by Bailey, G.
Silas turns to me, smiling. "Hey," he echoes, leaning over to press a kiss gently to my cheek. "I'm sorry I haven't seen you the past few days," he says, looking down. "I was… I guess I'm just a little out of it."
"You seem down," I venture, leaning forward to look at him. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"You're a sweetheart, Boots," Silas tells me. "I'm fine."
“It’s your parents, isn’t it?” Almost as soon as the words are out, I wince inwardly, wondering if I’ve overstepped. Silas is the strong, silent type, and even after all this time, I can still never be sure what he’s thinking.
The dragon shifter heaves a heavy sigh, shifting his body to look me in his eyes. I’m expecting him to say something—to rebuff me, or to assure me that I have nothing to worry about, but instead, he remains silent. He watches me long enough that I start to grow restless, pulling my eyes away from his just in time for him to reach up and brush some snowflakes out of my chestnut hair.
“They would have loved you,” he says, his voice sounding rusty in the cold. His hand lingers on my face, as if he hardly dares to believe that I’m here, that I’m real.
I cover his hand with mine, shifting closer to him on the bench. For a minute he’s terrifyingly unresponsive, but then he leans gently against me, tall enough that his cheek rests on the top of my head. “I would have loved them, too,” I tell Silas quietly. “They were good people, Silas. I’ve never doubted that.”
“I miss them,” the dragon shifter admits, sounding almost sheepish. “It’s stupid, I know, considering I spent twenty years thinking they were dead, but… I can’t help but feel frustrated. Like they abandoned me.”
“You lost them again,” I finish for him. “Silas, I’m so sorry.”
“At least I had time with my parents, though,” Silas says, straightening up. “You never even got to meet yours.”
“I was angry at them for a long time,” I admit. It’s the first time I’ve confided in anyone about this. “After I found out they left me on purpose, that they never wanted me in the first place… I spent so long missing them, building up this image in my mind of the family I wanted but never had.”
“Sounds like we’re in the same boat,” the dragon shifter observes. “Just a couple of battered shifters with no family to speak of.”
“That’s not true,” I tell him, pulling his face down so I can look him in the eyes. “We have each other. You’re my family, Silas. You, Landon, Shade, Hunter… I love you.”
“I love you too, Boots,” Silas tells me. “I’ve loved you ever since I met you, I think. And…” He takes a shaky breath, the heat of it coming out in plumes and calling to mind his dragon form. “And I think that’s enough.”
He leans down and kisses me; the feeling sending sparks of electricity down my tense shoulders. I’m reminded of the first time he kissed me, after revealing the nature of my hybridism to me in the face of overwhelming scrutiny from Hawthorne and the humans.
Silas’s arms encircle me, his mouth breaking from mine only so he can bury his face in my neck. His nose is cold, making me shiver, and I can’t help flinching, letting out a short giggle.
“Save some for the rest of us, Aconyte,” comes a familiar voice. I pull away from Silas and turn to see Landon making his way through the snow, seemingly unbothered by the cold in spite of how lightly he’s dressed. The siren shifter grins as he comes to plop down on my other side. “If I’d known this was where the action was, I would’ve come outside sooner.”
“You know people are going to give us strange looks if they catch us all out here together,” Hunter points out, moving to stand across from me. “You should hear the things my students are saying. “I can’t tell if they resent you or want to be you.”
“It’s not our fault we’re so fucking handsome that she can’t keep her hands off us,” comes Shade’s voice. The wolf shifter, bringing up the rear, stands behind me. And just like that, the four loves of my life are flanking me on all sides. I can’t tell if it’s real or imagined, but I could swear the temperature feels suddenly warmer.
“So did we miss any good gossip?” jokes Landon.
“We were just taking a minute to take it all in,” Silas responds.
“It’s been a hell of a ride, hasn’t it?” Hunter asks.
“Damn right,” Shade says. “But for some reason, I think we’re going to be okay.”
