Chapter 24 Avery
AVERY
Igave my sword a few hard shakes, and the blood lingering on the blade spattered on the nearby grass.
The members of a moderately talented gold-shirted quad limped away from us, cursing and arguing with each other, two in human form, the others a panther and a rather terrifying gorilla.
Commander Moss barked orders from somewhere in the distance, hidden by the thick foliage.
He was wandering around the woods, observing today’s combat tactics session.
We’d been assigned a game of Capture the Flag, black versus gold, and my quintet had been working our way into enemy territory for over an hour.
“Nice work, Killer,” Heath said, sheathing his saber on his back. “That gorilla underestimated your strength and the reach of your little blade.”
“He did,” I agreed. “You’d think after over a month of this, they’d have learned.”
“They will, sweetheart,” Aiden said, giving me an indulgent smile that got my beast’s tail flicking, and then he turned to frown at Heath. “We’re still clunky, though. We should’ve eliminated that group in half the time it took us.”
Wyatt, a bear, grunted in agreement.
“I suggest we come up with a new plan, then,” Elijah hollered down at us.
He’d climbed the tallest tree in the vicinity like the dexterous monkey he was to scope out the rest of our path toward the enemy flag.
“Because the flag is flying from the top of an old hunting cabin a hundred yards ahead, guarded by one last quad.”
“Is it Crimson?” Heath shouted up at him.
“No, Yang. Crimson was probably sent to attack our base like we were nominated to attack theirs.”
The Yang Quad were all Prime leopards. Not the biggest cats in camp—that would be Aiden, Cash, and, unbeknownst to everyone, me—but they were vicious fighters and slightly insane.
“Are they all in beast form?” Aiden yelled up the tree.
“Yes.”
Heath swore. “Team Gold is not as dumb as we’d hoped.”
Elijah came down from his perch, swinging on branches and jumping from limb to limb before he dropped and landed on light feet. He winked at me, and I smothered a grin.
I’d… had fun today.
It wasn’t that I’d had zero fun since I’d come to camp. There’d been plenty of moments with Ian and the Support Squadron guys, and swinging my swords in the heat of battle, even when it was just practice, was always fun for me.
But I always came crashing back down when reality intruded. I spent most of my time here fighting my beast and locking away every errant emotion that plagued me.
Today I stopped fighting.
And so far, today had been a good day.
Heath studied the group of us, his shapely arms folded across his chest, his blond brows furrowed. “It’s our formation,” he said after a moment.
“What?” Aiden asked.
“Our formation,” he said again. “When Ward assigned Avery to us, we decided to keep the normal square of the Guardian Unit and just stick her in the middle. I didn’t see the need to make drastic changes to what’s worked for the Guardians for decades, and we all felt that it made sense that the four of us who were going to be shifting at will to be on the edges, with our full-time blade wielder in the center. ”
Aiden pursed his lips. “You want to move Avery out of the center.”
Wyatt the bear growled his disagreement.
Elijah only studied Heath with a quiet, unsettling intensity.
I shrugged. “I don’t have a problem with where you put me, Heath. It made sense to me at the time.”
“That’s the thing, Killer. It might’ve made sense with any other trainee assigned to us with the instructions to make it work with a quintet.
But anyone else is not our Fated.” He shook his head, and his frown said he was reluctant to admit what came out of his mouth next. “I think we’re hampering you.”
“You do?”
And you care?
“Yes. Not on purpose, but it’s natural that we’re going to want to protect our mate from all sides. That’s why we’re sluggish. We’ve all done our best over the past month to treat you like another soldier at our side, but that’s just not reality. We’re constraining you, and we can’t have that.”
“Heath,” Aiden growled. “I don’t like this.”
Wyatt the bear grunted in agreement.
“I don’t like it either,” Heath snapped at his brother.
“You think my wolf wants to do anything except stand between his mate and anything that remotely smells like danger?” He looked at me, and my cheeks heated under his assessing gaze.
It was somehow the look of both a commander at his soldier and an Alpha at his mate.
“But I can’t do that. Avery’s as good of a fighter as anyone in our quad, and someday, hopefully very soon, she’ll be shifting into her beast just as freely as the rest of us. ”
My heart thudded against my rib cage, and my beast released a savage growl of triumph within me. That was my dream, the ability to shift without worry, and Heath hadn’t forgotten that.
