Werewolves 101
By Marisa Claire
Academy of Shifters Copyright © 2019 by Torment Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Academy of Shifters: Werewolves 101
Marisa Claire
www.tormentpublishing.com
www.marisaclaire.com
Printed in the United States of America
Contents:
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER ONE
“So, which house are you hoping to get in?”
I dropped a pair of jeans back into my half-unpacked suitcase and turned toward the chipper voice of my new roommate, who kept blabbering on about the pros and cons of her two picks without even waiting for my reply. She sat on the edge of her twin bed across the room—AKA six feet away—swinging her feet a good three inches above the gray tiled floor. Her blue-streaked black hair stood out sharply against the white cinder block wall, and her wide brown eyes were practically swirling with magic.
In other words, she was exactly the sort of person I had been trying to get away from when I chose the solid, no-nonsense Keller Parks State College for my alma mater. And yet here she was…
I had already forgotten her name. It had been right there next to mine in glittering, construction paper letters on the outside of the heavy wooden door we’d be sharing until sometime next May. And she’d introduced herself just twenty minutes earlier when I’d slunk through that door after her overly doting parents finally went away. But social graces had never really been my thing, even under the best of circumstances—which these were clearly not.
I glanced down at her shirt like maybe she’d be wearing a name tag to help me out. Instead, I came face-to-face with a screen print of those dudes from that demon hunter TV show that was never going to do me the solid of just going off the freakin’ air.
An irritated sigh escaped me. “Listen, uh…Nikki—?”
Please be her name.
“Um, actually, it’s Hickoree.” She extended her arms like branches above her head with an animated sway. “Like the tree. But with two e’s… like a tree.”
“Of course it is.” I blew a breath out through my lips. “Listen, Hickoree, we’d better get this out of the way right now before you start unpacking your wand collection, expecting me to be impressed.”
She glanced at the cardboard box to her left.
Ha, called it.
I held up my hands as if I could push all that geek energy away. “I’m not into that stuff. Like, however into it you are? That’s how not into it I am. So, if we’re going to be sharing this cell for the next nine months, let’s make a pact right now that you keep all your funky-pop dragons or whatever on that side of the room…”
She glanced at the cardboard box to her right and pinched her lips together.
Ha, called it again.
I thrust my right hand out to her. “… and I won’t throw any of them out the window. Deal?”
Hickoree slammed her hands to the boxes. I could pretty much hear the voice in her head wondering whether or not this threat was grounds to request a new roommate. Probably because the voice in mine had already been there, considered that. But Hickoree would’ve filled out the same Campus Housing Compatibility Form I did, the one with plenty of room to list our deal breakers on the last page, and I was certain that where I’d written “no book nerd weirdoes” she’d written “no normal people like Remi St. James.”
Someone had done this to us on purpose.
Finally, Hickory must’ve come to the same conclusion, because she grasped my hand for the briefest of handshakes, as though my allergy to whimsy might be contagious.
“Deal,” she said. “But just so you know, the sorting ceremony is kind of, well, mandatory.” She bit her glossy lower lip and winced like she thought I might slap her.
I tilted my head. “I beg your pardon?”
Hickoree handed me a bright orange piece of paper from the desk between our beds. It was the itinerary for Welcome Week, and, sure enough, scheduled for tonight in bold black letters:
SORTING CEREMONY 7 PM (MANDATORY).
“What the actual hell?” I exploded, staring at the words. “This is outrageous! This has to be some sort of infringement of my rights!”
Hickoree raised an eyebrow. “And what rights would those be, exactly?”
A whoosh of dizziness slammed into my brain. I raked a hand through my brown waves and felt beads of sweat forming on my forehead. Even I knew that was an extreme overreaction to the dorm’s stupid freshmen icebreaker party, but still, I couldn’t seem to get a grip. The orange paper rattled in my trembling hands.
“Trust me,” I choked out. “This is a direct violation of my liberty and pursuit of happiness.”
“Well, two out of three ain’t bad. At least your life isn’t in danger,” Hickoree offered, and now I did want to slap her because it wasn’t fair that she was sitting there cool as a cucumber while I—the normal person—forgot how breathing worked.
I slapped the paper down on the desk instead and sank onto my bare mattress next to the single suitcase holding all my belongings. “How much time do I have to find a different college where this sort of thing doesn’t happen?”
Hickoree shifted in the midst of her fortress of cardboard boxes, reaching for her phone. My stomach turned. Nobody brings their entire childhood bedroom to college, which meant this girl still had more of this crap at home. Just like the half a dozen fangirl foster “sisters” I’d known over the years, each one more determined than the last to be the homewrecker in my committed relationship with reality.
“Thirty minutes,” Hickoree said.
“That’s not enough time, is it?”
She shook her head. “Probably not.”
