by Ivy Hearne
We were sitting in the clearing waiting for Caleb, who had stepped behind a tree to shift back to skin. Were-animals can be so strange. They’re perfectly fine running around naked after they shift but they don’t want you to see their bones changing.
Caleb was a perfect case in point. He came out from behind the tree totally nude. I averted my eyes and handed him his backpack.
“Okay. I’m going to check his dorm room one more time. You two keep looking? We can meet back at the Rathskeller in an hour or so. And if he hasn’t turned up by then...” I let my voice trail off.
“Then we alert the rest of the staff,” Reo said.
The rest of the staff. Right. I kept forgetting he was an academy employee now.
Nobody answered at Souji’s dorm room.
I hadn’t even had a chance to ask if he’d been given a roommate this semester. When I’d gotten here last year, he was determined to stay in his cat form all the time and had been allowed to stay in his dorm room all by himself.
If it had been only a ruse to get his own space, it would’ve worked out fairly well. By really, it was leftover trauma from his first hunting partner dying during her entrance exam.
Like I said, those things are dangerous.
That reminded me. I should’ve gotten Izzy and Bash’s phone numbers the night before. At this point, they were pretty much the only friend I had to Academy.
But from the way they’d been talking the night before they weren’t Souji’s only friends. Reo had started this summer working to turn the academy’s loose-knit community of shifters into a real, cohesive pack. And apparently, it was working.
I wondered why Reo hadn’t brought the shifter pack out to search for his brother.
I shook my head. I was seeing conspiracies everywhere.
I was tired, it was weird to be back here, and I was already worried that people were telling scary stories about me behind my back. It was an easy step from there to paranoid that everybody hated me. Or that Reo wanted to keep his brother’s disappearance hidden for some reason.
The easiest thing to do would be to wait until the next set of classes got out and then let a few people know what was going on. The quad would be flooded with students, but at least I wouldn’t risk transmitting my sheer terror over his disappearance to the entire school via psychic message.
No. I’d just show it in person to his shifter friends.
“Hey, Kacie. What’s up?” Souji’s voice echoed down the hall. I turned and threw myself into his arms, hugging him as hard as I could. He patted my back and laughed a little. “What’s up? Why are you so panicky?”
“Where have you been?.
“What do you mean?” Souji pulled his keys out of his pocket and unlocked his dorm room door.
I thumped him on the shoulder as he moved into the room. “I mean, why did you call me and tell me that you were in trouble?”
“I didn’t do that. I never called you.”
“Well, not on the telephone or anything. Psychically.”
A frown creased his forehead. “I didn’t do that, either. Kacie, I haven’t called you psychically since last semester.”
I stared at him and backed away one slow step. “Oh. Okay.”
“What do you think you might have heard?” Souji asked
It was him. I knew it was Souji. He’d called me.
But there was something weird right now. Something off. It was almost like I could feel whatever was out of kilter oozing toward me, an ugly, slow infection.
And I was afraid it was emanating directly from Souji. From my hunting partner.
“Maybe I misunderstood,” I said. “Did you ever get our course schedules worked out?”
“Oh, yeah. Yours should be ready now, too.”
The way he looked at me was wrong.
This wasn’t Souji.
“Sounds good. Listen, I’ll check in with you later, okay?” I smiled, but I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Chapter 10
As soon as I got downstairs, I pulled out my cell phone and this time I actually called Reo.
“I found him,” I said into the phone when Reo answered.
Right at the same moment that Reo announced, “I just talked to him,”.
“He’s in his dorm room,” I said.
“No, he’s not.”
“I just saw him there,” I said, pushing my hair back out of my face as the wind blew part of it out of my braid. “He just went in there.”
“He couldn’t have,” Reo insisted. “I just watched him walk away from me at the Rathskeller.”
I froze in the middle of the sidewalk, even as students poured out of classroom building, parting around me like a river around a stone.
Souji couldn’t be in two places at once. He could not have just spoken to Reo at the Rathskeller the same time he was talking to me at the door.
In unison, Reo and I both said, “The doppelgänger.”
Reo cursed. “Let’s meet at the faculty residences. Who can we trust?”
“I have no idea. Depending on how long the doppelgänger’s been here, maybe no one.” Pain pounded in my head, just behind my right eye.
A doppelgänger had been on campus once before, last year. He had kidnapped several people, including an instructor and me, and impersonated us.
He got away, too.
There was no way to tell this is was the same one, but he had to have a similar goal: hide out in plain sight among us and wreak havoc.
Though why he would impersonate Souji and leave him free was beyond me.
The biggest problem was that all he had to do was touch someone, and he could copy them, right down to the cellular level.
I didn’t even know for sure the doppelgänger was a he. I knew very little about them. Except that the one I’d come up against before was fast and clever, using his skills to get away as fast as he could.
It was all terrifying.
Once again, I found myself dashing across campus, trying to suck in enough air, its oxygen depleted at this elevation.