Aiden sighed. “You’re right. Her beast will be such an asset in the field. It frustrates the absolute shit out of me that we can’t just run her right at the Yangs and watch them lose their minds.”
“And securing Avery’s ability to shift without fear for her safety is why we’re all here, isn’t it?” Elijah added in his silky soft tenor. “We’re going to be the most powerful and feared Guardian quintet in history, such that no one would ever dream of crossing any one of us, especially our mate.”
I could only stand there in stunned silence.
Wyatt nudged my hand, and I scratched his ear while I attempted to gather my thoughts and also not cry.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll, um…. I’ll take whatever position in our formation that you decide works best, Heath.”
He smiled at me, and it was tender and fond. “How about the point of the spear, Killer? Let’s try a pentagon formation with you at the front.”
Aiden blew out a breath, Wyatt growled, and even Elijah rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck.
But none of them protested.
Adrenaline raced through my body. I marched forward, twirling my blade in my hand as I went. “Sounds good to me.”
With that, we began our attack on the gold team base. Wyatt and Heath lined up behind me, with Aiden and Elijah behind them. We always kept our shape fluid, but as we made our way stealthily through the trees, I realized immediately that Heath was right.
I had been constrained. Now, I was in the lead and could move however I needed, with the might of my quintet at my back. This already felt easier.
We approached the hunting cabin Elijah had spotted, situated on a small hill with a gold flag flying from its roof. Heath’s wolf pulsed a command to slow. We took cover in the thick brush, and Elijah activated his beast’s vision, which was far more powerful than the average binoculars.
“There’s only one clear path to the cabin, and the leopards are covering it four across,” he reported.
Heath nodded. “We’ll hit them head-on. They’ll be expecting Aiden to shift, but it’s easier to draw blood with blades than claws. Elijah, peel off and get on that roof.”
I drew my second sword from the sheath on my back and waited.
Heath’s wolf punched us with another command, and then we bolted from the trees. Elijah disappeared, and the rest of us ran straight at the leopards.
Four huge cats snarled in unison. Three of them were the light orange of African leopards with dark brown rosettes, while the fourth was a thicker-coated white snow leopard. Their frames were only slightly smaller than Aiden’s jaguar, but they were much lighter in weight.
The problem was that they were crazy.
The first leopard charged me at the head of our group. No hesitation, no finesse, he just leapt for me, soaring through the air and hissing up a storm.
Instead of waiting for my team to engage and then reacting to the fight as the center, I moved without thought, muscle memory and years of honed instinct in the driver’s seat.
I ducked under the flying leopard and rammed both swords straight up into his belly. He yelped and fell to the ground.
“One down!” I shouted. Those were the rules—if your opponent drew blood, you were out of the game.
Wyatt had tackled the second leopard out of the air as it, too, had flown at my head. He held it down with his giant body, grinning his bear teeth at the cat. I sliced the leopard across the shoulder.
“Two down!” I yelled.
“Three!” Aiden shouted back, yanking his saber from the snow leopard’s flank.
Wyatt released his leopard and shot across the grass, faster than an enormous bear had any business being.
He aimed right for the last leopard, who was playing cat and mouse with an irritated Heath twenty-five yards away.
Snarling, leaping, ducking, hissing, swatting—all while Heath brandished his sword and invited the cat to stop fucking around.
Sensing what was coming, Heath grinned, ducked, and rolled away as Wyatt hit the leopard like a wrecking ball. Aiden arrived to stab the leopard before he’d even registered that there was a bear on top of him.
The rest of the leopards limped off to the side, defeated. They’d hang out and heal before shifting back to their human forms.
Elijah whistled.
I craned my neck to take in the cabin at the top of the hill. Elijah sat on the roof, waving the gold flag.
I laughed and waved back. We’d won the game for Team Black.
Suddenly, Elijah’s smug smile vanished and his eyes widened in horror.
Two Alpha wolves leapt from the thick foliage near the base of the hill and ran straight at me.
While the others were still standing by the final “kill,” twenty-five yards away.
I dodged a snap of the first wolf’s jaws, ducking and rolling away.
I surged to my feet and ripped my swords from their sheaths just in time to meet both wolves head-on.
I struck as fast as I could move, spinning in a circle and slicing my blades one after the other again and again as my tiger shot speed and strength into my limbs.
I opened deep gashes on each wolf’s head, neck, or shoulders, and still they didn’t relent.