She’d started the school, and yet here we were, coming back like we hadn’t made a home for three years amidst the pines and the ghosts. The packs couldn’t keep up their endless infighting if we were going to survive the covens. This school was supposed to be the first step toward a different world.
All I could see was the dense greenery of spring in the south. The glass was cool against my face as I gazed down the trail ahead of us. Then glittering yellow eyes shone out of the darkness. My heart rocketed in response. Wolves.
I was only used to being around my own pack. When Piper had missions with the other packs, she almost always left me behind. You never knew when pack diplomacy was going to turn into a pack war.
That yellow-eyed wolf melted out of the darkness. His dark body seemed to be made of shadows for a second until the sunlight danced over his shiny fur. My focus was on him, and so the second wolf, a big gray-and-white one, startled me. The wolves paced around the car and then disappeared back into the forest.
Piper put the car into drive and eased off the brake. We pulled down the narrow, rutted trail. Tangled branches wove into an archway overhead, which made the forest feel oppressive.
My sister had made me go with her to visit regular colleges near home—Virginia Tech and Georgetown and Mary Washington—but I wanted to go here. There was no escaping the war, no matter how much Piper wanted to protect me from it.
We passed by walls that split the forest, tall stone walls that shimmered with magical energy, and then drove for another mile through the forest. Then suddenly, we were in an enormous green clearing, and in front of us were a series of stone buildings.
“I understand why students aren’t allowed cars,” I muttered. Too many vehicles would alert someone to this little hidden city in the middle of the forest. “But I don’t like it.”
Piper turned off the car, but she didn’t move to get out. She palmed her keys and said, “Are you sure you don’t want to give normal a fair shake? Drive your car to college, date normal boys, take some literature classes instead of training for a war…”
I did love my car. When I’d turned fifteen, Callum had surprised me with a broken-down 1973 Pontiac GTO that looked like it would sputter and die if I tried to drive it in second gear. THe and Kai and the rest of the pack had spent that year teaching me how to fix it, turning it into my metallic-cherry-red dream car. That car represented just how loved I was. I wasn’t just Piper’s kid sister; I was all of theirs.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this,” I said, “but whether they’re wolf-shifters or not, there’s no such thing as a normal boy.”
She grinned as she pulled her oversized sunglasses off and tossed them onto the dash. “Okay, you’re not wrong there.”
“I’ve done normal for all of high school,” I said. “I’ve tried things your way.”
“I wouldn’t say you’ve done normal,” Piper muttered.
She loved the idea of being normal. She’d had a tough life in high school, when I was just a little girl. Our ‘father’, the man who had kidnapped us when we were kids, had been abusive. She’d been bullied mercilessly. She’d wanted so badly to give me a better life. And she had. I’d joined the swim team and gone to high school dances, even though my bodyguards were always lurking within earshot. We’d pretended that was normal, too.
I hated to break it to her, but even being a normal high school student still sucked.
“Normal was never achievable,” I said.
“Possibly true,” she said with a sigh. “Oh well.”
“I had a beautiful childhood,” I promised her, because I knew how much it mattered to her. Then I released my seatbelt and threw it over my shoulder in my enthusiasm to get out of the car. “And it’s over! Time for the next thing.”
She sighed. “Which has to be the shifter academy.”
“There’s a war on,” I reminded her.
“Exactly. I’d like my little sister safe.”
As soon as she twisted toward her side, I threw open my door and bounded out. I flashed her a grin over the roof of the car. “Sorry, but I am your sister. Safe is not a priority. If it was ever even an option.”
We weren’t sisters by blood, but we couldn’t have been more sisters, anyway. Piper had certainly never taken the safe path when there was a more interesting fork in the road.
“God help me,” she said, but she still threw an arm over my shoulders.
Together we swaggered toward the big brick asylum, once abandoned and now restored, at the center of campus.
The bell in the church’s tower began to toll, and I craned my head to look up, startled. I’d forgotten about the bell. That church was eerie, just as haunted as the asylum; I remembered playing hide-and-seek in the dark, the shattered glass windows boarded over, crawling across the hard floor beneath the pews.
“It’s strange being back here,” she murmured.
“How does that,” I pointed up at the bell, “help with the whole secret-location thing?”
“No one can hear it past the warded walls,” she promised me. “And the miles between us and civilization helps too. But it keeps the pulse of the university.”
“Yeah, good luck sleeping in.” A tall, young guy with tousled light brown hair smiled at me from the top step. He had a leather book bag slung over one shoulder. One well-built shoulder. He held out his hand. “The famous Northsea sisters, I take it?”
“I don’t know about famous,” Piper said, shaking his hand. “But I’m Piper Northsea, and this is my sister Maddie.”
Sometimes when I heard the name Northsea, it took me a second to remember it was my last name. My sister and her pack had chosen a new name for themselves, and I’d taken it too. I didn’t want to carry my birth mother’s name, after all her sins against our pack, or the name of the witch who had stolen me.
So I was Maddie Northsea—until, like my sister, I gathered my own pack one day.
