“Well, I kinda thought being human was the best until this morning, so I’m gonna withhold judgement on that one.”
Dean pulled a face. “Human-schuman.”
“You seriously did not just say that.”
“I did. And I’ll say it again. Human-schuman. Shifting is way cooler.”
I shook my head in mock-dismay, but I couldn’t quite suppress the smile tugging at my lips.
“Just telling it as it as,” he said.
“So, what’s the plan?”
“The plan?”
I groaned.
“Please tell me we’re not spending the next week locked in this room, because I’m already going stir-crazy.”
“Oh. No, you’re free to explore the castle, or head out into the grounds. As long as I go with you.”
“I don’t need a chaperone.”
“No? So you’re not planning to jump the wall and head back to your hometown first chance you get?”
“Hometown? No. Alright then, can you at least give me the tour, if we’re stuck with each other?”
“Ouch. I’m not that bad, am I?” A look of genuine hurt flashed through his eyes before he covered it up with a smirk.
“As jailors go,” I said, “you could be worse.”
“Good enough. Come on, let’s take that tour. We can start with the dining hall.”
The dining hall was huge – and deserted, apart from us, and a middle-aged guy working from a hatch in the kitchen.
“Dean,” the man greeted him with a nod. “I heard you were here early.”
“Hi, Mickey.” He gestured to me. “This is Jade. She’s… new.”
Mickey’s eyes sharpened, and he searched my face. I guess I was going to get a lot of that. Sucks to be the new kid, but it wasn’t the first time and it probably wouldn’t be the last. I set my jaw and returned his scrutiny.
“Good to meet you, Jade.”
“Yeah. You, too.”
I didn’t break eye contact and he chuckled, flicking a glance back over his shoulder into the kitchen, at the array of pans lined up by the hob.
“She’s a feisty one, huh?” He didn’t meet my eye again. “A couple of steaks?”
Dean nodded. “Sure. Jade, what do you want?”
I laughed, then realised he was being serious.
“Oh. I’ll have whatever. Thanks.”
Mickey turned and ambled back into the kitchen. Dean made to take my elbow to steer me across the room, and I jerked it away, fixing him with a glare.
“Easy,” he said, holding his hand up and sounding a little irritated. “Not everyone round here is your enemy. Some of us just want to help you. Most of us, actually, if you give us a chance.”
“Well, excuse me if–” I broke off and exhaled, long and low, and got my voice under control. “Never mind. It’s been a long day.”
“It’s going to get a lot longer if you keep challenging everyone you meet,” he said, steering us to a table near the back – this time not making the mistake of trying to touch me.
“Challenging?”
“I saw you, trying to stare Mickey down.”
“I wasn’t just trying. Anyway, he stared at me first.”
I pulled out a chair and dropped into it.
“Get used to it. You’re the outsider here.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“All I’m saying,” he said, pulling out a chair opposite me, “is if you carry on looking for a fight, sooner or later that’s what you’ll get – and probably with someone who’s more than your match. If you go looking for trouble round here, you’re going to find it.”
I picked at my nails, letting that sink in a moment. I couldn’t fight. I’d never been in a fight in my life. Facing off against stuck up bitches? Sure, I’d done my share of that, but actual fighting? I didn’t even know how to throw a punch. And I was in enough trouble as it was. I didn’t need any more enemies.
“Alright,” I said eventually. “I get it. No more looking for fights.”
He quirked an eyebrow at me, and I held up one hand and placed the other over my heart. “I swear.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it, rebel.”
“If you’re trying out nicknames, you can stop right there. It’s Jade. Just Jade.”
“Whatever you say, Just Jade.”
I rolled my eyes. I’d brought that one on myself.
Mickey brought two plates over to us, both piled with a trio of the biggest steaks I’d ever seen, plus mashed potatoes, onions, mushrooms… the works. I raised a sceptical eyebrow at the lean figure sitting opposite me.
“Where exactly are you planning on putting all of that?”
“What? Shifting burns a lot of calories. And this is the best steak you’ll ever eat.”
