Chapter 6
The pink protection potion that Professor Bowen gave Nix was safely stored in the pocket of her borrowed blazer as she walked into the cafeteria. Ryker and Bael trailed after her since Thierry had another class to teach.
Inwardly smiling, Nix wondered if any of the girls from yesterday would dare try to pour strawberry milk onto her again—this time, in front of the gruff dragon shifter and knife-happy incubus.
Nix faced more petty and caddy bullying than she remembered in her previous life. Why the difference between the two timelines? She was not sure.
“Sit,” Ryker grunted to her. “I will…feed you.” He nodded at her, kissed her throat like a lovesick vampire, and strode away to stand in line for food for her.
“Where do you typically sit for lunch, Nixie?” Bael asked her, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “I haven’t been in this cafeteria since I accidentally caused an orgy in my first hungry and hormonal year at the academy.”
Nix’s eyebrows shot up. “You caused an orgy?”
“Accidentally.”
“Allegedly accidentally,” Nix replied.
Bael’s face broke out into his crazed, adoring grin. “Have I told you how much I like you? Not just how hard you make my dick, but how I like you.”
“You really can’t say anything romantic without mentioning your penis, huh?”
“It’s my most vital organ.”
“What about your heart?” Nix asked.
“What heart?”
They smiled at each other, like two kids sharing a secret.
“Nix!” Elle’s voice shouted from the left side of the large cafeteria.
Uh, oh. Nix had damage control to do.
“Hey, it’s the girl whose wrist you broke this morning,” Bael said. “Smiling at you, in a cast, like a freak.”
Nix sighed. “Yes.”
“Why do you think she is waving you over with her not-broken wrist like she wants you to sit and eat lunch with her? Because that is not the common reaction to being attacked—even if she does think of herself as your sister.”
Even though every ounce of her being whispered, “Don’t,” Nix needed to talk with Elle because she needed to locate Persius.
The protection spell that sat in Nix’s pocket did nothing if she could not find Persius to “cure” him from Elle’s enchantment.
Nix asked Bael, “If I allow you to sit with me at her table, will you promise not to say anything in front of them?”
“Embarrassed of me?” Bael asked playfully, but there was a palpable edge to his tone. A darkness lingered in his red eyes.
“No. Protective of you,” Nix replied, shocking him. “I don’t want you saying things around them that they could use against you. Don’t let anyone get close enough to pour anything on you or take any of your hair.” Damn Enchanters.
Bael’s lips screwed into a sour expression. “What the fuck kind of people do you sit with, Nixie?”
Nix cocked her head to the side, and she turned to walk to Elle’s rectangular, dark wood lunch table. Other cygnus shifters sat around as usual.
Elle was the daughter of the clan leader and shifter council president, after all. She and her brother were basically royalty. In the past, Nix had always felt so incredibly lucky that the Oadess family took Nix under their wing.
Nix walked into an active conversation. About her.
“You took her in, she broke your wrist, and she seduced your brother and now the other alphas in this school,” a girl said to Elle. “What an ungrateful slut.”
Nix blew out a breath and summoned a sense of calm as she rocked on her feet, right in front of where Elle had motioned for her to come join them. Also, “seduced” Elle’s brother, Adar? Um, no. Never had that happened.
“Hey, don’t say that stuff,” Elle scolded the girl and feigned an expression of pity for Nix. “Nix didn’t mean to hurt me. You know how delicate and demure my body is. She didn’t mean to break my wrist.”
“Elle, you’re being too nice,” the girl said, glaring at Nix. “She deserves her wrists broken. See how she likes it.” The spiteful female cygnus shifter looked right at Nix and added, “Bet your alphas would disappear if you couldn’t offer hourly handjobs anymore.”
Elle acted scandalized as she scolded the girl. “Stop it! Nix is my friend. Please, Nix, sit next to me.”
Nix slowly followed the direction. She sat at the table, but she left extra room between herself and Elle.
Bael stood back several feet, watching the interaction carefully. Nix was rather impressed that he had listened to her and not spoken or jumped in when Nix was called an “ungrateful slut.”
“So, Elle, uh, sorry about this morning. I have, uh, no idea how I hurt you like that. You know I’m not very strong,” Nix told her, lying through her teeth.
What Nix really wanted to say was: “Where is Persius, and why did you bespell him to not recognize his fated mate?”
“I wanted to apologize to Persius as well. Is he coming to lunch today?”
“No, he was a bit…horrified from this morning. Didn’t feel very well, so he skipped classes today.”
He “didn’t feel well,” huh? Nix palmed the potion in her blazer. “When will I see him again? To apologize?”
“You don’t have to apologize to him. And don’t worry, you are still my best friend.”
Am I? Really?
Elle leaned over to whisper to Nix, “You were clearly having some weird mental breakdown from your potion withdrawal.” Elle reached into her pocket and took out a vial of illusion potion.
