Chapter 10 Avery
AVERY
Ihadn’t made it ten feet down the hall before a hand wrapped around my arm and yanked me into a closet.
Darkness swallowed me as I was pressed from chest to thighs against a hard, muscular body. A woodsy, masculine scent with hints of thunderstorms invaded my nose. Eyes blinked in the dark, now softly glowing with blue-green rings around the irises.
“Aiden!” I yelped. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Shit.” His hands landed on my hips. “I didn’t know this supply closet was so small. And I have no idea where the light is.”
“What?” I glared up at him, my eyes adjusting as my tiger, who was coyly flicking her tail, lent me her keen night vision. “Why are you dragging me into a supply closet in the first place? Have you lost your moondamned mind?”
“Yes,” he growled. “My mate refusing to talk to me has made me lose my moondamned mind, Avery.”
Each time one of them called me their mate, it sent me into a sanity-shredding spiral of pleased preening from my inner beast and barely contained rage from every other part of me.
“I am not your mate,” I whispered. My lips were mere inches from his chin.
“You let me know exactly what I was to you when I saw you and your date at the ball. What was up with that, Aiden? Were you and Heath just going to flip a coin between Phoebe and the hot professor when it came time to choose your bond? Or was that fuckboy behavior just for my benefit?”
He crowded me further, and my back hit the shelves. The neon headlights in his eyes pulsed brighter, and his jaguar floated into the air between us. Not pushing, but caressing, teasing my tiger. She didn’t rise to the bait, but she purred in approval.
“Do you want to talk about what happened, sweetheart?” he asked, his lips next to my ear.
He smelled so good, and it made me monumentally furious.
“Gladly. I know you’re angry. You have every right to be.
But we are Fated, Avery, and that deserves at least one civil conversation.
” His grip tightened on my hips, and he pressed his body flush against mine.
He was hard as a rock in those track pants, and I couldn’t decide if I was pissed he dared or would’ve been more pissed if being pressed up against me didn’t make him hard.
“So, are you going to talk to me, or are you going to continue to act like a brat?”
I squirmed under him. I ached to reach for my sword, but there was no room to maneuver. “Fuck you, Aiden. You broke my heart, and now you have the gall to call me a brat?”
He sucked in a harsh breath and returned his gaze to mine, anguish marring his stupid handsome face. “Fuck, baby. I didn’t know I even had enough of your heart to break. I am sorry, Avery. I was half in love with you—”
“Bullshit,” I spat.
“—but we had reasons, sweetheart. Reasons to seek what we thought was a guarantee of power and stability in our bond, and to do it quickly. You know why we thought that couldn’t be you—”
“I don’t want to hear it—”
“For the love of the fucking Moon, Avery,” he snarled, his lips nearly touching mine, his minty breath hot against my skin. “We. Didn’t. Know. I didn’t know! But now we do. Stop this madness and come back to us.”
I jammed my knee into the steel rod between his legs. He swore and stumbled enough that I was able to slip around him.
He leaned against the shelves, breathing hard and watching me warily. Turquoise pulsed as his jaguar reached for me again.
My beast shoved back, and he winced.
“I know what we are to each other,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “It is excruciating every time I see you, and my beast longs for the ones the Moon, in her infinite wisdom, has decided belong to us. But do you know what I also feel when I see you, Aiden?”
He sighed, defeated. “Tell me.”
“I feel the bile that rose in my throat when you paraded another woman in front of me and called me no one. I feel the terror that consumed me when you left me in wraith-infested woods alone. And I feel the pain of my heart being crushed when the moment that should’ve been the happiest of my life wasn’t—because you’d ruined it. ”
We stared at each other for a long, agonizing moment, me with my hand on the doorknob and him sagging against the shelves filled with cleaning supplies.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “For all of it. Those weeks after spring break are the greatest regret of my life because you are everything to me, Avery. You always have been, even when I acted like the exact opposite was true. That was torture, but this? This is far worse.”
It sure fucking was. My chest was so tight, it was a miracle I could breathe at all. I straightened my posture and lifted my chin, proud of how I managed to keep it from trembling. “Goodbye, Aiden.”
I left the closet and slammed the door behind me.
Our group combat tactics session was held in another large field, its grass trampled to hell. This one was bordered by the lake on one side and the tree line of the thick forest on the other.
All of us were here this time. Gold shirts, black shirts, and the white shirts of the Support Squadron.
Ian unsheathed his katana and twirled it lazily as he looked me up and down. “What’s wrong with your face? How is it that every time I see you, you look more and more pissed off?”
“I don’t know, Ian, what could possibly be driving me up the fucking wall on this fine day?”
Nico elbowed Ian. “Dude, I know she’s your sister, but you can’t say shit like that to a chick.”
“Yeah,” Joon added, “you gotta tell them they always look perfect and chill or else they’ll think you’re calling them crazy, and I wouldn’t call Avery crazy if you paid me a million dollars to do it. I like my guts where they are.”
“Thank you, Joon,” I said, tickled to be considered so threatening even by my friends. “That’s kind of you to say.”
Our array of trainers for this afternoon’s activities stood in the middle of the field, surveying the lot of us with mixed expressions.
There was Cash, of course, his posture rigid and a look on his face that said we all disgusted him.
Trent was here, too, his big shoulders bunched and white hair ruffled as he muttered something to Cash.
The other two members of Cash’s quad, Jared and Alex, both generic brunet Alpha wolves, lingered nearby.
Even after a semester of training, I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Jared speak a word, and Alex communicated more in grunts than fully formed sentences.
Neither of them had ever paid much attention to me, content to let Cash and Trent be the ones to belittle me while they ignored me in favor of their favorite trainee quads.