It was getting harder and harder to believe that would ever happen. My sister had found her pack before her eighteenth birthday. I was coming perilously close to my eighteenth birthday and never-been-kissed. I’d never met a boy who seemed worth kissing.
“I’m Lex,” he said. “Jacob Alexander, technically, but everyone calls me Lex except my mom.”
The smile he flashed our way was devilishly handsome. His gaze lingered on mine, just for a second, before Piper cleared her throat.
“Dean McCauley can’t meet you until after the prospective student presentation this afternoon, unfortunately,” Lex said. “He sends his regrets, but he also sent me along to be your tour guide. He thought you’d like to see the changes since your tenure.”
He directed that last sentence to Piper.
“Certainly,” Piper murmured, although the rigid straightness of her posture told me that something was bothering her. She still smiled graciously at Lex. “Well, lead on.”
Lex stepped back and opened one of the heavy wooden doors into the church. “Well, as you certainly know, this church is original to the site. It was here to serve the asylum, and it was abandoned when it was in the 1940’s. Ahhh… normally, here I say that you decided it would be an ideal site for the school…”
Piper waved off the thought. “It was actually Nick who found it.” To me, she said, “He has that weird obsession with ghosts and he found this place on a list of haunted sites.”
“Which definitely says to me, let’s go there and build a home,” I said. I remembered sleeping in cold rooms in the asylum when I was little. Maybe there were ghosts. But I’d never been scared, since I had my pack to protect me.
Lex glanced between the two of us, a smile on his lips. He had very nice, well-formed lips above a big jaw. Then he turned and stepped through the church’s lobby, which had worn wooden floorboards and smelled like old paper and nostalgia, into what had once been the sanctuary.
I followed him into the room. The two-story ceiling towered above us, and light trickled in through stained glass windows.
But the windows were all different from a regular church; the scenes in red and blue and green portrayed images of angels descending and wolves snarling.
“The original windows were ravaged by time and had to be replaced,” Lex explained.
“Interesting,” Piper said.
“During a recent renovation, Dean McCauley thought it would be interesting to replace the original glass panes with images depicting some famous scenes from the Book of Cain,” Lex said.
Piper nodded, although she looked less-than-thrilled.
“The Book of Cain?” I asked.
Lex glanced at me quickly, his eyes widening, before he continued on as if I hadn’t said anything odd. “The lost book of Cain. The book of the Bible? About how werewolves and witches descended from Cain and his two wives?”
“We aren’t particularly religious,” Piper said, and rested her hand on my shoulder like she was reminding me of something. “Just like we don’t believe in ghosts.”
I rolled my eyes, but I still rested my hand on my sisters. “Speak for yourself. I am open to the possibilities and wonder in the universe.”
Lex led us back through the big green grassy court to one of the big brick dorm buildings. “We follow a house system here as well as a strict hierarchy,” he explained to me as if it was part of his patter, although he flashed an apologetic look at my sister, who knew all this.
“After all, packs love a hierarchy,” I murmured. I did not love a hierarchy. I’d grown up with an overprotective big sister and her eight wolves, who were sweet…and bossy. The last thing I needed was more.
But it was worth it to be here. There was no place else in the universe where wolves from all the North American packs came together.
He nodded. “Freshmen through seniors live in one house together. Freshmen do chores for the upperclassmen. Nothing too terrible, I swear. Laundry, errands.”
“I thought you were supposed to be selling this place,” Piper said drily. She elbowed me, flashing me a mischievous grin. “You’re used to having men do all the chores.”
“It’s just that Callum is so good at cooking. Much better than you,” I said. “Anyway, I do my own laundry.”
Then I really pictured myself handling sweaty werewolf laundry. It must have shown in the look of horror that crossed my face, because Piper burst into laughter.
“You’re the one who won’t take my advice,” she teased. “I’m trying to save you from handling gross man-laundry.”
“It’s just for a year or two,” I said, but it sounded like I was trying to convince myself.
Lex flashed us a curious look but held open the door for us into the dorm. We walked inside, into a big space with a handful of tables and chairs and two staircases twisting away to an upper floor.
“Each house has their meals together in the cafeteria in the asylum,” he said. “On the ground floor of each house is space for us all to gather, like you see here.”
“Is this your dorm?” I asked.
He nodded. “Oh yes, you’re in my house.”
For some reason, there was something about the way he said that in his low, warm tone that sent tingles racing through my chest.
He pointed down the hallway. “Down the hall is a library for quiet work and mandatory study hall—mandatory if your grades dip—and in the basement there’s a big gym and the laundry rooms.”
“What’s the gym like?” I asked promptly. I loved to work out. My ‘big brothers’ had adored training me to fight.
“I’ll show you,” he said promptly. He brought us downstairs and led us through a big, gorgeous gym with a fitness center, pool, and a dojo. He grinned, as if he saw my eyes light up when I looked around the big, light-filled dojo. The basement of the dorm walked out to a green lawn, and floor-to-ceiling windows and French doors along one side let in sunlight and a distant view of the pines.
Lex clapped his hand on my shoulder and said, “Well, something makes me think you’ll fit in here, even with…”
My sister was eying him, and he suddenly tucked his hands in his pockets.
