Chapter fourteen
Jessica
I am a terrible lizard mother, and I realize it in the middle of Shifter Ethics.
It just hits me. It's been weeks since orientation, weeks of classes and Merit Marks and princes and almost-kisses, and in all that time I have not once gone to see Pickles.
He's been living down at the faculty cottages this whole time and I've been so swept up in becoming a wolf that I forgot about the only family member I actually brought with me. The guilt is immediate and enormous.
So after my last class I walk down to the faculty side of campus, which turns out to be its own quiet little world — the professors' cottages are tucked into the trees, older and softer than the student dorms, with actual gardens and woodsmoke and none of the frantic Merit-fever energy that hangs over everything up the hill.
It's peaceful in a way that makes my shoulders come down.
I find the one with Jon's name on a small brass plate and knock.
There's a pause. Then the door opens, and for once, Professor Matthias doesn't look composed.
His sleeves are rolled up, there are reading glasses shoved up into his hair, and he's holding a book with one finger keeping his place, and he blinks at me with the unguarded surprise of a man who was very much not expecting company.
It's the first time I've seen him look anything other than completely in control since the day he shifted into a wolf in front of me, and it's oddly reassuring to learn he owns a "caught off guard" setting.
"Jessica," he says. "I— this is a surprise. I don't think students usually—"
"I need to see Pickles," I say, and breeze right past him into the cottage.
Behind me I hear him close the door, and when I glance back he's still standing there with his book and his glasses in his hair, looking faintly like he's lost control of his own afternoon. "By all means," he says, to the room I'm already inside. "Come in."
"Pickles?" I call, scanning the place — which is warm and lived-in and full of books, exactly the cottage I'd have designed for him if you'd asked me. "Pickles, it's me, I know I'm a disgrace, I've come to grovel—"
I hear scratching. I follow it. And I stop dead.
Because Pickles has upgraded.
The enclosure taking up half the far wall is enormous — easily ten times the size of the sad little tank I left him in back in England.
It's custom-built, clearly, with real branches and climbing shelves and multiple heat lamps throwing warm pools of light, hiding caves, a water feature, little enrichment toys, and a food dish containing what are visibly nicer bugs than I have ever provided in my life.
And in the middle of it, draped across a heated rock like a tiny reptilian emperor, is Pickles — fatter, glossier, and radiating the smug contentment of a creature who has clearly upgraded his entire quality of life since we parted.
"Oh my gosh." I turn around, delighted, overwhelmed, and completely on instinct I throw my arms around Jon in a hug. "Thank you, thank you, I've been so worried about him and you built him a whole — you built him a palace, you—"
Jon goes completely rigid.
I feel it happen — the way he stops breathing, the way every muscle in him locks — and then he steps back, quick and clean, breaking the hug like he can't let happen, one careful stride between us.
I freeze.
"Oh." I drop my arms. My face goes hot. "Sorry.
Sorry, that was — I overstepped, I do that, I'm a hugger, I forget not everyone—" I wave a hand, mortified, and immediately decide I misread the whole thing.
Obviously. He's a professor, I'm a student, and I just tackled him in his own home.
"Ignore me. I'm just really happy about the lizard. "
"It's fine," he says, but his voice is a little rough, and he clears his throat.
And it's only then, standing this close in the aftermath, that I actually notice him—notice that he's tall, taller than I realized, that his shoulders are broad enough to fill the space between us, that up close he's all solid muscle and radiating heat—
I look away. Fast. Down at Pickles, who blinks at me with the lofty disinterest of a creature who has upgraded to a better life and does not particularly miss his old one.
"He likes the top branch best," Jon says, changing the subject with the smooth relief of a man throwing a life raft to us both. "In the evenings. He climbs up there and watches me grade papers. I've come to suspect he's judging my marking curve."
"He judges everyone," I say. "It's his entire personality." I crouch down by the glass and Pickles, traitor that he is, ambles over to me at last, and I feel absurdly emotional about it. "You spoiled him rotten."
"You said shared custody," Jon says mildly, and I turn to find the corner of his mouth lifting. "Back at the coffee shop. I believe I said I'd made no promises because I hadn't met him yet." He glances at the palace enclosure. "I've met him. I lost the negotiation immediately."
I laugh — a real one, surprised out of me — because he remembered, and because it's the driest possible way to admit he adores my lizard.
