Legacy Elite (Luftis Academy #2)

1. Chapter 1

Chapter one

J essica

The sweatshirt isn't mine.

Mine's in a bag somewhere with a hole torn through the shoulder and most of a bear on it, so I'm sitting in Professor Matthias's armchair in my own Trial pants and somebody else's gray sweatshirt.

Many sizes too big. It smells like cedar and coffee.

I take a deep inhale and the scent calms me a little.

My hands won't stop shaking and everything hurts. My shoulder, where the bear opened it up, is bandaged and throbbing in time with my pulse. My hips ache.

My jaw aches.

I shove that away and focus on the actual emergency. I am so hungry it's making me stupid. Hungry like I’m actually contemplating the pinecones on the side table like they might have food-adjacent properties.

They're decorative. I know they're decorative. I'm still thinking about it.

Pickles has no opinion on any of this.

He's sitting on my lap where I put him twenty minutes ago, when we got in and I couldn't make my mouth say anything except can I have Pickles , and Jon grabbed him without asking me a single question about why.

He's warm from the lamp. He's about the length of my hand and he weighs nothing and every so often his tongue comes out to taste the air.

Yesterday I was a girl who couldn't shift. Now half the faculty of Luftis Academy backed away from me because I turn into something scary.

Pickles blinks at me. Slowly. One eye, then the other.

Behind him, taking up most of a small bedroom, is the reason I still can't quite look at this room straight.

I brought my lizard from England in a plastic tub with a sticker of a cartoon shark on the lid, because I told them flat out I wasn't getting on the plane without him, and dorms don't allow pets, and Jon said I'll take him like it was nothing.

Then I came to visit a few weeks later and found — that.

Cork bark and stacked slate and a proper heat gradient with a hide and multiple branches all for Pickles.

My lizard lives better than I do.

The door opens.

Jon comes in on a gust of cold pine air, coat still on, and stops when he sees me. His hands are red from the walk.

"You're still awake."

"I'm too hungry to sleep." I glance at my lap. "Also, Pickles is resting."

Jon looks at Pickles. Pickles looks back.

"He'll stay there until you move," Jon says. He shrugs out of his coat and hangs it over the back of a chair, next to another coat already there, and goes into the kitchen without asking me anything else. Cabinets. A drawer. The scrape of a pot.

He comes back with bread and butter and a wedge of cheese and half a cold roast chicken on a cutting board, sets it on the table beside me, and says, "Eat all of it."

"All of it?"

"Jessica. You finished a Trial, fought an evaluator, were mauled by a bear, and shifted for the first time in your life." He hands me a plate, and lifts Pickles off me with the absent competence of a man who has done it a thousand times. "Eat."

I mean to be polite about it, but I’m too hungry to care much.

The chicken's cold and it is still the best thing I have ever put in my mouth. I take the bird apart with my fingers and eat like I've been at sea, and I get butter on the sleeve, and Jon doesn't comment. He fills the kettle and gets down a mug and I find myself watching him do it.

Halfway through the bread, my brain comes back online.

"Okay," I say. "What happened?"

Jon leans against the counter. "After you shifted back?"

"Yes."

"Faculty secured the clearing. The bear's been moved. Professor Voss wants it examined." His voice stays even. "The upperclassman from your combat station didn't survive."

I stop chewing.

I heard him die. I heard it through the trees, his scream. I know that. It still sits in me like a swallowed stone.

"Okay," I say. It comes out rough.

He waits. "The students who came in after were sent back to the dorms. The Trial results stand. Everyone who finished, finished. And Chancellor Falken is meeting with the senior faculty tonight."

"About the bear?"

"About several things."

I put the plate down.

"And I'm here," I say slowly, "because?"

"Because you're staying here tonight."

"In your house?"

"In the spare room." He says it the way he'd correct a wrong answer in class, no heat in it at all. "The Chancellor doesn't want you alone, or in student housing, until we have a clearer picture."

"A clearer picture of what?" I sit up too fast and my shoulder twinges. "I shifted. That's what I’ve wanted to do all year. I couldn't do it before the Trial, I couldn't do it in the Trial fight, and then I did it. And now I'm being quarantined? Why? Do I have rabies?"

"Shifters don’t get rabies."

"Oh, well that’s good. Then why am I here?"

"Jessica." He waits until I look at him. "Nobody in that clearing had a problem with you shifting."

"Then what—"

"It's what you shifted into."

And that’s it.

I heard them whispering out there. I had ears like a bat and I caught every fragment — impossible, not possible, extinct — and one word underneath it all that I couldn’t even understand why—and haven’t stopped chewing on since.