“Even with what?” I asked. I’d like having his hand on my shoulder; he’d seemed so easily familiar.
“Even with you being a woman,” he said.
“Girl,” Piper said under her breath, so softly that I wouldn’t have been able to hear her without my wolf’s senses.
“It wouldn’t change anything, right?” I asked. There were two way to become a werewolf—by being born one and by being turned—and for some reason, born female wolf shifters like me were rare. It was against pack law to turn a child. That meant only born shifters were young enough to be admitted to the academy.
“It shouldn’t,” Piper said, but the look she gave Lex was hard, as if she knew it did.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve always been surrounded by guys. It doesn’t bother me.”
Piper sighed as if she was holding her tongue. “Well, what else is there to see?”
She didn’t say anything, but I could read my sister.
She thought it would bother me, in the end.
I bumped my shoulder into hers. She tucked her arm through mine, the gesture comfortable and familiar, and rested her head on my shoulder. Without her heels, I was a little bit taller than she was, even though I was the little sister.
“Thanks for not trying to talk me out of what I want,” I said. “Even when you think I’m making a mistake.”
“They’re your mistakes to make,” she said. “Lord knows I’ve made plenty.”
“Maybe it won’t turn out to be a mistake,” I said.
“From your lips to Saint Cain’s ears.” Her voice had a teasing note as she invoked a saint she didn’t believe in anyway. She squeezed my arm, and the two of us followed after Lex.
Lex walked backward down the hall, telling us everything about the academy except for the things that mattered most.
3
When Lex sped ahead of us to meet another prospective student who had just arrived, I elbowed my sister swiftly in the side. “Why did you call me a girl in front of Lex?”
“You’re seventeen,” she whispered back. “Technically, you’re a girl.”
“You didn’t say it because I’m technically—”
Piper interrupted me. “You think he’s cute, huh?”
I glanced at Lex’s back. His dark brown hair was sexily tousled, like he ran his hand through his hair while he was thinking about more important things. His school uniform—a fitted black military jacket over black slacks—clung to broad shoulders, a lean tapered waist, and an absolutely adorable ass.
“Maybe,” I said non-committally.
“Because otherwise you wouldn’t care,” she said, a smirk breaking across her face. “Oh my god. This is exciting. You never think anyone is cute.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “You are twenty-six years old. You’re a werewolf queen leading three packs. Your ability to kick ass in high heels is legendary. You’re not supposed to be antagonizing your little sister anymore.”
“Can’t quit, won’t quit,” she said mischievously, and when I wasn’t looking, elbowed me back.
Sisters, man.
The bell rang again, and a stream of students left the academic building and headed across the lawn for the house. Two students were arguing. One stopped the other, a hand on his chest, and the second one glowered at his hand and then at his face. His lips curled back from his teeth, snarling.
Piper automatically stepped in front of me. Oh my god. I stepped back up next to her, flashing her an exasperated look, and she pursed her lips.
“Sorry I’ve spent my entire life trying to protect you and it’s a hard habit to shake,” she said.
“You don’t sound all that sorry.”
“Observant of you.” Her blond eyebrows furrowed. “I’d stop them, but you know. Wolfish boys are going to wolf.”
The two of them were circling each other now, looking as if they might transform at any moment.
&nb
sp; And then they didn’t. One of them stopped, frowning, and shook his head. The other one stared at him, his lips still curled back from his teeth. Both of them seemed suddenly distracted from their fight.
“They didn’t shift,” Piper said softly. She stepped forward suddenly toward them, and there was the whip-crack of command in her voice when she said, “Knock it off. Talk it out like normal people.”
I raised my eyebrows at Piper, but she was already turning away from them and their surprised faces. She hustled me away from them.
“There’s something going on. I think they can’t shift,” she whispered to me.
The two of us hustled around the corner of one of the houses. Piper was already stripping off her jacket.
She was going to try to shift. I should try, too, and I bit my lower lip as I steeled myself. The transformation feels like getting hit by a bus, except that you know you’re going to survive. It’s still hard. Especially when you’re new to shifting, like I was. I’d been so excited for my first time, and now it filled me with dread.
Her lips parted, a far-away look coming into her eye, and her arms and legs began to shake as if she was trying to transform. But then it was still just Piper. I closed my eyes, blocking her out as I tried to concentrate. I’d heard that wolves shifted by accident when they were scared or angry enough, but so far, I’d always had to work for it. No matter how much I focused, imagining my bones and muscles and teeth shifting in place, nothing happened.
When I opened my eyes, Piper was shrugging her jacket back on. She drew her long blond hair out of her collar, and then touched the necklace she wore, murmuring a spell softly. I waited as she sent out the call to our pack.
We didn’t need cell phones to stay out of trouble, no matter what that man at the gas station had thought.
When she finished, she nodded at me. “There’s dark magic in the air. We’ve got to give Lex the slip and talk to the Dean.”
I headed to the edge of the building to get a look at Lex. He was still talking to a prospective student and his family, his face lively and his hands animated as he punctuated his words. I watched him a few seconds longer than I needed to, before Piper came to my side.
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