I prodded one of the slabs of meat with my knife. Blood leaked from it onto the plate, and I eyed the drizzly mess. I was more of a ‘well done’ kind of girl when it came to steak – on the few times a year I had it – but this was beyond rare. What was it they called it? Blue? Whatever it was, it looked like a good vet might get it going again.
“I can’t eat this,” I said, shoving the plate away. But my hand didn’t let go of it, and my stomach rumbled loudly in disapproval.
“Just try it. Tru– You won’t regret it.”
I pulled it back in front of me and prodded it again, slicing a small piece from the edge with my steak knife. I paused, wondering if I could stash the potential weapon when we left the hall. Then the scent of the charred meat hit my nose, dissolving all other thoughts. I lifted a small cube of steak on my fork and nibbled at the edge. And then shoved the thing in my mouth and swallowed it whole. Then I speared another.
“See?” Dean said, and I felt a snarl work its way up my throat. He was looking at my meat.
“Easy, Just Jade.” He’d gone very still. Shit. Was I growling at him? Over a steak? I swallowed the suddenly flavourless lump of flesh in my mouth and set my fork down.
“Dean, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean– What the hell is wrong with me?”
I slumped my head into my hands, even as some instinct screamed at me not to take my eyes from him while he was so close to my food.
“Hey. It’s normal. The rest of us? We’ve had our whole lives to learn how to handle these instincts. They’re new to you. It’s going to take you some time to adjust.”
“And what?” I lifted my head to look at him through a few strands of hair that have worked their way loose. “Until then I’m just going to be running around growling at anyone who looks at my food the wrong way? What’s next, I’m going to start burying my bones in the yard?”
“Until then,” he said, reaching over to place his hand on mine, then remembering himself and pulling back, “people will understand that you’re trying to learn control, and they’ll cut you some slack. Besides, you’re not going to be the only person round here struggling to control themselves.”
“I’m not?”
“Pfft. You put a bunch of eighteen-year-olds under one roof, and you think they’re all going to be calm? Have you ever seen a freshman dorm?”
I snorted.
“Anyway, you didn’t actually try to bite me, so we’re good.”
“But you’d just heal if I did, right?”
He sucked on his teeth a moment.
“Werewolf healing?” I pressed.
“Not exactly.” He set his knife and fork down. “We can heal from almost anything, right? But there are some things we can’t heal from. First, anything that kills us. Dead is dead.”
I nodded. That one, I’d assumed.
“Second, any wound inflicted by an alpha with the intent to do lasting damage.”
“Any alpha… as in, Blake could shred me if he wanted, and I’d stay shredded?”
“Yup. But he wouldn’t. Not unless you really stepped out of line.”
“Great.”
“And the big one, shifter bites. Any shifter. Claws are fine, but if we get bitten, the mark is perman
ent.”
I paused, looking down at my leg.
“And this?”
“Sorry. You’ll always have a scar.”
“Great,” I said, exhaling through clenched teeth. “There goes the bottom half of my bikini body.”
Dean looked entirely too much like he was picturing me in a bikini, so I stamped on his foot, and gave him an angelic smile. After that, he suddenly found his food very interesting. We both devoted some time to polishing off our steaks – I was both surprised and disgusted to discover I could clear my entire plate, and probably could have managed seconds – and then lounged in our seats for a few minutes in what could almost have been mistaken for companionable silence.
If, of course, I hadn’t been a prisoner here.
Chapter Six
One week isn’t a long time to scope out an entire castle and find a way to escape. The first five days had already passed before I had the first inkling of a plan. Dean spent the time feeding me titbits of information about my new shifting power, while Mickey fed me piles of the best steak I’d ever eaten, and the pair of them dropped countless hints about how much being at Fur ‘n’ Fang was going to help me. The cuffs stayed on my wrists.
It wasn’t a deal breaker. Sure, it’d be nice to have at least one of them off so I could have some access to the new, heightened senses I apparently now possessed, but if I couldn’t convince Blake to remove them, so be it. I wasn’t going to stick around for that.
