Chapter 13 Avery #2
Gold shirts and black shirts alike converged into the area at the front of the small clearing where we all waited. A stone-faced Jared and a scowling Trent set about putting them in some kind of order.
I hung back. The longer the rest I had after this morning’s run, the better.
“Not excited for this one?”
Ari the tiger sidled up next to me, a confident and relaxed cat without a concern for what lay ahead on this course.
“Plenty excited,” I replied. “But not in a hurry. I’m pretty sure the course isn’t going anywhere.”
He chuckled, and a whisper of his beast’s interest floated between us.
My tiger hissed her displeasure.
Yes, thank you, I’m aware of your feelings.
“Well, I think you’ll do just fine,” Ari said, beaming an encouraging smile at me. “If I had to guess, I’d wager you’re hiding some kind of feline within that gorgeous body, and we’re excellent climbers.” He placed a hand on my arm and gave it an encouraging squeeze.
Feline aggression filled the air, and instead of provoking my beast, she let out a pleased purr.
Ari’s hand disappeared from my arm. The snap of bone followed.
“Shit,” he hissed, shaking out his hand. “What the fuck, man?”
Aiden loomed, turquoise headlights set to high behind his glasses. “Hands off, Syed.”
I gaped at him. “Did you just break his finger?”
“I did. He has plenty of time to wander away, shift, heal, and come right back.”
Ari growled, and orange fur sprouted along his arms.
Aiden’s jaguar pulsed dominance into the space between them, a clear message to fuck off. He wasn’t as strong as Heath, but he was close. Heath was heavy and sturdy, like an immovable wall, while Aiden’s flavor was sharp and biting.
Ari gritted his teeth.
I stepped between them. “Sorry about him,” I said to Ari. “He’s lost his mind. We’ll be up soon, so you better go take care of that.”
Ari shot Aiden a look of pure venom, then stalked off into some nearby trees, ripping his shirt off as he went.
I turned back to give Aiden a piece of my mind. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He tsk’d and gave me a stern look, like I’d been the one misbehaving, his hazel gaze hot on my skin.
Then he stalked off to join the rest of his quad where they lingered a few yards ahead.
My tiger flicked her tail, thumping it in time to the pounding of my growing headache.
Whistles sounded at intervals, and the line moved as wave after wave of trainees took off onto the course.
Heath and Wyatt were placed in the same heat, and they easily muscled their way over the first walls, up the ropes, and over the cargo net before they disappeared around the bend in the trees.
Aiden got stuck with Hank and Teegan from the Crimson Quad, and his nimble body and superior climbing skills had him well ahead of those two before they ran out of sight.
When it was finally my turn, somehow the quiet and inoffensive quad I’d been lingering near had shuffled back into the line. Instead, Kellan stepped into place on my left. Elijah materialized on my right.
“Oh, look, Baxter,” Trent drawled as he fiddled with the timer app on his tablet.
“A couple of your boyfriends have decided to run the course with you. Do you think opening your legs for the mythics will convince one of them to protect you from being torn apart by an L4 when we ship you out at the end of the summer?”
“Dude,” Kellan said, sounding taken aback. “What the fuck?”
Elijah said nothing, but Trent paled considerably, his knuckles going white around his tablet. The cool touch of the basilisk glided across my skin like a wink before falling away.
Trent shook it off and blew his whistle angrily.
We were off.
First up: an agility run through rows of tires, straight into the seven-foot-tall “low wall.” I easily scaled it by jumping to grab the top and muscling myself over.
Kellan hit the ground two seconds ahead of me, but Elijah had somehow gone up and over the wall with a leap and a hop, like he was jumping a fence.
We ran ahead to the high wall, which we were to scale by pulling ourselves up with one of the three ropes hanging from the top. Hands on the rope and feet planted on the wall, I worked methodically, making it to the platform at the top right behind Kellan.
Elijah, meanwhile, was already there because he’d run halfway up the wall and grabbed the rope near the top before swinging himself over the ledge.
He stood there, grinning at me, apparently not in a hurry. “You’re doing great, Dove.”
I scowled at him. “What the hell is this? You don’t give a shit about training, you hardly ever come to anything, but suddenly you’re a parkour champion?”
He licked his lips, yellow eyes alight. “I have a few talents that may yet surprise you.”
Kellan huffed and nudged me. “Let’s go, Avery. Don’t let Harrow distract you.”
Our way down was via one of the ropes suspended from a steel apparatus ten feet in front of us. Kellan launched himself onto one, slid down, hit the grass below, and jogged ahead to the cargo net.
