6. Tate
Tate
Fucking Beak . How dare he treat me like one of his ass-licking little butt boys? My temper threatened to boil over as I stalked back across the quad.
I didn’t need to ask his permission to leave campus. As my father’s heir, I could leave anytime I damned well liked. I swung left toward our dorm, feet crunching over the gravel path.
The cold air stung my exposed skin, but I barely felt it. It was hard to focus on anything with my wolf behaving like a feral beast. Ever since I’d entered Beak’s office, he’d lost his mind, and I had no clue why.
My wolf wasn’t prone to histrionics. Mostly he remained quiet until I let him out to run free in the forest. He rarely reacted strongly to anyone, not even the females we hooked up with.
So why was he reacting so strongly to a scrawny kid who’d arrived from the US? A hybrid shifter, no less. It made no fucking sense.
The thick oak door at the entrance to our apartment hit the wall with a bang when I burst in. Music and gunshots echoed down the stairs, along with the pungent stench of witch weed.
When I entered the living area, I found Tobias, my friend and roommate, lying on the couch with a gaming controller in his hand, yelling at the screen while a smoldering joint burned a hole in the Italian leather seat cushion.
He cursed up a storm when I picked up a jug of water and threw it over him and the joint.
“What the fuck, dude?” Green eyes flashed gold as his wolf came to the fore. I growled and bared my teeth, a reminder that I was the dominant wolf in the room. For a few seconds he refused to back down, which made my wolf quit his tantrum and take notice.
As the son of my father’s enforcer, Tobias was part of our pack, but my wolf didn’t appreciate the challenge to his authority. Nor did I.
“You’ve burned a fucking hole in my couch! Again!”
Tobias grabbed a discarded tee and used it to wipe his wet face. Then the shit had the nerve to roll his eyes at me.
“Chill, dude. You know stress causes heart attacks, right? You gotta loosen up. It’s only a couch.”
I watched as he rummaged under a cushion and retrieved a battered metal tin, but before he could roll another witch-weed joint, I grabbed it and tossed it out the open window.
“For fuck’s sake,” he muttered petulantly but wisely thought better of punching me in the face. That wouldn’t end well for him. The last time he’d tried it, I broke his fucking jaw.
Tobias might be a powerful wolf, but he would never get the better of me. My beast was too dominant, and Tobias was just too fucking lazy to fight.
Ignoring Tobias’s bitching as he switched his gaming console off, I grabbed a beer from the fridge and flopped onto the other couch. I ground my teeth as my wolf continued to whine and howl in my chest.
What’s wrong with you? I asked, and he ignored me.
“Everything okay?” Tobias asked eventually, curiosity getting the better of him. “Surely Hawksley agreed to let you leave campus?”
“I saw Beak, not Hawksley, but of course.” They both knew better than to turn down one of my requests. Neither of them were that stupid.
“Then what’s crawled up your ass and died?”
“My wolf’s throwing a bitch fit about some new student.”
Tobias stared at me, eyes wide. “Um, what?”
“Did I stutter?” Perhaps I needed to let my wolf out for a run. He usually settled after a few hours tearing through the forest in pursuit of rabbits. I waited for him to show some excitement about the idea, but nope. The idiot carried on whining pathetically.
“So your wolf likes a new student? A male student?”
“I believe this is an all-male academy, so yes.” Not that the guy—Ridley?
Riley?—had been especially masculine in appearance.
Definitely male, but also…pretty, with long lashes and pouting lips.
The effect had been jarring honestly. Most male wolf shifters were tall, like me, with plenty of natural muscle.
The new guy was not muscular in the slightest, probably because his human genes diluted the shifter ones.
Male wolves also smelled of musk and outdoorsy scents, whereas this little wolf smelled of burned sugar—sweet enough to make my mouth water.
I grimaced. Hybrid wolves were rare, which wasn’t a bad thing. While I didn’t condone the barbaric old ways, where pack alphas dealt with rogue hybrid offspring, I was not in favor of wolves mating with humans.
Humans were too weak to make suitable mates for a wolf shifter. Worse, wolf shifters had much longer natural lifespans than humans, so a human mate would age far quicker. It was hardly a match made in heaven.
“But I thought you only liked females.” Tobias scrubbed his jaw in confusion. “Is this you coming out of the closet, dude?”
“Who’s coming out of the closet?” Tank walked in and dropped his gym bag on the floor, his chest damp with sweat.
“Tate’s bi now,” Tobias explained. “His wolf has a crush on a new student.” Tank looked at me as if I’d just sprouted horns. I was the least bi-curious wolf in the northern hemisphere. Unlike many of my pack, I only ever fucked females. If it had a dick, I wasn’t interested. Period.
“My wolf doesn’t have a fucking crush on anyone.” I drained my beer and threw the empty bottle at Tobias, who ducked. It flew over his head and hit the TV hanging on the wall, shattering the screen with a loud bang. Oops.
“My wolf’s confused,” I said while shrugging dismissively. “I just need to get laid.”
“Yeah, you do. Maybe it’ll improve your fucking mood,” Tobias grumbled, unhappy about the state of the TV.
Perhaps if he’d shown a little empathy, the TV would still be functional. As it was, I didn’t care. Gaming was his hobby, not mine. I was too busy dealing with my father’s bullshit and keeping my grades up to have hobbies.
Deciding getting laid would solve all my problems, I pulled up the chat thread with Camilla and fired off a message.
Meet me at the old chapel in an hour.
Her reply pinged back immediately.
Yesssss, baby! Can’t wait xxx
A hot hookup with Moonrise Academy’s sluttiest she-wolf would sort my dumb wolf out. And if it didn’t, well, I’d have to pull that new shifter aside and figure out whether they’d used some kind of illegal siren magic potion to fuck with my beast.
It wouldn’t be the first time one of my father’s rivals had tried going after me to get at him.
The new guy better not be working for one of Dad’s enemies.
If he was, then it wouldn’t end well for him.