I smile, in spite of the snow that continues to drift down on us. Surrounded by the guys I love, safe in the knowledge that I’m exactly where I need to be, I can’t help but agree.
Description
My powers are back, my men are safe, but the academy has a new enemy.
And we are all at risk if we can't stop him.
The days of being in foster care are long in the past and I have everything in the family I have found at the academy, but Hawthorne threatens everything. New powers, dangerous experiments and monsters rising from the shadows...we have never been in this much danger.
I fell in love with four men at the academy, I found myself, my powers and lost them once before. This time I won't stop fighting until I get my happy ending.
Hawthorne might have been ruling the academy once before but he never controlled the students.
And we are fighting back.
18+ Reverse Harem Romance which means the main character will have more than one love interest.
Chapter 85
It’s funny how easily the tide of a fight can turn once personal feelings enter the equation. One moment, you’re invincible, shocking even yourself with your ruthlessness and skill, and the next, you’re being brought to a grinding halt, eyes welling up with tears as dueling emotions battle for your attention, whatever soft spot you’ve had hidden within you the whole time suddenly being torn open and left to fester. What used to matter doesn’t matter anymore, and what you never thought would affect you has suddenly taken on more gravity even than the battle you’ve been fighting.
And I’m not even the one whose own parents are trying to kill me.
Silas, whose ability to take everything in stride, in spite of his own feelings and weaknesses, has always astounded me, is more than shocked as he stares down at the battered form of his mother, her eyes flashing with hatred and blood welling from her mouth. He looks shattered. The world around us has come to an abrupt stop, and not even the sight of the enemy shifters recuperating in my peripheral vision is enough to pull my attention away. It’s like looking into the eyes of a ghost I’ve never even met before.
“Mom,” Silas croaks, dropping to his knees in front of her. “You’re alive? How…? What happened to you?”
“Oh, Silas.” His mother turns to him with a loveless smile on her face, her eyes rolling in her skull like a rabid dog. “You were always so bright. Shame you’ve always had trouble seeing what’s right in front of you.”
“What did they do to you?” Silas persists. “Why are you helping them? I thought they killed you.”
The other dragon shifter, a man now back in human form and pinned down by Landon, spits out, “We had our eyes opened. That’s why.” He must be his father, some part of me thinks.
“Silas,” says Shade, moving to stand beside him, “we should really—”
“Shut up.” The dragon shifter doesn’t even look at him. “What are you doing here? What did Hawthorne do to you?”
“Are you deaf?” snaps his mother, struggling to sit up and clutching at a stitch in her side. “You might as well kill me now, Silas. It will save me from having to listen to anymore of your brain dead questions.”
“Mom, please,” Silas protests. “Let us help you. Tell us what you need—we can protect you from them. Whatever they have on you, it’s not going to…”
But his voice trails off as his mother starts to laugh, a bitter, ugly sound. “Doesn’t matter. Nothing you do matters.”
I realise that I’m shaking, and it has nothing to do with the adrenaline of the fight; my mind is already racing b
ackwards to Edith, the fallen witch shifter who seemed to express regret for betraying me even as she took her last breaths.
Nobody can help me.
“Don’t say that,” Silas tells her, sounding desperate, before turning to his father. “Dad, please—tell her we can help you both.”
His father responds with a merciless, bloody grin. “Listen to your mother, Son,” he says, the tone of his voice grating and sarcastic. “Be a good boy and let us out of here before we kill all of you. Family or not.”
Silas looks as if he’s just been slapped across the face. “You don’t mean that.” But whatever conviction was left in him before seems to be bleeding out before my eyes.
“Oh, but we do,” says his mother, and before I have a chance to react, she’s shifting her dragon tail into existence and using it to slam me hard across the chest, sending me flying across the room. In spite of having my powers back, it seems my reaction time is the same as it ever was. Which is to say, not very good.
