“Go on ahead, I’ll see you later,” I said to Theo as we exited class.
“Where are you going?” he asked, trailing behind me. Odd. Usually, he was rushing off to meet one of the other Council members down a shadowy hallway.
“Don’t worry about it.” I kept my voice clipped. Served him right for being this weird lately. I headed towards the women’s bathroom, knowing there was no way he could follow me there. Even the bathrooms in the Academy castle looked as if they’d been made for royalty. I sat down in one of the lounge chairs in the area leading to the actual toilets and stared out the window.
Beast Academy was located uphill on a gorgeous piece of land with tall green grass. From what I could tell, there was an impossibly tall fence surrounding the entire property. A wall from the looks of it. I’d seen some students take cars and scooters out of the premises, but this I’d been told required special permissions. In a way, you had to have access to transportation and know the right people in order to leave. I scowled.
Didn’t that make the Academy more like a prison than a school?
The lunchtime bells rang. I’d figured out this morning how to order a to-go lunch from our Council kitchen. When I saw a familiar head of braids, I ran to catch up to her.
“Priscilla,” I said and caught her by the arm. “Do you want to eat lunch together today? Just us girls?”
She beamed. “Tired of the boys already?” With a swift movement, she steered us toward a bench that I recognized as the one she usually ate at. We sat next to one another.
“Will your other friends be okay?” I asked her, looking around for her usual gang of fellow intellectuals. She nodded, taking out an immaculately prepared lunchbox.
“Exams are coming up. They’re studying today in the library.”
Something clicked in my brain. “We have a library?”
She gasped. “Theo didn’t show you? It’s only the best part of the school. I’ll show you today if you want.”
“I’d like that,” I told her. It was nice being with Priscilla. Even though she had the air of a dragon-shifter, she was happy to talk about anything related to school. “Actually, since you know everything about our school, I wanted to ask you something. Where exactly is Beast Academy?”
She swallowed a bite of her food and blinked behind her large eyeglasses. “We don’t know.”
“Why?” I could feel my eyebrows knitting together and producing that disbelieving look. Don’t make her defensive, Fiona. But Priscilla was blissfully talkative, unlike the cagey boys I was living with. She was a fountain of information for those willing to ask questions.
“It’s a matter of safety,” she informed me. “Imagine if you wanted to take out all of the talented shifter youth from North America, you’d know exactly where to attack.”
“Attack?” I echoed. Angry flames flashed through my mind. A scream. I pressed a hand against my temple. “Why on Earth would someone attack the Academy?”
She shrugged. “Not everybody is good, Fiona.” She patted me on the shoulder as if she was informing me of some grand truth in life. I wondered if she knew that humans were just as evil out in the real world. “I’m sorry. I know that you were raised by humans, and shifter culture may seem strange. There are people out there who don’t like shifters. There are shifters who murder other shifters.” Her eyes darted to the side. She leaned in closer and lowered her voice, “There’s always been a theory that a group of anti-Shifters took out Ren’s family.”
“Shifters killing their own kind?”
Her nod was grave. I could see myself, slack-jawed, in the reflection of her glasses. “Shifters aren’t immune to greed and in fact, our beastly instincts sometimes make us worse than our human counterparts. But you’ll find that out whenever you first shift.”
I bit my lip from telling her that maybe, just maybe I wouldn’t find out. I still didn’t believe that I was a shifter in any capacity. More students arrived, and she stiffened.
“Let’s talk about more pleasant things,” she said with a sidelong smile. In a moment, we were discussing the lecture from our first class. We ate our lunch pleasantly enough, but my mind was churning away beneath the friendly conversation.
Ren’s clan killed by shifters who kill other shifters?
Although his story was sad, I hadn’t felt much when I first heard it. Now, I imagined Ren as a young boy, witnessing the carnage. My heart stung. I knew that feeling. Not an entire clan… but my parents. They were all I had.
Theo missed our last class together. Without him to protect me, a new student sat by me. Geoffrey was a lanky fox-shifter who wore his uniform messily. I noticed him earlier that week because his height made him as tall as the bear-shifters. He tapped his pencil on the table and smiled at me.
“Hi, Fiona.”
“Hi, Geoffrey.”
“You know my name?” His eyebrows disappeared beneath a head of red curls. Jasper’s hair had only a hint of red in his blond waves, but Geoffrey was walking around with full-on fox hair.
“You’re the tallest fox-shifter I’ve ever seen,” I informed him and then shrugged. “Not that I’ve seen a lot of shifters.”
He dipped his head closer towards me. “So, it’s true?”
“What?”
“You’re a late-shifter?” His eyes glistened with curiosity. My back unconsciously straightened, but like Theo… Geoffrey didn’t strike me as dangerous in any way. He was funny, often responding sarcastically if a professor caught him sleeping. That had actually happened twice already this week.
“Yes,” I said. “I know you guys can smell something different about me.”
He nodded enthusiastically, suddenly looking more like an enthusiastic puppy than a fox. “It’s true! We caught your scent the first day and realized something was different.” He leaned back in his chair as our professor wandered in. “Wow, what’s that like?”
“What?” I muttered from the corner of my mouth as the professor began to speak. He looked down at my notebook and scrawled something quickly on paper before sliding the notebook back to me. He’d written: what’s it like to be human?
I wrote back quickly: Annoying. Everything hurts. Class is starting!
He chuckled but quieted as the professor fully launched into a lecture. This class was a general science class. I suppose even shifters couldn’t skip out on the natural laws of gravity and thermodynamics. I made quick notes, making sure to box off my conversation with Geoffrey. He was nice. Unlike the Council boys, he seemed reachable. I paused, thinking of all my dorm mates.
They existed on pedestals in my mind. Even Theo. My chest burned and I rubbed my sternum, hoping Geoffrey wouldn’t notice. He didn’t. He was doodling a cartoon of our professor’s hair catching fire. A normal student thing. No disappearing off into shadowy corners to discuss secret things. I covered my frown with my hand.
The Council boys were suspicious…
Beast Academy was in a mysterious location…
I thought back to what Priscilla had told me about the Academy. There was a great fence surrounding our college, one supposedly meant to protect us.
That was it.
I would try to make it over the barrier tonight.
Midnight, I wrote quickly in the margins.
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