7. Riley
Riley
Apiercing alarm dragged me from the best sleep I’d had in ages. After unpacking my pathetically small bag the previous night, I’d taken a quick shower in the adjoining bathroom and then fallen into bed.
Home was several hours behind, which had my body clock all out of whack, but after a long flight followed by a train ride, I had been exhausted. My wolf’s uncharacteristic whining hadn’t helped.
I focused inward and saw she’d curled up and was currently ignoring me. Well fine. That was her usual behavior. Last night’s shenanigans must have been a temporary aberration.
Eventually the alarm stopped, by which point I was wide awake. Fuck my life. If the school expected us to crawl out of bed at seven a.m. every morning, I was dead. Like, deceased.
I almost never got up before ten. Midday on a weekend. Sometimes later. Mornings and I were not friends. Early mornings were for losers, and I much preferred being out and about at night.
Still, I didn’t plan on being here for long, so a few early mornings wouldn’t kill me.
Someone called Miss Markham had emailed me a class schedule. I scanned the list of classes, thrilled to see I’d be studying shifter politics and a history of shifting magicals, as well as taking Shifter Biology 101 and Modern Relationships and Sex Ed.
Grim.
The only classes that sounded like fun were the physical ones. Unarmed Combat was right up my street, and Fitness and Conditioning would help me stay in shape.
Miss Markham had also attached a student handbook, which I spent way too much time reading. Not because it was interesting—far from it—but because I needed to know which rules not to break to avoid drawing attention to myself.
Shifting in class was banned, apparently, unless authorized by a faculty member. And badly injuring another student was also frowned upon.
It wasn’t until a second alarm went off that I realized I was in danger of missing my first class, Living and Thriving Among Humans.
I snorted as I hurriedly pulled on some sweatpants and a baggy sweatshirt.
Having grown up among humans, there was very little I didn’t already know about living among them.
A quick glance in the mirror told me the glamour was still working as expected. My short hair was a spiky mess but there wasn’t time to fix it, so I grabbed my backpack and left my room.
The dorm building appeared empty when I arrived downstairs. I spotted a few empty coffee cups and a half-eaten pastry on the kitchen counter and wished I’d thought to check out the breakfast options sooner.
My stomach grumbled loudly. It had been a very long time since my last meal, and that had been little more than a small portion of pasta with tomato sauce on the plane. I desperately needed something more substantial. A decent steak would do it. Or a rack of ribs.
My wolf agreed.
The campus map said my class was in a stone extension to the rear of the admin building where I’d met Mr. Beak last night.
The size of the campus took me by surprise when I stepped outside. I hadn’t appreciated the scale of the place when I arrived.
My jaw dropped as my gaze took in the grandeur of the buildings. While the dorms were modern in appearance, the central structure looked centuries older.
Gargoyles squatted on ledges, glowering down at me as I jogged past one of the other dorms. They gave me the creeps, but according to the map, this pathway would get me where I needed to be faster.
Only I hadn’t counted on meeting a trio of braindead assholes along the way.
Just as I rounded a corner, a hulking male with a buzz cut stepped into my path.
He cracked his knuckles, stubbed out a witch-weed joint on the wall, and leered at me.
The musky stench told me this was a wolf shifter, while his two friends were feline shifters, possibly mountain lions. It was difficult to tell.
“Stop, loser. You come this way and there’s a tax to pay.”
I tried to skirt around him, but his cat companion grabbed my wrist hard enough to leave bruises.
Fuck my life. I didn’t want to cause a scene so soon, but if these idiots thought I was an easy mark, they were mistaken.
“What’s your name, newbie?”
“Donald Duck, now let me go. I’m late.”
The wolf shifter didn’t appreciate my sense of humor. His eyes flared gold, and the shirt he wore strained under the pressure of a wolf trying to force a shift.
“Unauthorized shifting is forbidden,” I reminded him with an eye roll. “I feel obliged to point out that poor control of one’s animal is not a reasonable excuse for going full fur.” I paused for a beat to let my words sink in. “Unless your ferret is feral?”
“Why you little—”
The wolf’s words cut off abruptly as a tall, deliciously handsome male strolled into view, humming a pop tune. I took in his tight pants and half-buttoned shirt that revealed a tempting portion of olive skin, and I almost whimpered. Kill me now. This guy was just my type.
He even had dimples.
Dimples!
My wolf sat up and made it abundantly clear she was very much in favor of me claiming him as our mate. Which was ridiculous because we were hybrid, and therefore taking a wolf as a mate was out of the question.
A human partner was the best I could hope for as anything other than a casual fling. No self-respecting shifter would accept a hybrid as a mate. Especially not a wolf shifter.
Those bastards were stuck in the Dark Ages, with half the packs in North America still refusing to let female wolves take on roles within the pack hierarchy. Alphas like my father believed females were only good for fucking and breeding.
Misogynistic fucks.
“Everything okay?” the cute-as-candy male asked, his pretty green eyes flicking between me and the moron trio. The way his jaw tightened as he cataloged the scene told me he knew damn well everything was far from okay.
I peeled the feline shifter’s fingers off my wrist, vowing silently to buy him a ticket for the karma bus before I left here, and smiled.
“Just peachy. These guys were introducing themselves in a totally friendly way, which I appreciate as it’s my first day here.”
“I’m surprised they could string a sentence together,” the hot dude said with a snort, triggering a few angry growls.
“Me too,” I chirped, smirking. “I read a scientific paper just last week that claimed rampant shifter-roid abuse leads to cognitive decline and permanent atrophy of sexual organs. Very sad.”
The three idiots bristled with rage while the hottie chuckled.
“Don’t do drugs, meatheads,” I advised before bolting toward the tower where my class had started ten minutes earlier.