A few Support Squadron leaders stood near Cash’s quad.
Two of the trainers were younger, maybe in their late twenties, and with them was an older man who could’ve been anywhere from forty to sixty.
It was hard to tell with shifters, since we aged slower than humans, especially those of us in the physical condition required when one fought wraiths for a living.
These three seemed in good spirits and generally happy to be here training the next generation of ordinary shifters destined to plow the lower-level wraiths from the path of their Guardian counterparts.
Finally, there was the man who had to be the one in charge of this exercise.
“Is that Gandalf the White?” Ian whispered.
“I think it’s Zeus,” Brody whispered back.
“Nah, it’s a real buff Santa Claus,” Nico said, a little too loudly.
“Shh,” I hissed at them.
“Greetings, trainees,” the large white-bearded man said, projecting his deep voice across the field.
“I am retired Commander Benjamin Moss. I served in active combat as a Guardian for twenty years, and then I spent twenty more years in command at both the brigade level and the division level throughout our region. I know my shit, and I’m here to help you become well-oiled machines out on that battlefield. ”
I had the vague notion that a brigade was the group of Guardians and Support Squadron forces stationed at a specific post, while a division made up all posts within one of the zones Kit had shown us during class. The “Twelfth Division” would be all the posts within Zone 12 and so on.
“If you’ve made it this far,” Commander Moss went on, “you’ve proven yourself adept against the wraith simulations, both as an individual fighter and in team formation.
You’ve drilled the basics of how to employ both blades and claws against these monsters.
” He paused, his deep-brown eyes hard as he swept his gaze across us all.
“And there are those of you who have survived one year of real patrols under the darkest skies. But there is always more to learn. This session will be first and foremost about teamwork—specifically, teamwork as a Guardian Unit.”
My skin tingled with excitement. A unit was the team of four Guardians and their six-member Support Squadron. Our training against the SWIM hadn’t involved working in that formation, but I was most comfortable working in a mixed shifter group.
“We’ll be doing a number of games and drills designed to hone your tactical skills as a unit.
And of course, we do not have fancy magical constructs out here in these woods.
You will be facing each other, which means you can and will get hurt.
Toughen up, because at the end of the summer, we’ll be tossing you into one of the most active zones on the map. ”
“Hell yeah,” Ian said.
“’Bout time,” Joon agreed.
Mumbles of at least some level of enthusiasm sounded all around.
I shifted my balance from foot to foot, anxious to get started and also pretending that I couldn’t feel the four stares of my not-mates boring into the side of my face. They lingered on the edges of the group like surly princes, too talented and important to mix with the rest of us.
“All right, settle down,” Commander Moss barked.
“Today we’re just going to play a simple round of blades versus beasts so I can get a feel for what I’m working with.
” He nodded at Cash. “Since Rogers knows the lot of you better than I do, he and his quad will divide up the teams and assign roles.” He clapped his massive hands. “Spread out and get started!”
Everyone hopped to. The Guardian trainees who’d arrived as established quads broke away into their groups. Every other group was at least a trio, though there were a few spares like me. The Support Squadron trainers herded the white shirts into groups of six.
“Baxter,” Cash spat, stalking over to where I’d tried to blend in near a quiet trio of black shirts. There was also a second trio of gold shirts nearby, who radiated hostility in my direction. “You’re fucking up my numbers, as usual.”
“Just stick her in the Support Squadron,” one of the gold shirts suggested helpfully, his lip curling as he gave me a passing glance. He was a tall, lanky asshole with black hair and a giant nose. “It’s where she belongs.”
Cash scoffed. “She belongs outside the gates of this fucking camp with a one-way ticket back to the slums of fucking Fulton City. But until Ward Gale gets his head out of his ass, we have to play along with this farce.”
I sighed. “This is getting tiresome, Cash. I earned my place here, same as everyone else.”
Big Nose cackled loudly. “Sure you did. I don’t know who you had to fuck to get let in here to make whatever bullshit feminist statement this is supposed to be—”
A cold, brutal chill swept over my body. Big Nose hissed in surprise, and the others paled and stumbled back a few steps.
The icy force had alarmed and maybe even pained the gold-shirt trio, but it only caressed my skin lovingly before fading away. I jerked a stern look over my shoulder and met the electric yellow gaze of the basilisk peeking through Elijah’s eyes.
His pupils bounced back into a round shape, and then he winked at me.
“Baxter can work with us,” Mark Ellison announced, his voice soft but decisive. He was the leader of the quiet trio from my year and a Prime jaguar like Aiden.
My beast snorted derisively.
Yes, I know, Aiden’s beast is more impressive. Thank you for the reminder.
“How magnanimous of you, Ellison,” Cash drawled.
“Fine.” He turned his slimy leer on me again, and he smiled.
“Your team will be playing the beasts, which means you’re going onto the field with only the clothes on your back and whatever animal you have at your disposal.
And once I find Davidson over here a fourth”—he jerked his head at Big Nose—“they’ll be team blades. Enjoy.”
He sauntered off.
Fuck.
Mark cast a sidelong look my way, a hint of sympathy there. “We’ll do our best. I don’t suppose you might decide to actually shift for this? It’s cool if your beast is on the small side—we can make it work. The Support Squadron guys they assign to us will be in beast form too.”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Right. Well… don’t be a hero.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly, then turned to confer with the rest of his trio.
Davidson and his team procured their blades for this exercise, and they began warming up nearby, making harried, violent slashes through the empty air. Davidson’s preferred weapon appeared to be a mace, which made little sense for killing a wraith and was going to make this exercise extra tricky.
All three of them watched me, grins wide like they couldn’t wait to teach me a lesson.
I’d just have to teach them one first.