Chapter 24
SADIE
Scaling the hill back up to Lunova Academy was no joke.
By the time I made it to the top, there was mud under my fingernails and my thighs burned.
Shouldn’t becoming a wolf make my human body stronger?
Shouldn’t there be some perks to this? Apart from being extremely sensitive in the best ways, obviously.
As much as I tried, I couldn’t help but think about Verne and Leander.
The way their eyes had felt on me, both hungry and tender.
The way their touches had lit a fire in me like no other.
I couldn’t tell if wolves were just insane sex gods, or if I’d just been with crappy men before and only had the world’s worst frame of reference.
I usually had to provide a map, compass, and GPS just to help them find my clit, but the men who called themselves my mates certainly didn’t need the help.
Hell, Verne had located my g-spot in less than a minute, and proceeded to hit it with every thrust, destroying my ability to think.
Fucking with my ability to walk, too, as I discovered fleeing through the forest.
Some part of me screamed at me to turn around and go back. That I belonged back there, and our revenge wasn’t worth leaving them. But the second revenge crossed my mind, pure rage took hold of me. It completely obliterated everything else in my head until vengeance was all that existed.
Rev, Oona, and Marveline threw me off that precipice to teach me a lesson. Well, I’d return to teach them a lesson. I may not have a fancy surname or a Lord father, but I’d worked in retail for years. I knew how to handle a bitch.
But I didn’t just want to handle them. Me and my wolf were in complete agreement that we needed to kill them.
I didn’t care if I would never have thought this way before they killed me, never have been so full of rage that I’d resort to murder before I was brought back as a wolf.
It should’ve been them in an arena with the light leaving their eyes, not Suri.
If I could get Rev to fight me during a training session, I could kill her in plain sight of the tutors, and not only escape a punishment for it but be rewarded.
But first, I needed to get fitter because this was ridiculous.
I paused on the edge of the boundary, now able to feel the slight shimmer in the air, and movement more than anything magic.
Not that I knew what magic felt like, but I pictured sparkles and a crackle like a live wire.
This was more a disturbance in the air, like a soft wind.
If I passed through it, would the tutors sense it? Would Mortem know I’d come back? More to the point, did she have any idea I’d been thrown through the boundary and off the hill in the first place?
Was that even illegal in an academy like this or was that just part of the curriculum?
As I stood there, with my hands braced on my knees as I caught my breath, I realised fate had a very sick sense of humour. Not only has she enrolled me in an academy to kill wolves, then made me into a wolf, but the second I made it back to the academy she delivered me to my killer.
Voices filtered through the trees, pitched low as if to avoid being overheard.
But even though my wolf hadn’t gifted me immediate stamina and fitness, it had sharpened my hearing, so when two voices reached my ears, I immediately recognised one as Rev’s.
The other was older, male, and smooth like the skin of a snake.
It sent shivers down my spine, and made some new instinct howl at me to run back to the cottage.
It didn’t take a genius to guess who Rev was talking to.
Her father, the vampire Lord. I had to assume that meant he was even more powerful than the vampire faculty and the lunatics who trained here.
And here I was, easy prey, a fucking wolf right out in the open with no backup and one week’s worth of combat training.
My emotions flipped, volatile. I was enraged at the wolves for changing me, for making me into this.
But the alternative was being dead; I had no choice but to make the best of this nightmare.
Just like I’d planned to make the best out of being dragged here against my will, I’d find a way to cope with being a wolf.
Would the vampire Lord have been able to smell me if it wasn’t for Lainsz’s bracelet around my wrist?
I had a feeling I didn’t want the answer to that, and I definitely didn’t want to know how many wolves this man had killed.
There was something in his voice that indicated power, older and more patient than anything I’d felt before.
If I thought the vampires at Lunatic Academy were dangerous, they had nothing on the aura of this man.
I wanted to back up, to retreat, but I was frozen stiff. I didn’t dare move, lest I bring his attention to me. So I went preternaturally still, my ears sharp on their conversation.
“— unacceptable, Reverie. I did not raise you to be a failure. I raised you to be a victor, to make our family the envy of every other in Lunova. I don’t tolerate losers, and there is no place in this family for mediocrity.”