I was spending all of my time back at school running from place to place. Wasn’t school supposed to be about sitting down the desks of learning?
I would’ve laughed if I’d had the energy.
Or the breath.
When I got to the Rathskeller, Reo was already outside, pacing back and forth.
“Where’s your Souji?” I asked him.
“No clue. I finished talking to you and turned around, and he was gone flat fucking gone.”
That probably meant he had brushed up against someone else and left the Rathskeller looking like a different person entirely.
Assuming this one was the doppelgänger, the one who could take on other people’s forms.
Or maybe the one in the dorm room was.
“At least he’s not crazy,” I said.
“The doppelgänger?”
“No. Souji. When I asked him in his room why he asked me for help, he claimed that he hadn’t. I was worried about him.”
“You think it was the double? Why would the doppelgänger try to call you like that?”
“To get me back on campus, maybe?”
“That makes sense.” We began walking back toward the dorm again. I should’ve had Reo come to me.
“Speaking of making sense, I’m glad you’re not as irritated with me as you were last night.”
“Last night?”
I froze. “At the Rathskeller when you talked to me and Caleb and Bash and Izzy.”
Reo shook his head. “That wasn’t me.” He blew out a breath. “Looks like the doppelgänger is circling around you.”
I cast my mind back over that conversation. “Then how did the doppelgänger know that Erin had gone to school in Europe?”
Reo gave me an odd look. “She’s in New Zealand, not Europe.”
“Europe, New Zealand, whatever. How could the doppelgänger know what kind of answer to give me?”
“I suppose it depe
nds on how long he’s been hanging on campus.”
“You’re the one who’s been here all summer. Notice anything strange?”
“I haven’t been back here very long myself,” Reo said. “And things have changed a little bit since I was a student. So I don’t know that I would notice if anything was odd. Not yet.”
By then we were at the dorm. But the Souji who’d been here earlier was gone.
“So are we right back to having no idea where to look, only this time maybe for both Souji and the doppelgänger?” I asked as we exited the dormitory.
“I’m afraid so,” Reo said.
“Afraid of what, precisely?” Caleb’s plummy British tones interrupted us.
“It looks like we might have a doppelgänger on campus,” I said as Caleb caught up to walk with us.
“Wow. Isn’t that pretty rare?” Caleb and Reo fell into a conversation about dealing with rare monsters.
I, on the other hand, was busy wracking my brains trying to figure out how to flush out the doppelgänger.
“We call a meeting,” I said out of the blue, interrupting their intense discussion of possible unmasking techniques. “And you can think it’s funny,” I said to Caleb as he grinned at me, “but last night you shook Reo’s hand—and it turns out that wasn’t Reo. There’s a good chance you could be copied, too.”
Caleb’s naturally pale skin went even paler.
“Call what kind of meeting?” Reo asked.
“A shifter meeting. As I understand it, the doppelgänger can copy any human form but doesn’t do as well with a shifter’s animal form. It’s the only test we have that will come close to proving that we have the doppelgänger on our hands.”
“Assuming we catch him,” Reo said.
“Great positive thinking. Keep it up, mate,” Caleb said.
Chapter 11
Once we got to Reo’s apartment in the faculty housing building, inside the front hallway was a line of portraits. They started with paintings and ended with photographs.
“All the Hunters in Residence since the academy’s founding in seventeen-hundred-and-whatever,” Reo said. “It intimidated the hell out of me when I first moved in here. Now I pretend like it’s part of the furniture. I guess it is. Or at least the decor, anyway.”
I laughed dutifully at his joke, but I was pretty sure he was going to end up being a dad-joke kind of guy, overall.
“I’m sure you’re as good as any of them,” I said loyally.
“Maybe. But a lot younger. The youngest Hunter in Residence ever, in fact.”
“It’s an honor to be given the position,” I insisted.
“It’s a pain in the ass, is what it is. I didn’t realize quite how much work it would be until I took the position. Luckily it’s only for one or maybe two more semesters. Make yourselves at home. Feel free to grab a drink or whatever in the kitchen. I’m gonna go round up all the shifters and have them report over here.”
I was left alone in the living room as Reo went to make phone calls and Caleb stepped into the kitchen to, as he put it, “make you a proper cup of tea.”
As if I cared whether my tea was proper or not.
Still, it gave him something to do, made him feel useful. I was not about to take that away from him.
A few minutes later, Reo reappeared and announced, “A representative group is coming over. I didn’t know if we could fit all the shifters in here. But I figured we needed at least one from each species to really represent the entirety of the shifter world.”
I nodded. “Good idea.”
That way, no one could say we hadn’t given every shifter species a voice in whatever it was we decided we were going to do next.
I COULDN’T TELL THE difference between any other cup of hot tea I’d had and what Caleb served me, but he seemed proud of it, so I thanked him, told him it was wonderful, and went back to fretting about Souji.
It wasn’t long before the pack members started pouring in.