It’s still good enough for me to be in my vampire form before I even hit the ground, landing in a three-legged crouch just as the witch who had Josie paralyzed finally overpowers her, sending a bolt of energy straight into her body. She gets launched back, but my superior reflexes in this form are on my side, and in an instant I’m on the other side of the room, catching her before she hits the wall. She gives me a grateful look just as the chaos resumes, except it doesn’t take long to notice that what’s driving these hunters isn’t strength or even magic; it’s pure, unadulterated hatred, along with a sick conviction in what they’re doing.
It’s one thing to fight for a cause. It’s another to actually believe in it.
That’s the last coherent thought that crosses my mind before Silas’ mother opens her mouth and exhales a blast of flame directly at him. He’s not in his form yet, and the fire would be enough to immolate him… Except I manage to get my hands up just in time, conjuring a force field, much like how Theo did, in front of the man I love. It absorbs the full brunt of the heat and allows him time to shift, but I realise too late that it was all just a tactic to buy time. In the few seconds it took for us to regain our bearings, the others have already gotten up and changed forms, battered but otherwise full of fight. The next thing I know, his mother, now in full dragon form, dive bombs Landon and plucks her otherwise-helpless husband right out of his grip. “Hawthorne sends his regards,” she tells us, before turning casually away.
“Stop!” the siren shifter yells, but it’s no use; the command is impossible to hear amidst the commotion.
Then the enemy shifters, every single one, are leaving the way they came in, crashing out through the windows and disappearing into the still, blue sky.
“No!” Shade roars, bounding up to the window in pursuit, but it’s too late. They’re gone. “Fuck,” the wolf shifter says, raking his hands through his sandy hair. “Fuck!” His eyes have already turned the golden colour of his wolf form. “We have to go after them,” he says, rolling his shoulders back in preparation for another round. “If we leave now, we can take them out from the ground.”
Silas, who has been looking borderline-catatonic, turns his scaly neck on the wolf shifter. “Like hell,” he growls. “Those are my parents.”
“Not anymore, they’re not,” Shade argues. “Whatever they are now, they’re on the wrong side. If we let them get back to Hawthorne alive, we lose whatever advantage we had from them not knowing Boots got her powers back.”
“Not. Happening,” the dragon shifter hisses, staring down his snout at Shade.
“Silas,” Hunter tries to reason with him, “if we can just capture them, figure out what they want—”
“No!” Silas bellows, flapping his wings in agitation. “They’re my family!”
“Silas…” I shift back into human form and approach him like one might approach a wild animal, both hands in the air. For someone normally so stoic and unflappable, his agitation is heartbreaking. What would I do if I were in his shoes? I wonder.
Probably the same thing.
Slowly, I lift my hand to his snout and smooth my fingers along his bristling scales. The motion is gentle and slow, and I can feel him beginning to relax under my touch. “It’s okay,” I tell him, over and over. “No one’s going to hurt them, Silas. Right?” I look around the room. Hunter and Landon give reluctant nods, while Shade kicks the wall in frustration, but throws his hands up. Gradually, the dragon shifter’s tension eases, and he slowly transforms back into a human… only to collapse to his knees on the floor, silent and forlorn, his head bowed and his dark hair hanging in his face. I move to touch his shoulder, but he shrugs me off, looking utterly drained.
Landon approaches me and begins checking me methodically for injuries, his hands working from my scalp down to my shoulders. “I’m not a fragile flower anymore,” I joke dryly.
“Believe me,” the siren shifter says, planting a kiss on my forehead, “I never thought you were.”
“You were unbelievable back there, Boots,” Hunter says, his face lit up with admiration.
And at last, with the heat of battle finally dying down, I’m able to look around and see that he’s right. The carnage before us catches me off guard; while the room was mostly clear before, now it’s a veritable battlefield, with overturned potion bottles and destroyed books covering the floor, loose sheafs of paper fluttering down from where they were tossed up in the air. That’s all secondary to what my eyes settle on next, though: a large smear of blood on the far wall, right where I flung the wolf shifter who was going after Landon. Did I do that? some part of me wonders, almost afraid to take in the sight. I was so caught up in the heat of the moment; I wasn’t even paying attention to the damage I was doing.