The same potion that had started all of this. The potion the Oadess family gave her since childhood, so she would look like a cygnus shifter like the others. Yet, it had shifter poison in it…
Elle nudged the vial over to Nix. Nix fought the temptation to shove it down Elle’s throat. “I would say to take it, but…” Elle’s gaze flicked to Nix’s red hair. “I think people have noticed now.”
“I still feel bad about this morning,” Nix said. “I want to apologize to Persius, face to face.” So I can pour the protection potion on his skin.
From behind Nix, Bael’s eyebrows were high and arched on his forehead as he witnessed Nix “playing nice.” His calculated red eyes took in her every move and every word, analyzing it for her endgame goal.
She was grateful that he did not say anything in front of the cygni group, who may or may not have vandalized her room and set it on fire.
Then again, she had burst into flames in class. What if she had started the fire in her sleep? But if she had accidentally started the fire, her nightgown would have turned to ash like her school uniform… Was she now gaslighting herself?
“I hear you’re a dragon shifter, Ugly Fuckling,” another girl at the table said. “Is that true? You’ve been lying to everyone, parading around and pretending to be a cygnus, to be one of us, for years?”
Nix ground her teeth at that. “I wasn’t the liar.”
Elle flinched, but her expression soothed into one of innocent confusion. “The rumors about Nix being a dragon shifter cannot be true,” she lied so easily. “How silly. Just because she dyed her hair red?”
“Not just her hair,” another girl at the table said. “Her whole face is different. Did you get plastic surgery like the mortals?”
“Yeah, for the Ugly Fuckling you look…not that bad,” the girl sitting on the other side of Elle told Nix.
“What a compliment,” Nix commented dryly.
“Truly such kind praise,” Sarasa, the one cygnus shifter Nix actually liked, rolled her eyes and shot Nix an amused smile that said, “Can you believe these bitches?”
“I heard you breathed fire onto Atticus Graeves,” another cygnus at the table said. “So, you are a dragon shifter. Only dragons breathe fire.”
“That’s just a false rumor,” Elle stressed, flinging her hand in the air as if to wave away the conversation from such a topic. “Nix is a cygnus, like us.”
“No,” Nix said. “I’m not.”
Elle’s vibrant blue eyes widened at how Nix did not follow her lead. She scoffed as her cheeks pinkened. “Nix.”
“Why lie anymore?” Nix asked, genuinely curious. “What’s the point?”
Elle opened her mouth but seemed at a loss for words.
“I am a dragon shifter.”
The women at the table stiffened and tensed at her admission. Bael stepped forward and stood directly behind Nix.
Elle’s mouth opened and formed a dramatic O when she saw the academy’s infamous sex demon behind Nix. Nix had never even known Bael existed in the past, but Elle knew everyone at the academy.
Nix used to tease her and say Elle must have a binder with notes on every student. Did she? Did she know everyone because her father was behind the student disappearances?
“Move,” Bael muttered to a cygnus shifter, so he could sit next to Nix. Apparently, he had gotten impatient just standing there.
The girl squealed in excited fear and scooted as far away as possible, making room for him.
Bael sat backwards, back of his elbows on the table, and leisurely leaned his back into the wood. This way, he faced only Nix. He could turn his head and see Elle as well, if he wanted to, but he stared only at Nix. Silently and intensely. With unadulterated lust in his eyes.
Sigh.
“You could have hurt Atticus,” a girl whined about Atticus Graeves and how Nix had “breathed fire” onto him.
“Only if I were lucky,” Nix replied evenly.
“Ayyy, badass bitch,” Sarasa cheered her on. The others gaped at Sarasa, but she just shrugged and said, “Atticus Graeves is an asshole.”
“Excuse me.” One of the girls raised her hand as if the lunch table were a classroom or a council meeting with voting members. “But I don’t feel comfortable eating lunch with a dragon shifter who is prone to violent rampages—”
“Rampages?” Nix echoed.
“You broke Elle’s wrist. Elle—the only one who actually likes you here.”
“I like Nix,” Sarasa muttered.
Thank you, Sarasa, Nix thought.
“Think of what she’d do to us,” the girl at the table spread fear and uncertainty into the others.
The other cygnus females bit their lips and looked nervously at Nix. Even when Nix was trapped in a cage and experimented on, in this moment, she had never felt more studied and examined.
“You all have called me Ugly Fuckling for years, and I’ve never fought back,” Nix reminded them. “You think just because you know now that I am a dragon shifter, that somehow changes me?”
One of the girls stated, “Dragons are thoughtless, savage, abhorrent threats to innocent lives—”
Ryker’s arms leaned in front of Nix’s vision as he lowered a food-filled lunch tray down for his mate.
Having heard the hurtful generalizations about dragons, Ryker dropped the tray a little too loudly, and every cygnus shifter at the table stopped breathing.