Chapter 9 Aiden #2
Heath sighed and pinched his brow. Wyatt leaned an elbow onto the desk and propped his chin in his hand, looking wistful as he prepared for our mate’s scathing tirade. Elijah’s grin was nearly giddy.
Instead of the vitriol we expected, Avery only shrugged, her expression patient. “Wraiths do make it into the streets of the Upper City on a fairly regular basis. My brother and I killed a Giant over the holidays. I almost died doing it.”
Heath broke the pencil he’d been fidgeting with. Wyatt’s bear activated, his rage a tangible thing that set my beast on high alert. Elijah went rigid next to Heath.
Our mate had almost died a different time than when she’d almost died because we were high-handed assholes who sent her away during the campus breach?
Kit’s brows bounced to his hairline. For a moment, he studied Avery, a look of profound respect on his face.
“Wow. Not even a graduate yet and you have real wraith kills under your belt? And in the city? I’ll definitely want to sit down with you later.
I need to know the locations, the frequencies, the power levels—we may have to redraw our maps! ”
Avery’s face flushed with a hint of pink, a pleased smile on her face. “Sure. I’ll bring my brother.”
I jammed the lead point of my pencil into the surface of my desk and snapped it right off.
When Avery announced that wraiths walked the streets of the city on her first day in my class, I’d dismissed it as ludicrous.
I’d expected Kit to do the same, but for some moonforsaken reason, he’d chosen today to become a guy willing to believe he could learn something from a random student he just met.
Elijah raised his hand, and Kit had to tear his adoring gaze from our mate. He eyed Elijah with equal parts surprise and trepidation. “Uh, yes, Elijah?”
Elijah gestured to the map, his yellow eyes narrowed as he stared at something in the top corner. “Why is that zone marked in gray?”
He was referring to a large swath of territory at the northeastern edge of the map. It was labeled “Zone 3,” but instead of one of the traffic-light colors of the other patrol areas, it was shaded gray.
“Huh,” Heath mused under his breath. “That’s fucking strange.”
It dawned on me why that part of the map had caught Elijah’s attention.
That was where his fathers had died.
“Oh, yes,” Kit said, perking up. “Interesting, isn’t it?
The Guardians took this zone out of active patrol about five years ago.
I believe it was normally green, and occasionally yellow—normal for a location on the furthest outskirts of our community.
But there hasn’t been a wraith sighting there in something like twenty years, so the zone was retired.
The adjacent zones rarely see wraiths, either, and those that we do see there are believed to have wandered over from more active areas. ”
“Really, twenty years?” Elijah asked, his posture lazy and his tone nonchalant when he had to be feeling anything but. “Interesting”
“It is,” Kit said, nodding enthusiastically. “We theorize that the rifts that were in and around that zone have closed. Gone extinct, or at least dormant. It’s a rare phenomenon, and we don’t really know why it happens.”
Elijah didn’t ask any more questions. We all knew where his mind had gone, and the brutal slaying of his fathers by several Giants and an Apex wraith that happened to occur in that area during the lunar eclipse twenty years ago was not a topic he would want to raise for a classroom discussion.
I filed it away for later. We’d help him get to the bottom of this too.
Kit continued his lecture on the basics of Guardian patrol, regaling us with how he and the other bright minds at HQ develop forecasts before every lunar cycle to provide recommendations for the manning of each zone.
He answered a few more thoughtful questions and several dumb ones, and after ninety excruciating minutes, he finally dismissed the class.
“Oh, hey, Avery,” he said as we all stood up and gathered our things. “Could you stay behind for a couple of minutes? I just have a few questions for you.”
“Like fuck he does,” Wyatt snarled under his breath. He was still in a mood.
“Sure, no problem,” Avery replied.
I snagged Wyatt by the waistband of his shorts before he could storm the lectern. “I’ll handle it,” I announced briskly.
Heath, Wyatt, and Elijah filed out, but not before each of them had given Kit some version of a death glare.
Not that he noticed. He’d come out from behind the lectern and was leaning casually against it, his arms crossed over his chest as he peppered Avery with questions about the wraiths in her neighborhood.
“That’s enough, Kit,” I said, coming to stand behind Avery’s shoulder. “You’ll make Avery late for our combat session. I’m sure it isn’t news to you that a few of the trainers would love an excuse to make her life harder, and I’d prefer not to give it to them.”
Kit arched a brow at me. “Ah, Aiden, you must’ve forgotten that here at camp, I’m the instructor and you’re the student. I know what time the next session starts.”
I let my beast peek through my eyes. “And you must’ve forgotten I’m not a fucking idiot. Flirt with females on your own time, but never this female.”
“Aiden,” Avery hissed.
Kit’s cocky smile dipped. The rivalry between us was always academic and never about our animals, and it was beneath a Prime of my level to run around exerting my beast’s power against lesser shifters. I hadn’t touched him, but I was reminding him that I could.
Avery was mine.
He cleared his throat and turned to her, his inquisitive smile returning. “What’s going on here, Avery? Blackwell is acting a tad possessive. Who is he to you?”
She shrugged her swords onto her back and tucked her notebook under her arm. She spared me a passing glance as she turned to leave.
“He’s no one, Kit,” she said, raking my guts onto the floor with poisonous claws.
She walked out of the room without another word.