The wall that ran the perimeter of the academy was made of stone, and it was twenty-foot tall if it was an inch. A pair of iron wrought gates guarded the front entrance, and, near as I could tell, they were always locked. But I didn’t need to use the gates. I grew up on a farm. I could climb. And there were a lot of trees here. Some of them close enough to get me halfway up the wall. I’d make it the rest of the way from there.
The landing on the far side was likely to be rough, but shifter healing meant a sprained ankle shouldn’t hold me back for too long. Still, I’d need to go at night, so I had as long as possible before anyone noticed I was missing.
I didn’t know where we were, but that was fine. It wasn’t like I could head back to the farm, anyway. That was the first place they’d look.
I would need to disguise my scent. I’d convinced Dean to take me all round the grounds, telling him that the outside air made me feel less trapped, and he seemed to buy it. It didn’t feel great, lying to him, but so be it. He knew I didn’t want to be here. As far as I was concerned, that made him just as guilty as Blake.
On one of our many jaunts around the extensive grounds, I’d discovered a compost heap. I was willing to bet that would cover my scent for a while. I’d been able to smell it long before I’d seen it, even with my shifter senses muted by the cuffs. No way would anyone be able to block out that.
I just had to find a way to get out of my room without Dean noticing. And I had to do it soon, because in three days the rest of the students would arrive, and the castle would get a whole lot busier. And then I’d be stuck here.
Tonight. I was going tonight. Dean was already asleep, the cloud cover outside was heavy, and if I didn’t go now, there was no telling if I’d get another opportunity this good. I moved my duvet aside and carefully climbed out of the bed. I’d gone to bed fully clothed, pretending to get changed while Dean was in the bathroom. I glanced at him to make sure he hadn’t heard my bed springs – there was no telling how good his hearing was – then stooped to grab my trainers. I carried them to the door, not wanting to risk making any more noise than I had to, and crept across the floor, throwing a glance at my roommate with every other step.
Carefully, I eased the handle down, wincing as the metal mechanism scraped quietly, but sleeping beauty just rolled over in his bed, and carried on sleeping. Good. I didn’t want to have to fight him if he woke. For one thing, the noise was sure to bring someone down on us. For another, he’d probably kick my arse. Neither scenario sounded particularly fun to me.
I snuck through the door and pulled it to behind me, not wanting to risk the sound of it closing disturbing him. I was in the long corridor lined with identical doors. I figured each of them had to be another room, and I figured each of them had its own bathroom, like ours. That was a lot of assumptions, and I had another. I assumed none of the rooms were locked, or capable of locking – because if they were, it meant ours was, and if our door was capable of being locked, Blake would have done it. And if Blake had done it, well, I wouldn’t be standing in a corridor, tugging my running shoes on.
Getting out through one of the other rooms was my best bet. So far as I could tell, the castle had two main entrances – one at the front, and one at the back. They were both kept locked after dark – whether that was to keep the werewolves in, or something else out, I had no idea. I wasn’t sticking around to find out.
The dorm rooms were two floors up – probably not high enough that I was going to do any lasting damage, but enough to put an end to my little escape attempt if I jumped. Luckily, I had a better idea than that.
I counted four rooms along, hopefully far enough that Dean wouldn’t be able to hear me, then tried the door. I was right, it wasn’t locked. The room was identical to mine, except for the notable lack of a sleeping werewolf. I pulled the door shut behind me and crossed quickly to the bathroom. I opened the window, stuck my head out, looked left and right, then ducked back inside and closed it. No good. I headed for the next room.
I tried four rooms before I found what I was looking for. Attached to the wall beside the bathroom window was a water pipe. I reached out and gave it a gentle tug, but it didn’t budge. A glance down at the ground told me I was going to be in trouble if it did.
Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Do or die. Now or never. And a dozen other such clichés. I sucked in a deep breath, then swung one leg out of the window. I edged along until I could wrap it around the pipe, still straddling the window, then reached out and wrapped my arms around it. One more deep breath, then I lurched out of the window and clung to the pipe like a circus monkey. I looked down and the ground swam before my eyes. What in the name of ever-loving fuck was I doing? A freaking drainpipe!