"What am I?" I ask him.

Jon doesn't pretend not to know what I mean.

"Direwolf," he says.

I wait for that to make sense.

It doesn't. I know the word the way anybody knows the word. Big prehistoric wolf, museum bones, a thing that stopped existing a very long time ago. Not a word for me.

"Okay," I say. "So how is that even possible?"

And Jon hesitates.

"There's history attached to it," he says. "A lot of it. And the Chancellor needs to be part of that conversation."

I stare at him. "That’s all you are going to tell me."

"I'm not going to give you half of it tonight."

"Why not? Half is more than I've got."

"Because half of this is worse than none." He says, no apology. "If I tell you what I think is true and I'm wrong about a detail, it could hurt you. I'd rather make you wait than give you an answer that is totally wrong."

"Wait how long?"

"Less than a day."

"Fantastic."

I shove my hair out of my face and immediately regret the shoulder involved. Because apparently turning into a giant extinct wolf means everyone gets secretive and weird.

"This is exactly what you did when you recruited me to come to Luftis Academy," I say.

Jon looks at me.

"You told me what you knew, admitted there was more you couldn't explain yet, and asked me to wait until orientation."

"Yes."

"I hated that too."

The corner of his mouth moves. Barely.

"I remember."

"And now you're asking me to wait again."

"Not long. Because right now I can tell you that you shifted into a direwolf. I cannot yet tell you what that means with enough certainty to be useful."

Annoyingly, that is almost exactly what he said before.

Across the room, Pickles has been returned to his fancy house and is stalking the far corner of it like a very small, very smug crocodile.

I sit back.

"Fine. Then answer this question for me."

"If I can."

"How big was I?"

Jon looks at me.

Because that's something I don't know. I know what it felt like to shift. I know my eyesight sharpened and the world exploded with things I'd never been able to smell before. Wet stone. Blood. Pine sap gone sticky in the cold.

I know what it felt like to run on four legs. Muscle and speed and a body that finally seemed to know exactly what it was supposed to do.

And I know I wasn't afraid.

That's the part I keep coming back to. There was a rabid bear in front of me, and I wasn't afraid of it. I wasn't afraid of the teeth or the blood or what I'd become.

It was the best thing that has ever happened to me.

But I never saw myself.

"How big?" I ask again.

He looks at me for a full second longer than the question actually needs.

"Large," he says.

I wait. He doesn't add anything.

" Large? That's it?"

"Very large."

"Oh, very large. Great. Really vivid. I can picture it perfectly now."

The corner of his mouth moves again. "You were substantially larger," he says, "than any shifted wolf I have seen at this academy."

Because I felt enormous. I assumed that was just what shifting was, that everybody feels like the world has gotten small. It didn't occur to me that everyone in that clearing was looking at an animal they'd never seen.

"Huh," I say.

Not a good response. It's what I've got.

A knock. Not a polite one.

And Jon barely gets the door open before Sophia comes through it saying my name.

Then all of them are in the room at once, and the whole cottage changes temperature.

Torres gets to me first. He's across the floor before I've untangled myself from the chair, hands on my face, my neck, my ribs, down my arms like he's taking inventory.

"Hey," I manage.

"Shut up." His forehead comes down against mine. He's shaking a little too. "You scared the absolute shit out of me."

"I know."

"I felt all of it. I was three ridges over and I couldn't—" He stops. Breathes. Pulls back to look at my shoulder. "How bad?"

"Twelve stitches."

He isn't looking at me like a museum exhibit. He's looking at me like Jessica , who is bleeding and mouthy and his, and I realize that's what I've been starving for even more than the chicken.

I get my good arm around his neck and breathe him in.

“Move, Torres, some of us have medical training.” Declan crowds in, practically blocking out the room as he frowns at me. “How bad were you hurt? Did they clean it properly? Did you need stitches—”

"They cleaned it."

"Did they give you—"

"Declan. They gave me everything. I've been given so many things."

Freya has taken a position by the fireplace where she can see the whole room, arms folded, saying nothing, watching me. Renzo drops onto Jon's couch.

And Sophia has been vibrating in the middle of the floor this entire time with her hands over her mouth, and she finally can't hold it.

" Holy fuck, Jessica. " It comes out of her like a bottle uncorking. "Do you have any idea how big you were?"

"NO." I throw my hands up, and my shoulder screams, and I don't care. " Nobody will tell me! All I get is the word 'large'!"

"Large—" Sophia makes a strangled sound. " Large. Who said large?"