and-jasmine scent wafted through the air.
Heath’s sensitive canine nose would get that full bore.
My brother smothered a groan.
Avery slipped into an open seat near the front, next to Josh Anderson and his happily bonded quad. He jerked a friendly but uninterested nod at her and went back to his phone.
My jaguar luxuriated in the sight of our mate’s profile, her slender neck, and her ash-blonde hair—not the silver of her tiger’s beautiful fur, but close enough to conjure memories of that night.
The night I was handed everything I could’ve ever wanted even as I’d known with gut-churning certainty that I’d already lost it.
It was my turn to smother a groan when our instructor strolled into the room.
“Oh shit,” Wyatt said, chuckling. “Looks like I might not be the only one getting into a fight today.”
Kit Wells.
Kit fucking Wells.
We’d been in the same graduating class at Proteus. He was an ordinary shifter—a fox, of all the things—and had been a perfectly adequate Support Squadron trainee. He’d made the cut and gone onto serve in the field, but the Guardians must have determined his real value was his intelligence.
Whenever he and I had shared a class, we battled for who would take the top grade and who would come in number two. And we’d unfortunately shared a lot of classes, as we’d both been history majors with a secondary affinity for rune and spell work.
He’d beaten me one more time than I’d beaten him. Not that I was counting.
He was of average height, maybe an inch shy of six feet tall, and he had the lean build of an ordinary shifter who kept in top shape.
His wheat-colored hair was thick and wavy, and he still wore glasses with thin wire frames, like he was so above it all that he didn’t care to be stylish with his eyewear.
Unlike Cash and the field instructors in their fatigues, Kit wore a simple black polo shirt with the golden Guardian logo embroidered over the chest and light gray slacks.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” he said cheerfully.
He took up his post at the lectern and opened the laptop waiting there.
His friendly smile morphed into a smirk when he caught me glowering at him from the back of his class of students who still hadn’t graduated from college.
“Welcome to your first classroom session of Guardian Training Camp. My name is Kit—fox shifter and two-year veteran of the Support Squadron. Last year I transitioned to a position at Guardian regional headquarters, where I’ve been working as a top counterinsurgency and deterrence analyst.”
I could not roll my eyes any harder.
Avery had perked right up, clearly excited to learn from someone with real Guardian experience who wasn’t a meat-headed blowhard like Cash.
And she probably felt some affinity for Kit because he was a fox shifter like her brother and father.
I hadn’t thought it was possible for me to dislike Kit Wells more than I already did, but I’d been wrong about a whole hell of lot lately. It was starting to piss me off.
Kit tapped a key on the laptop, and a map of northern Georgia flashed onto the screen at the front of the room.
Outlined in red were the borders of our shifter communities, stretching from the outskirts of Fulton City to the south and ending at the college and the base of the Blue Cliff Mountains.
I-77 bisected the map, and miles of rural land and forest surrounded the warded walls of each town.
“You’ll of course recognize our community map,” Kit said. “As Guardians, you’ll become intimately familiar with the vast areas beyond our walls, where our posts are located, and where we patrol for three nights every lunar cycle.”
A guy in the row below me raised a hand. “How come we patrol in the woods rather than just guarding the walls of our towns?”
“Ah, a good question. Generations of experience have taught us that the best tactic is to hit the wraiths out where they spawn rather than risk them coalescing into larger groups and attacking our communities. And the longer they’re allowed to roam, the greater the risk they could kill someone.
Never forget—a wraith that’s consumed a soul will immediately become stronger. ”
The class murmured its assent. That was something none of us could forget. Stories of shifters who’d strayed beyond the wards and had their soul eaten were fodder for our bedtime stories.
Kit tapped another key, and the forests, fields, and towns on the screen became sectioned into zones, each one shaded green, yellow, orange, or red.
“This shows the map of each official zone—the area assigned for Guardian patrol coverage. The colors denote the level of wraith activity reported by our patrols during the most recent lunar cycle. Red will be the most active, with an exceptional number of L3 Rippers and L4 Giants. Orange is higher activity than normal, and yellow is normal to low—usually just a few L2 swarmers or the occasional L3. Green marks no wraith sightings for the previous cycle. We also use this light-blue color to mark an area within a zone where L1 wisps have been sighted, indicating a rift between realms is likely to be established within the next cycle or two.”
Our training via the school program hadn’t focused much on the mechanics of real patrols, since our only job had been to learn to swing a bladed weapon and kill wraiths in a magical simulation.
My quad had some notion of how Guardian patrols worked, but only because of our relationship with Wyatt’s fathers.
Another hand went up. “Do the zones change color often, or do you find that most red zones stay red, green zones stay green, and so on?”
Kit gave his patented smile, easygoing enough to be friendly but patronizing enough to remind you he was of superior intelligence.
“Another great question. As I’m sure you’ve learned in your training, the areas adjacent to our communities with higher populations of shifters are usually more active, and the places where we have more Primes per capita are the biggest targets for wraiths, especially the L3s and 4s.
” He waved at the map on the screen. “You’ll note that the most red and orange zones are clustered near the Hills, though we’ve had orange zones popping up all over the place lately. It is a lunar eclipse year, after all.”
Nods and grunts all around. We certainly hadn’t been allowed to forget the lunar eclipse coming later this fall. It would be one of the longest totalities we’d had in this area in several decades.
“But,” Kit went on, “while the color of a zone isn’t static, it is indicative of a trend.
We can have months where all zones surrounding the Hills, where our illustrious Primes are most numerous”—that got a snort out of Avery, which I found a bit ridiculous, since I was now aware that she herself had a powerful Prime animal—“are yellow rather than orange or red. That tends to lend itself to more quiet green zones to the south and for the rest of our region’s patrol map. ”
Avery’s hand shot into the air. “Kit, I see Zone 11, which is the southernmost zone, closest to the Fulton City limit, was orange last month. Is that normal?”
Kit now had an excuse to stare directly at Avery, and he drank her in with enthusiastic curiosity.
“If you don’t kill him, I will,” Heath muttered.
“Well, Miss…?”
“Avery Baxter.”
“Well, Avery,” he said with a grin, “I’d have to check the reports, but we’ve had a lot of our quieter zones become more active lately. It’s been an unpredictable eighteen months or so as we approach this area’s big eclipse event.”
She smiled back at him, and it was gorgeous and lethal.
“I would be interested to know the answer, and I would be really interested to know why the bright minds at Guardian HQ don’t believe Fulton City itself merits at least a small patrol, especially if there are on occasion orange zones directly to its north.
Wraiths don’t exactly abide by the Guardian’s borders. ”
He frowned. “You think we need to patrol the city?”