“I’m sorry, father,” Rev replied, her voice stripped of its ego and arrogance.
She sounded like a different person entirely.
I might have been sympathetic for the way her father spoke to her, for how small she’d made herself to best appeal to him.
But I didn’t feel sympathy for women who threw people off cliffs and left them for dead.
I didn’t feel sympathy for bullies who made everyone else’s life a living hell, who were so cowardly they went for easy targets, because they’d never hold their own against someone of equal strength.
I could still very clearly picture the smug look on her face when she stole Elix’s notebook, reading her private thoughts aloud, as if everything in the world belonged to her. So no, I didn’t feel even a drop of sympathy as her father laid into her.
“Improve your grades,” her father said coldly, “or don’t come home at all.”
“I’m trying, Father,” she said with a rush of desperation. “It’s just—”
The sound of a slap made me jump. I was lucky I didn’t snap a twig to draw his attention to me. Jesus, he’d slapped her.
“I do not accept excuses from my own daughter. Excuses are for subordinates and peasants. If you’re still inferior by the end of the term, don’t bother showing your face at home, Reverie.”
Blood tainted the air, sharp and astringent like cleaning fluid, and a weight seemed to lift from my chest. When a sob exploded from the trees to my left, I realised he was gone, disappearing by blood magic the same way his cowardly daughter made me immobile.
I wrinkled my nose at the scent of both blood and tears, and some residue of the Lord, as if he gave off a miasma that stained the air.
A better person would’ve blended into the shadows, and waited for Rev to leave.
But I was too consumed with revenge, with payback to let an opportunity like this go.
So I made sure my footsteps were loud as I strode through the tree line.
Reverie came into view, pushing tears off her cheeks.
Her skin was still flawless, but I was gratified to see that her eyes were rimmed with red.
“Hello, Reverie,” I said jauntily, a little pep in my step until a sharp ache went through my pussy. “Fancy seeing you here in the forest? I just got back from a lovely trip,” I added, referencing her last words to me. “Did you miss me?”
“You bitch,” she snarled, and I saw her ugliness for what it was: embarrassment. She was mortified I’d seen her crying, and maybe she suspected I’d overheard what happened before.
“Ah ah ah,” I chided, giving her a little smile I knew would enrage her.
“You don’t have any of your cronies with you.
No backup, no school body to impress with your ruthlessness, no audience at all.
It would be such a shame to expose you as the fraud you are, because we both know there’s a chance I would win in a fight.
You had to immobilise me to push me off that cliff.
You didn’t dare challenge me at full strength.
How would daddy dearest feel about finding you dead in the forest?
Or worse, not even dead, just beaten into a pulp by a slug. ”
Her embarrassment snapped into rage, but the look on her face was brittle, as if she was one move away from breaking. Now that I knew what vampire magic took the form off, now I knew to be worried of blood and bitten fingers, I was ready for her. She wouldn’t get the best of me a second time.
She sank her weight onto her heels, ready to launch at me, but another figure passed through the trees, and light flared in a pool of blood in a man’s palm.
The light made him into a skeletal, ghastly creature.
Pale skin, rough features in a square face, grey hair clipped close to his skull.
He was tall and stocky, dressed in a black robe edged in red like a stereotypical vampire and not the soldier his appearance and countenance reminded me of.
I’d seen him around the academy, striding with purpose, and the other slayers had jumped out of his path enough times to tell me he was not a tutor to be fucked with.
But I didn’t know his name until Reverie said, “Professor Beaufort.”
Oh. The professor leading the investigation on Fioranna’s murder. The one Mortem said would execute her killer on the lawn for everyone to watch.
“Reverie,” he said, as cold as this forest at night. His eyes were like chips of silver when they snapped my way, the moonlight turning them inhuman. And of course he was inhuman; he was a vampire, but without the red irises in most vampires. “Sadie.”
I blinked. “You know my name?”
“I make it my business to know the names of everyone in my academy.”
“You mean Mortem’s academy,” I replied, and wished I’d kept my mouth shut when his eyes flashed a dangerous warning.