“Okay. Fine. I can do this.” I slapped my hands on my knees.“But first, I’m going to take a walk. Yes. That’s what I’ll do.”
But when I stood, all of my blood rushed into my head—or maybe away from my head, it was honestly impossible to tell. I just knew it was rushing, like it had some very important place to be with or without me. What I didn’t know was that my knees were buckling, at least not until Hickoree’s hand shot out and steadied me.
“I’m okay,” I blurted before she could ask. “I’m fine. Really. Just need some air. This room is so small. Isn’t it small? And hot. Wow.”
Her big brown eyes bounced around the walls of what was actually a fairly decent-sized room, finally landing on me, full of pity. “Well, it is the third floor. They do say heat rises.”
I tugged at the collar of my shirt. “They do s
ay that. Okay. I’m gonna go.”
Her forehead wrinkled. “Do you want me to come with?”
I shook my head and waved her off me. “Nope. You stay right here. I bet you’ve got like a whole cosplay thing to put on for this.”
“No, I was thinking for this I’d just wear the scarf. Maybe tip the scales in the right direction, but not totally embarrass myself if I get the wrong—” She clamped her lips together and mumbled, “Sorry.”
“S’ok,” I mumbled back, willing my legs not to stagger as I made my way to the door, trying not to think about the trail of striped scarves I’d left in donation boxes around Alabama. Gifts from all those foster “sisters” who’d lost my number the second their parents shipped me on to the next house.
I turned back with my hand on the knob. “You know it’s still like ninety degrees out?”
She cocked her head. I waved my own question out of the air.
“Wait,” she said, wiggling her phone at me. “Should we exchange numbers, just in case…?”
“Just in case what?” I laughed. “Oh no… you’re one of those girls who forgets your keys, aren’t you?”
She smiled and kind of rolled her eyes. “You sure do know me already.”
I started out the door.
“Remi, seriously. If we’re going to be roommates, I think we should exchange numbers.”
With a sigh, I turned around and rattled off my number, then dutifully plugged hers into my phone.
“Thank you,” she called as I swung out the door.
I popped my throbbing head back into the room. “Hey, Hickoree? If you do lose your keys, how about you just call it back with one of your wands?”
***
I could have been nicer. I should have been nicer. I knew that. Hickoree seemed like a perfectly likable person. Just because we had wildly different tastes in pop culture, that didn’t give me license to treat her like crap. I’d need to apologize when I got back. Start fresh. Same ground rules, but… fresh.
My head felt better already as I wandered the campus with nice long strides and big deep breaths. I would need to explain to Hickoree about my anxiety attacks. The last thing I needed was her thinking I was some sort of basket case who had actually reacted that poorly to a stupid sorting ceremony, which I knew was just an elaborate trick to get everyone in the dorm to pitch in with chores for the sake of earning points that would ultimately add up to nothing more than a year-end pizza party from some third-rate local chain.
No, the dizziness, the weakness—the rushiness?— that had been going on for months. It started sometime between my birthday and graduation. Mrs. Baker, the guidance counselor, told me I was just stressing too much about college; I’d do just fine in life wherever I ended up going. But I knew that already. The cool thing about being a relentlessly practical person is that you don’t give yourself over to any pie-in-the-sky fantasies—not the wizards and dragons kind, nor the rich and famous in real life kind. All I had to do was go to college—any college—get a sensible degree like nursing or accounting, snag a job that paid well enough so I could buy a house—nothing fancy—and never have to move again for as long as I lived.
Reasonable, achievable dreams. That was my philosophy.
So why do I feel like I’m about to die half the time?
Up ahead, a cluster of future frat jerks were cat-calling girls from the steps of their dorm, so I cut across the grassy lawn toward the student center where I’d bought my books—about real things like Health and Public Speaking—earlier that day. Sweat trickled down my neck, but the normal kind that comes with August in Alabama, not the freaking out over nothing kind. A clock tower loomed over the courtyard, and in the same moment that I noticed it, the heavy bells inside began to chime.
Seven o’clock. Party time.
My phone buzzed, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. It never buzzed.
Pulling it out of my back pocket, I took one glance at the screen and my eyes nearly rolled out of my head.
Where are you?
My first text from Hickoree. But at least she’d spelled all the words out.
Ten points to whatever house she’s hoping for.
I looked back in the direction of the dorm, then ahead of me, past the clock tower, to a shadowy area in the distance between two brick buildings. Somehow I knew that was where I needed to be.
My phone buzzed again.
Please come back.
Seriously? I’ve been gone what? Fifteen minutes? She can’t miss me that much.
I chewed on my lip and glanced at the dark space between the two buildings again. I absolutely did not need to be in the shadows between two buildings on the far side of campus. That was the opposite of sane, the one thing I had always prided myself on being.
Until recently.