Hunters’ Academy isn’t huge—maybe three or four hundred students. The shifters make up maybe a quarter of that.
Unlike other supernatural packs, the Hunters' Academy pack is created from all the different shifters on campus.
At least, that’s the way it was being run under Reo. Before he’d taken over as Hunter in Resident late last spring, there had been factions within the Academy pack. Wolves ran with wolves, the cats stuck together, and so on.
Not anymore.
Reo was very much an all for one and one for all kind of leader.
Everyone on campus seemed to agree that it was a much better system.
At this very moment, with Souji missing and a creepy doppelgänger having taken his place, I was anxious to have as much help as we could possibly get. Reo’s pack was perfect and I was glad to have all of them.
Right up until the moment Layla walked in. She froze for a heartbeat when she saw me, that same look of terror flashing across her face. The one that I had seen in our dorm room.
We were going to have to figure out some way to deal with each other. Just not right at that moment.
Right now, we are going to go find my hunting partner.
Izzy and Bash came in together. I was beginning to wonder if they ever did anything separately. Go to class, I guessed. I shook off the thought. I didn’t have time for it right now, even if it did create some distraction from the gnawing terror in my stomach over Souji.
They came over and sat next to me. “You know what’s going on?” Izzy whispered.
“Reo’s going to talk about it in just a second. Let’s wait for everybody to get here.” I didn’t want to try to explain everything —not while there were still people making their way in.
About five minutes after everyone got there, Reo gathered us all in his tiny living room. There were maybe thirty people. I wondered what kind of shifter species my new roommate was to warrant being called in on this.
Something rare, obviously.
Then Reo stood up to talk.
Chapter 12
“I need everyone’s attention,” Reo said. “We have a crisis on campus that we need to deal with. It’s why I asked you all to come here separately and quietly—we don’t want to give away anything to our enemies.”
As Reo explained what had happened, backtracking a little to discuss last year’s incident with the doppelgänger, I watched the shifters’ faces.
I tried to remember how I would have felt about the news that there was a creepy Lusus Naturae monster on campus.
The students who had been here last year nodded as Reo recounted the details of last year’s kidnappings by the doppelgänger.
I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same one. Not that it really mattered. Creepy doppelgängers hiding out on campus pretending to be us was a terrifying thought, whether it was the same one or not.
If Layla was afraid of me, I could imagine how she was going to react to the real monsters out there.
I glanced over at my roommate who stood close to the door as if she were waiting for the chance to flee.
What kind of shifter would be so easily frightened?
How many different kinds of shifters were there, anyway? I’d only really thought about the major predators, the big cats, the wolves, and since Caleb, the giant hounds.
But were there other types of shifters, more prone to be prey than predator? Were there bunny shifters? Mole shifters? What about insects? Or birds? And how did each kind of shifter overcome its nature to function like a human rather than simply attacking each other all the time?
My pondering on the potential variety of shapeshifters in the world was interrupted by Izzy standing up.
“I think I have an idea.”
Reo nodded, but I could tell from the tightness in his shoulders that he was holding back an irritable response. “Go ahead.”
“I mean, we could try to sniff Souji out, right?” she glanced around the room, her face turning pink as she realized everyone was watching and liste
ning to her. “But he’s been all over this campus. There’s no telling how long it would take to separate out all the trails. And now there are two of him, right?”
Reo made a circular gesture with one hand, clearly willing to hear her out, but wanting her to get on with it.
Taking a deep breath, Izzy spit out her next words all in a rush. “I think I can create a spell that will sort out all the trails and help us find both of them at the same time.”
Suddenly, Reo was no longer interested in hurrying her through her speech. “Are you sure?”
“Mostly. But I’ll need to draw on everyone here. We all have memories of Souji. I want to see if I can figure out a way for us to use all of those.”
Her words sparked an idea in me, and I raised one hand. I didn’t wait for Reo to acknowledge me. He might be a staff member, but he wasn’t my instructor and we weren’t in class. “I think I can use my pendant to link us.”
Chapter 13
“Let’s do it.” Reo’s clipped words sent a ripple through the group.
I glanced up to find Layla staring at me, her face white and strained.
What the hell was up with that girl?
No time to worry about that now.
I stood up next to Izzy, who was now wringing her hands.
“I’ve never really coordinated a magic spell with anyone else,” she said in a tone that suggested she felt like she was making confession.
“I haven’t either,” I said, “but we’re about to do the best we can.”
All around us, the shifters representing their communities moved around uncomfortably, watching me nervously—like animals uncertain of another creature’s intent.
I closed my eyes and let the power build inside me. “I will link to everyone first,” I murmured to Izzy, “and then I will funnel that information and power to you.”
I opened my eyes briefly to check for her acknowledging nod and then sank as deep into myself as I could go. I reached out with my mind to clasp my power at the same moment that I reached up with my hand to grab hold of the stone hanging around my neck.
