Chapter 16 Avery #2
“So, this is the norm for the weekend that falls after curfew?” Ian asked the table, his blue eyes alight as he looked around the crowded bar. “A little silly if you ask me. It’s not like people who live behind the warded walls of the shifter towns don’t go out and about even under a New Moon.”
A dozen or so more people wandered through the door, and I recognized them from the avian contingent at school. They were bright-eyed, dressed to kill, and laughing loudly amongst themselves.
“It’s tradition,” Allen said to Ian with a gregarious shrug. “It’s taken generations to perfect the anti-wraith wards, so I imagine back in the day, there was reason to celebrate just being alive after a New Moon.”
“And we are celebrating all of you being alive,” Mallory said, pointing at me with her glass. “Since you are trying to make a career out of being outside the wards during curfew.”
Ian snorted. “The accolades are unnecessary. They aren’t letting us go on patrol until August, at the end of camp. So fucking lame.”
It was, but the July patrols had apparently been a bust, so I couldn’t be mad that we hadn’t been allowed out.
The gold shirt trainees, having already had a year of experience in the field, had been shipped off to Zone 12, which Kit informed us had been super active for June.
The report was that a few swarmers had strayed into the zone, and Kellan’s quad had killed a pair of small Rippers, but that had been it. Zone 12—marked yellow for July.
Kellan had bitched endlessly about how boring it’d been at breakfast yesterday morning.
Kit told us that it’d been that way across the entire region—quiet, hardly any wraith sightings at all. Chalk it up to things being more erratic than normal in a lunar eclipse year, move on, and be ready for the worst next time.
If I was being super honest with myself, our being forced to train another month before going out into the field was a good thing.
Our quintet formation was a work in progress and hadn’t flowed as easily as we’d all expected, used to being the best on the field as we were.
The few times we’d gone all out against other quads in training, whether in human or beast form, our attack had been sluggish, hampered somehow by the quintet in a way I’d never felt in a quad.
It would just take some time to adjust, and we had until the August patrol to get our shit together.
“Cash is a bigger annoyance than the wraiths are at this point,” I said with a wry smile.
Ian laughed. “The look on his face every time you slice up one of his prized Prime trainees. It never gets old.”
“He can’t ignore how badass you are forever, Avery,” Mallory said, sticking her tiny nose in the air. “Isn’t it strange how Prime males, the ones at the very top of our society, are the most threatened by powerful females?”
I didn’t think it was strange at all, but I was a whole lot more cynical and jaded than Mal.
“It is a bit silly,” Allen agreed. “A guy who is supposedly the best Guardian in his year has a problem with a competent female fighter, but I, merely an ordinary wolf, think it’s awesome we finally have a maybe-Prime female wandering the campus.
” He winked at me, and I returned it with a mysterious smile.
“Joon thinks you’re totally awesome too,” Allen went on, flapping a hand in Joon’s general direction.
At the moment, he had his tongue down his lady’s throat. “And so do Brody and Nico, obviously.”
I nodded absently, my attention snagging on one of the girls from the avian group. She was gorgeous—willowy figure, long pink hair, a tiny diamond stud in her nose, and dozens of bracelets adorning her slender wrists.
And she was staring at Elijah like she knew what his cock tasted like.
My beast rose and prowled her cage.
“Damn, Aves,” Ian said, shivering dramatically. “What’s got your fur in a twist?”
“Nothing.” I flashed my tiger the image of Elijah walking into our shared class last semester and ignoring the shit out of me.
She returned the memory of a large, violent, terrifying serpent monster attempting to destroy a griffin for touching me and then his naked human body kneeling at my feet afterward.
Quit that, or I’m never letting you out again.
Elijah turned around in his seat at the bar and pinned me with his yellow gaze, a dark brow raised in question. My tiger’s agitation must have called to the basilisk.
Inconvenient.
I should’ve ignored him, but instead I looked pointedly at the beautiful pink-haired girl still staring at Elijah with bedroom eyes. He glanced her way, and then his mischievous smile fell away, replaced with a rigid jaw and the barest hint of guilt.
The tiger let out a menacing growl.
I cracked my neck. Nope, we are having a nice time with our friends.
Another boisterous group of Proteus students trickled in through the front doors, interrupting my fight with my beast.
“Oh, gross,” Mallory said. “It’s Callista and her flock of harpies.”
It sure was. A gaggle of latent princesses from the rising senior class flounced toward the bar, a few burly guys in tow.
Callista wore a skin-tight black bandage dress that did amazing things for her ass, and she’d pulled her dark hair into a sleek ponytail.
She had on her usual war paint—smoky eyes and deep maroon lipstick.
Her friends crowded the bar, but she homed in on Wyatt immediately, slinking in his direction, a sexy gazelle offering a tantalizing meal to a starving bear.
Wyatt was still lounging in his chair next to Heath, a lazy prince on his throne, when Callista appeared next to him. His smirk slid right off his face, replaced by the same damn guilty look Elijah had worn.
The image of the two of them at the ball assaulted me yet again.
Callista, humping Wyatt’s thigh.
Wyatt’s hands all over her body.
Her lips on his skin.
His crazed smile during it all.
It took everything I had to keep the fur from blossoming on my skin.
I shoved my chair away from the table and got to my feet. “I’ll be right back,” I announced. “I’m just going to get some air.”
Mallory patted my hand but didn’t argue. The whole table could probably feel the beast aggression leaking from my pores.
I shoved through the door and stalked past the bouncer into the large parking lot that separated the building from the street.
The warm night air chased away the goose bumps that’d appeared on my skin minutes earlier, which had definitely been a reaction to the bar’s air conditioning and not the thought of Wyatt and Elijah fucking other girls.
My destination was my RAV-4, parked near the street, where I intended to listen to exactly two Celine Dion songs to recenter myself and my beast before going back inside.
The tiger needed to be reminded once again that we didn’t care who any of the assholes the Moon had tried to force on us had fucked once upon a time.
The fact that I still had to fight these feelings, even after a month of functioning behind carefully constructed walls, made me want to stand here in the middle of the parking lot and scream for a minute straight.
I was ten yards from my car when a bright red BMW came roaring down the street and then whipped a high-speed turn into the parking lot. Headlights lit me up, and I darted out of the way, smashing myself up against the back of a Jeep.
The driver laid on the horn as the car screeched to a stop in front of me, and then a piercing squeal erupted from the car’s passenger window.
“It’s Avery!”
“By the Moon’s tits, C,” said another female voice, this one a huskier rasp, “that almost shattered my eardrum.”
I shoved off the Jeep, strode to the car, and bent down to peer through the open passenger window. “Clara?”