Elijah waved a hand. “Ladies first.”
I huffed and jumped. The thick rope burned my hands and shins as I slid down. The others would shift to heal, but I would manage with Ian’s burn salve, which I had stashed in my cabin.
Kellan was halfway up the towering cargo net by the time we reached its base.
Resting Dick Face Jared stood nearby, observing.
I jumped onto the net and began my scramble.
Elijah—who, it appeared, was not only a basilisk but also Spiderman—crawled up the net at breakneck speed, his feet hardly touching each rope before he propelled himself up to another.
My grip was starting to tire, but I made it back down the other side of the net in good time, cutting Kellan’s lead on me in half.
Elijah waited for me there, and then we ran into the maze of trees, hot on Kellan’s heels. We dove under a low-lying net and army-crawled through the dirt.
We ran through the trees and vaulted over a series of logs set as high as my chest, passing Cash’s quadmate Alex, who did not look up from his tablet, at his station on the way.
We scaled another tall wall, this time with only nooks, crannies, and rock-climbing holds to aid us.
At the top of the wall, we ran across a narrow platform and then entered a rope bridge, walking heel to toe on a shaky tightrope with only even shakier rope railings to hold onto.
Slipping would mean a fifty-foot fall to the ground.
Elijah reached the end first and jumped from the landing. He hit the in-ground trampoline below, backflipped, and landed in a crouch on the high platform of the next structure we were to climb. Unlike Elijah, I'd be using one of the ropes hanging below it to do that.
Kellan grunted, shook his head, then jumped down.
He bounced off the trampoline and landed in a much more reasonable manner on the grass nearby.
I followed suit, allowing myself to fall as gracefully as possible onto the trampoline and then bouncing a few times until I came to a stop.
I stepped off onto the grass and faced the last rope climb.
My grip was weak now, but I managed to propel myself upward using the power my beast pumped into my legs. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty feet.
I reached the top and crawled through the circular hole, pulling myself onto the platform next to Elijah. Kellan popped through his hole and muscled himself up with just his giant arms.
We stood at the edge and faced down the final obstacle.
Below us was a downward-sloping hill. Three thick ropes, one for each of us, were strung like zip lines from the base of the platform and down the slope for a hundred yards, the other ends suspended from a simple wooden tower about ten feet off the ground.
Beyond the tower, the clusters of black shirts and gold shirts who’d finished the course were just visible through the trees. Commander Moss was there, too, deep in conversation with a few of the gold-shirted quads.
Cash hovered near the base of the tower below us, arms crossed over his chest, usual glare aimed squarely at me, his hate so visceral, I could feel it from a football field’s length away.
The stunt he’d pulled yesterday by forcing me onto the beast team had backfired pretty spectacularly.
Not only had I not revealed my beast, nor had I been gravely injured by refusing to shift, but the whole thing had resulted in three vetted graduates with the same female-hating sentiments as Cash getting tossed out of the program.
Cash had never liked me—not from the moment I’d stepped into the arena last semester and announced I was there to become a Guardian.
He’d done his best to humiliate me, insult me, and endanger me, but by the end of the semester, it’d seemed like he’d just come to a begrudging acceptance of my presence in the program. He’d mostly ignored me.
But there was a deeper hatred lurking in his glares since my arrival at camp. Maybe he’d been holding out hope I’d decide not to spend a chunk of my summer living in a cabin in the woods with a bunch of male shifters, many of whom deeply resented my presence here.
I met his cold stare with one of my own. Tough shit, asshole.
“Ready, Dove?” Elijah asked.
I sighed. “Just go. I’m sure you have some insanely graceful way you’re going to get down there. You don’t need to keep waiting for me.”
He winked, crouched low, and swung himself onto his designated rope.
Using that momentum, he spun around it like a corkscrew and shot all the way down to the end.
He dropped to the grass on light feet, gave Cash a shitty salute, and then leaned casually against the wall of the tower instead of jogging to the finish line like he was supposed to.
Kellan had already climbed onto the rope to my left and was clinging to it with his hands and feet, hanging like a monkey. He began to scoot down the rope, his movements measured and his pace quick. Pausing, he tilted his head back to look at me upside down. “Come on, Baxter!”
I backed up a few steps, ran, and launched myself out and onto the middle rope. I caught it with my weakened grip only a few feet behind where Kellan had progressed on his, and then I swung my feet up to grab on that way, too, content to use Kellan’s method to scoot down to the bottom.
But as I heaved my feet into the air, my rope snapped from where it had been connected to the tower at the bottom, and I dropped.