That’s never happened before. Not when I was fighting for my life against humans and shifters alike, not even when I lost my powers and had to learn to do things the old-fashioned way. Never, in all my time as a shifter, have I been capable of this much fierce destruction in so little time, and never have I been less aware of my own strength. As I look around, I’m only greeted with more traces of the violence I’ve inflicted in the aftermath of Josie’s experiment, and for a few selfish moments, all thoughts of Silas’ parents go out the window.
The only thing that pulls my attention away is a groan from Josie, who has slid to the floor with her hand clamped to her side. “Shit,” I exclaim, and rush over to her, my angst momentarily forgotten. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” the witch shifter spits out through gritted teeth. “Got nicked, though.”
“Hang on,” Hunter says, crossing the room to the backpack where we stored the medical supplies we pilfered from the Academy and tossing it to me.
Without needing further instruction, I rummage in it for a moment before extracting a healing poultice and a compression bandage. “Will this do?” I ask, showing Josie the bottle.
“This looks like pure alchemy,” the witch shifter says wonderingly. “Where did you get this?”
“Best not to ask,” I reply as I dab a cloth with the solution and apply it to the wound in her side. To her credit, she doesn’t even flinch, not even when I begin to dress the cut. “What do we do now?” I’m not sure whom the question is directed towards.
“It wasn’t even like they didn’t recognise me,” Silas murmurs from his place on the floor. “They recognised me. They just didn’t care.”
“Just like Edith,” Hunter mutters, crossing his arms as he turns to Josie. “Any idea what could make them turn like that?”
“I’ve never heard of that kind of magic,” the witch shifter replies as I help her to her feet. “Brainwashing doesn’t require the supernatural, though. Ask any cult member.”
“Don’t say that,” Silas says, but without much aggression. “Please don’t say that.”
“I can do some research,” Josie says after a moment’s pause. “In the meantime, the five of you should plan on getting some rest. You’ll need to be back on the move soon; i
f I know the Academy, they aren’t going to stop at just one attack.”
“I guess we have our marching orders,” Landon says, without much humor.
I nod, but my mind is already elsewhere: namely, a certain witch shifter, dead by my hands, and the way I leapt back into violence just now without so much as a second thought. And something tells me, regardless of how much energy I just exerted, that I’m not going to sleep well tonight.
Chapter 86
And I don’t.
I wish I could say that having my powers back and getting a reprieve from the violence have chased off my anxiety for good, but they haven’t; if anything, the time spent alone with my thoughts only makes things worse these days. I can’t even remember the last time I didn’t have something to ruminate on, some immense worry that made me feel like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. Concern over the notion of what I’m now capable of battles in my mind with preoccupation with Edith, the role I played in her death, and whether or not the other shifters on Hawthorne’s side are somehow being mind-controlled. Josie, after we help her restore some kind of order to her living space, retreats to her study to research the issue, leaving the rest of us to wander about the village while we collectively catch our breaths. A pall of unease has descended over our little group, one that has little to do with the fight. The implications of Silas’ parents’ brainwashing aren’t lost on any of us.
If they, the key players in one of the shifter communities’ earlier revolts, can be swayed so much as to turn on their own flesh and blood, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Rather than impose further on Josie, we rent rooms at the inn down on Gloucestershire’s main drag (such as it is in a hamlet this small). As usual, we each get a space of our own; in addition to the beds being rather small, there’s the added, unpleasant possibility of the Academy’s hunters returning while we’re still here. They tracked us down once - there’s no reason they can’t do it again. It’s becoming clear to me as I stare out the window at the rapidly darkening sky that things are approaching a precipice: it’s a race against time now, and we can’t even be sure who our enemies are. Silas has kept to himself all day, and I can’t say I blame him. I wish I knew what to say to make it better, but what? I can’t even guarantee that it’s going to be okay; none of us can.
