My toes curled against the cobblestone, ready to make my run for it. “No, I’m not feeling shifty. At all.”
Laith stepped out from under the tower, and his copper cougar mask snarled in the moonlight. He held out his hand. “Well then, how about you come on over here?”
Helms lunged and shreds of champagne fabric flew through the air. The golden wolf’s paws hit the ground only once before it slammed into Laith’s chest, knocking him backward into the shadows under the tower.
I dashed toward the terrible snarling tangle of human and animal limbs rolling around on the porch. Shift, Laith! Why isn’t he shifting?!
The golden wolf, still draped in the blue cape, straddled Laith’s torso, snapping its jaws in the air as Laith gripped the sides of its head, holding it off his throat. I leapt the last few feet, crashing onto my knees in the billows my gown, but I caught the hem of the cape and yanked as hard as I could.
The wolf coughed, but kept straining against the little golden rope that held the cape around a neck that was much thicker than Helms’ human one. His teeth flashed next to Laith’s nose, even as the veins in Laith’s forearms seemed to bulge with the effort of holding the wolf off.
Why won’t he shift?!
I hauled back on the cape again, and then pulled, hand over hand, bunching the blue silk up in my lap until the golden wolf’s forepaws were in the air, only the tips of his claws scrabbling against the concrete. White foam dripped from the edges of his mouth and his eyes began to roll.
When Helms caught on to me, he must have realized there was only one way to ease the tension on the cape. With what must have been his last reserve of strength, he wrenched his head out of Laith’s hands and sprang for me.
But Laith’s legs, which had been trapped up under the weight of the wolf, unfurled with tremendous force and struck the wolf square in the ribs, spinning him around mid-air. The cape wrapped itself around Helms’ throat and I jerked one more time.
Helms landed on the cobblestones with a heavy thud.
He didn’t move.
Laith crawled over to me, flinging his mask aside. “Are you okay?”
I couldn’t tear my eyes off the limp wolf.
Did I kill him?
Laith’s fingers brushed my shoulder, but he pulled them back. “Remi, are you okay? Can you look at me?”
“Is he dead?” I whispered.
Laith leaned forward, pressing two fingers to the wolf’s neck. He shook his head and dug the fingers under the twisted cape, loosening it. “He’s alive.”
My eyes finally gave up their hold on the wolf and found Laith’s face, his hazel eyes wet with… With tears?
“Are you okay? Why didn’t you shift? Did he break you, too?”
“I didn’t shift because I would have killed him.” His brow furrowed. “What do you mean ‘break me, too’?”
“It was him. He’s the reason…” My hands gripped the blue cape. “He did something to me.”
Laith’s eyes widened in horror. His hands came up like he was going to touch me, but, once again, he pulled them back. His voice came out low and deadly. “What did he do to you?”
I shook my head. “No, no, not like that… I mean, maybe he would’ve if…” My voice hitched, but I shoved those feelings back down for now. “My wolf, Laith. He did something to my wolf. It’s like… he locked her up.”
Laith’s eyes fluttered shut and he sat back on his haunches. He rapped a fist against his skull. “Stupid. Why didn’t I—?”
I grabbed his wrist before he could do that again. “Whoa, what?”
“I should’ve known.” He settled for tugging at his hair. “Remi, I’m so sorry.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” My head hurt. My heart hurt. The last thing I needed right now was to be reassuring Laith that something that obviously wasn’t his fault was… not his fault.
Laith kicked a foot against the unconscious wolf’s back. “He’s a Manip. I should have sensed it right away.”
“I have no idea what that is.” I laughed, even though nothing was really funny. “Or why that makes this about you.”
“Because…” Laith dragged his fingers down the side of his face.
But before he could explain, a set of double doors slammed open, bathing us all in light—a girl in a torn ball gown, a guy in a ripped tuxedo, and a shifted professor lifeless on the ground.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The doors slammed shut.
A pair of heels clicked toward us in the darkness, accompanied by the swish of fabric moving quickly over concrete. My breaths stumbled all over each other in my throat until my lungs, unsure which ones were coming and which ones were going, shut the whole thing down. My chest froze up with the rest of me.