My phone buzzed yet again, and I glanced down at a wall of text.
I don’t want to seem clingy, but you seem like someone who bathes regularly, and that was something I did specifically ask for in a roommate, so in spite of our obvious differences, I would just as soon you not get kicked out and replaced by someone who likes good fiction but doesn’t bathe.
Huh. I had specifically asked for that, too. Maybe the algorithm just ranked priorities differently.
On my way, I texted back.
And then headed straight for the shadows.
***
Another weird thing I’d been doing that summer? Sleepwalking.
My last foster family had agreed to let me stay until college started, but they changed their mind when they found me naked in the backyard one hot July night. I must have gone for a walk and then decided to come home and go sleep skinny dipping—Now that’s a bright idea, Remi—because my hair was full of leaves, and I never even found the pajamas I know I went to bed in that night.
Whatever my unconscious reasoning had been, the result was the same. I took one look across the yard at my foster parents’ horrified faces, swirling with the pale blue light bouncing off their swimming pool, and I knew they were assuming I’d been up to something much worse. It wasn’t worth arguing. I packed my things.
The rest of the summer had been rough, but everything had turned out alright. I was officially a college girl now. My reasonably happy ever after was on its way.
The shadows between the two brick buildings turned out to be a forest, and when I paused at its edge to study the sign announcing this was some sort of nature preserve cared for by the Environmental Science and Biology departments, with the help of some generous endowments from several fraternities and sororities, I definitely wasn’t sleeping.
But I still felt asleep. Like I had stepped into one of the bizarre dreams that had accompanied my later summer sleepwalking excursions; the scary ones when I didn’t live in a house with other people, but a tent at random campgrounds that cost two bucks a night. The dreams I wouldn’t have told anybody about even if I’d had anybody to tell because they were so wild, so wacky, so totally un-Remi.
My phone buzzed, but I left it in my pocket as I stepped onto the narrow trail cutting into the woods. My ears roared as my blood began rushing.
Where is it going? I need to follow.
The sky above me had fractured into dozens of darkening blue shapes between a thick canopy of leaves. I ran my fingers over the crooked columns of rough bark lining the trail and wondered if any of them were hickories. If so, maybe I could take a thumbs-up selfie to assure my overeager roommate I was alive and well.
But would that seem friendly, or mean?
My phone buzzed, but when I reached for it, dizziness swept over me like a wave, tipping me forward onto my hands and knees. From that angle, the trail glowed like someone had marked it with fluorescent gold graffiti. Stupid frat boys.
Crawling forward, I did have to admit that whatever it was, it smelled amazing. Not like paint at all. Like something good enough to eat.
I licked my lips. My mouth suddenly felt so wet. I’d forgotten to eat. There hadn’t been time yet to
do any shopping to fill the tiny fridge I now shared with a weirdo book nerd named Hickoree who’d probably already stocked it with homemade meals from her perfect home—like leftover roast beef or chicken casserole. I thought about turning back, asking if I could have a bite and return the favor later. I was an okay cook. You learn to make yourself useful when you’re borrowing other people’s parents.
Oh crap… there’s probably a pizza at the sorting ceremony—why am I such a dummy? That’s where I need to be.
But I kept going. My stomach growled. My head spun. Maybe I was dizzy so often because I wasn’t eating enough. All the more reason to keep following the graffiti trail. There was something at the end of it better than pizza, better than chips and dip or leftover casserole.
As I picked up my pace, tiny rocks and pine needles jabbed into my palms and the pads of my feet. I couldn’t remember taking off my shoes, but I no longer felt them weighing me down. Actually, I didn’t feel anything weighing me down. The dizziness was gone. The sweating was gone. My blood had settled in my veins, and I could hear it quietly pumping like a gentle stream. I held my head high and broke into a trot.
Weeds and low-hanging branches brushed my nose and my ears as I followed that irresistible trail deeper and deeper into the nature preserve. My phone hadn’t buzzed in forever. Hickoree must have gotten busy meeting all the other nerds who lived for fairy tales. I’d never been happier to be above all that. Real life suited me just fine. Nature, now that’s where it was at. You never heard Ralph Waldo or Henry David whining because they hadn’t gotten their magic school acceptance letters. They were happy with what actually exists.
The graffiti trail led me into a clearing and then vanished. Turning in a circle, I inhaled deeply, trying to pick up the scent. I peered back down the trail to see where I’d missed it, but there was only a still, black tunnel leading back through the trees.
An owl hooted and my muzzle pointed toward the open circle of sky. The stars sparkled like a big city skyline reflected in a river. My ears pricked forward. The whole universe sang. Joy bubbled up from somewhere deep inside me. Joy, but also terrible longing. Loneliness coursed through my veins, but my eyes wouldn’t make any tears.
Academy of Shifters: Werewolves 101 Page 1