I ground my teeth together. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t staying here as a damned prisoner, just because some feral mutt bit me. I wasn’t willing to give up my future for that. I was going to study law, and no pack of overgrown dogs was going to stop me.
I just had to get down this pipe first.
Piece of cake. I’d grown up climbing trees on the farm. Of course, I’d also fallen out of one and broken my arm. Just… don’t look down.
I wrapped my feet around the pipe and shimmied down it a couple of inches, then slid my clammy palms down. And again. And again. It was a slow process, and my muscles started aching before I was even a quarter of the way down. I’d spent too much time in the city. I was out of shape. By the time I was halfway down, the half-healed scar on my calf was burning, and I gritted my teeth in pain each time I shuffled downwards. This whole damned thing was taking too long. Dean could wake up at any moment and realise I was gone.
I pushed the pain aside and worked faster. I was three quarters of the way to the bottom when I hit the patch of ice.
My foot lurched and slid out from under me, the jolting motion pulling my other foot loose, too. I scrabbled frantically, desperately trying to find some purchase, every muscle in my arms and shoulders screaming out in protest as they took all my weight. My fingers curled, trying to dig into the pipe while my body swung unpredictably, but there was no purchase, and I could feel them slipping. One of my nails snapped, then another, sending tiny lances of pain through my hands, and I watched helplessly as my fingers came away from the pipe.
I plummeted to the ground and hit it hard, knocking the wind from me. I laid there a moment, staring up at the moonless sky and waiting for the pain to fade. I was lucky. If I’d fallen from much further… I shook my head, and rolled over onto my front, then pushed myself to m
y feet.
Pain lanced through my right ankle and I cried out, then bit down on my lip and stifled the rest of the sound. I couldn’t let them find me now. No way could I explain away climbing down a pipe in the middle of the night.
I tentatively eased my weight onto my right ankle again and hissed in pain. Not broken, but probably sprained. That wasn’t good. But not bad enough to stop me getting out of here, either. I hobbled along, keeping to the shadows as best I could, and ignoring the pain each step sent through me.
By the time I reached the treeline, I was panting with the exertion, but the pain had eased off a little. Not enough that I was looking forward to climbing out of here, but enough that maybe I could manage it. But first, I had to disguise my scent.
It looked different out here in the dark, and the trees towered over me ominously. A few animals scurried around in the trees, chittering in alarm at my approach, but I paid them no attention. The only truly dangerous animal here was in the castle, still fast asleep. I hoped.
It took me a few minutes of stumbling around in the dark before I found what I was looking for. The compost heap. I pulled a face, then thrust a hand into it, and rubbed some of the rotting mulch over my arms, torso, and all over the soles of my shoes. My nose wrinkled at the acrid scent, but that could only be a good thing. If it smelled that strongly to me, there was no way any of the shifters would be able to track my scent through it.
Fuck’s sake. Seriously. What had my life become?
When I figured I was smeared in enough of the mulch, I hobbled away from the heap, taking care not to snag my bad ankle on any of the protruding tree roots. I was pretty sure the wall was this way. I kept pushing ahead in the darkness, doing my best to keep to a straight line, and eventually I was rewarded with the sight of a tall, dark shape looming ahead. The wall.
How long had I been out here? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Longer? Too long. I needed to get gone before Dean woke up.
I stared up at the massive stone structure. This was all that was separating me from my freedom. It was tall. Taller even than I remembered, and I wasn’t looking forward to scaling it with a bad ankle. But I hadn’t come this far just to go back to the castle with my tail between my legs. There were plenty of trees nearby. I just needed to climb up one, then crawl along a branch, and then onto the wall. If I chose a big enough tree, I’d be most of the way to the top. The wall was old, and it had seen better days. The rough stone it was hewn from lent itself perfectly to hand and foot holds, especially further towards the top where it wasn’t as well maintained. I could get over it.
Fur 'n' Fang Academy: The Complete Series: A Shifter Academy Adventure Page 4