He makes tea, because apparently that's a thing that's happening now, and I settle into an armchair by the fire with Pickles transferred into my lap where he sits with the contentment of a tiny warm rock, and it's so easy, so unexpectedly comfortable, that I finally ask the thing I've been chewing on for three weeks.
"Can I ask you something? Actual question, not lizard-related."
Jon sits across from me, tea in hand. "Always."
"What’s everyone's deal with the princes?
My first morning, they walked into breakfast and .
. . the whole room stood up, like — nobody said anything, they just all rose, and then everyone lost their minds when I said good morning to them.
" I shake my head. "And it keeps happening.
People act so strange around them. What is that? "
Jon studies me for a long moment over his tea. Then, instead of answering, he asks, "What did you feel? When they walked in."
I blink. "...Hungry? It was breakfast."
He laughs — surprised into it, warm. "No. When they entered. The three of them."
I think about it, genuinely. "Um. That they were annoyingly attractive. And that everyone around me had suddenly forgotten how to breathe." I shrug. "That's kind of it. Why?"
Jon sets his cup down.
"Powerful wolves project dominance," he says.
"It isn't a choice they make. It radiates off them, especially wolves born to strong bloodlines, wolves like the three of them — future alphas, some of the most dominant wolves of their generation.
And other wolves respond to it instinctively.
Their heart rate climbs. Their eyes drop.
They stand, they still, they give space, they defer — not because anyone commanded it, but because the wolf underneath the person recognizes something higher-ranking and answers before the human mind ever weighs in.
" He watches me carefully. "That's what you saw at breakfast. Three hundred people, having a physical reaction to dominance they couldn't consciously stop.
Standing without deciding to. Lowering their eyes.
It's one of the deepest instincts our kind has. "
I sit with that, running Pickles's little foot absently between my fingers.
"Okay," I say slowly. "So. If everyone in the room felt that. Some biological, can't-help-it, drop-your-eyes-and-stand-up thing." I look up at him. "Why didn't I feel any of it?"
And for a moment, Professor Jon Matthias — who has an answer for everything, who runs a lecture hall like a symphony — doesn't have one.
"I don't know," he admits, quietly.
"Wait, really?"
“Really.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, his expression caught somewhere between fascination and caution.
"Every wolf feels dominance. Latent, trained, newborn to it — every single one.
It's not a skill you learn, it's a thing you are.
And you stood in a room with three of the most dominant wolves at this academy, and you looked one of them in the eye, and you told him to try saying thank you.
" A pause. "By every rule I understand, that should not be possible.
You should not have been able to do it. Your body should have stopped you before your mouth got the chance. "
"So I'm broken," I say. I mean it as a joke. Mostly.
"No." He says it immediately, firmly, and there's a protectiveness under it that I don't quite know what to do with. Then he softens. "If anything — I think you might be something we don't have a word for yet. I think you're unique."
I make a face. "See, I was really hoping for a more superpower-type answer. 'You're immune to bossy men' is not going to look great on a résumé."
That gets a laugh out of him, a real one, and for a second the careful professor and the wary wolf both step aside and there's just a man laughing in his cottage with a lizard between us.
Then he sobers. "For now — don't worry about it.
Truly. Go to your classes, earn your marks, live your life.
But observe. Pay attention to what you feel and what you don't." He holds my eyes, and his voice drops.
"And if you notice anything unusual — anything you can't explain, anything strange happening to you — I want you to tell me.
Immediately. Not a friend, not a classmate. Me."
There's a weight to it that I don't fully understand, and I almost ask — almost push, because that's who I am — but Pickles chooses that exact moment to make a break for freedom off my lap, and I lunge to catch him, and the moment breaks.
"I promise," I say, wrestling my escaping lizard back into two hands. "Anything weird, you're the first to know. You're clearly the person for weird — you built a reptile a palace."
"I maintain that was self-defense," Jon says, standing to help me corral the tiny fugitive back toward his enclosure. "He looked at me. You've seen how he looks at people."
"Judgmentally."
"Devastatingly."
And I'm laughing again, both of us bent over an escaped lizard in the firelight, and I think — right up until I catch him going still and careful again the second our hands nearly touch on the enclosure latch, and stepping back just a fraction too fast — that I could get used to a professor who takes my questions seriously and spoils my lizard rotten.
I file that one away too. There's a lot to file, lately.