How will we ever explain this?
Laith scrambled to his feet. “Dean—”
Dean Mardone swept him aside with one arm and knelt beside me, creating an unsettling puddle of dark red fabric next to Helms’ prone form. She laid her fingers against his furry throat, as Laith had just done. Her eyelids closed and her shoulders sagged with relief.
“Well, you haven’t killed him.” She lifted her mask and her fierce green eyes traveled the length of Helms’ blue cape, from the part twisted around his neck to the folds still gathered in my lap. “But it certainly seems like you tried.”
“Dean Mardone—” Laith tried again.
She held up a silencing hand and hissed into my face, “What have you dragged Laith into, you shiftless little—”
“Lenore!” Laith roared.
Mardone’s gaze flicked upward. “Not now, Lai—”
“He’s a Manip,” Laith spat. “Helms is a Manip.”
Mardone’s lips parted, but no sound came out. Slowly, her eyes slid back to where her fingers still rested on Helms’ neck. His left paw twitched, and she yanked her hand back as though he were a venomous snake.
“No. Impossible.” She shook her head. “He’s just a wolf.”
“Rare,” Laith said, folding his arms over his chest. “Not impossible.”
Mardone held up her hand, and Laith obediently helped her up, but she didn’t release her hold on him. “This is a serious accusation, Laith,” she murmured, almost into his neck. “One that could easily backfire. Are you sure?”
Laith disentangled his fingers from her grip, but his eyes remain locked on hers. “He bound Remi’s wolf.”
Mardone gasped, the tiny sound of a particularly tricky puzzle piece clicking into place. “Do you have proof?”
Laith gestured at me. “Remi says—”
“Remi says.” Mardone let out a harsh laugh. “That’s your proof? A shiftless girl with a shameless crush says a professor manipulated her? Come on, Laith, you’re smarter than that. We all saw them dancing. Who’s to say he didn’t dash her dreams and she responded like…” she gestured at me and the cape and the still wolf, “… like some kind of feral?”
“Hey!” I struggled to stand without help, but I was tangled in what suddenly felt like miles and miles of silk. “That’s not… I’m not… ugh! Whose idea was this stupid masquerade anyway?!”
Laith offered me his hand, and since I didn’t want to spend the rest of the night being talked over like I wasn’t even there, I grabbed it.
Bad idea, Remi.
The moment our palms touched, a flurry of prickles shot up my arm, and Laith’s wrist stiffened like he’d received a jolt. The second I was steady on my legs, he dropped my hand and wiped his own on his pants. It was definitely the first time I’d ever found myself hoping my hands were just grotesquely sweaty, but the furtive glance he darted down at his open palm before stuffing it in his pocket left me worried.
Worse, Dean Mardone’s shrewdly arched eyebrows and pursed lips told me none of it had been lost on her.
“I’m not feral,” I snapped. “And I don’t even know what a Manip is. Those are Laith’s words, not mine. And yeah, maybe I should have called B.S. on a professor asking a student to danc
e, but that doesn’t make it okay that I can’t even remember how he got me outside. And don’t you dare ask if I was drinking! I haven’t had a drop of anything all night, and… and… and I’m actually really, really thirsty right now!”
I knew I hadn’t really stuck the landing of that speech, but the rush of words had made me acutely aware of the sandy, cactus-filled desert formerly known as my throat. A cough right then would have almost certainly produced a tumbleweed.
Mardone turned her chin toward Laith, but her eyes stayed on me. “Any old shifter—well, not a bear, of course—could cause time loss on that scale. You’ve no proof he’s a Manip.”
“Did you not hear me?” Laith growled. “He bound her—”
“Helms trapped my wolf,” I cut Laith off, because as much as I appreciated him showing up when he did, I was perfectly capable of telling my own story. And even though I would have much rather been talking to the Vice-Chancellor or Belhollow, the words poured out of me. Everything I knew about Helms from that first day in the stairwell to the moment he shifted with intent to kill.
Well, almost everything.
The two warnings about my scent-sight swirled in my mind. First, Ms. Shirley’s, which I had blindly followed without questioning because I hadn’t felt it was a plot thread much worth following in the crazy dream I believed I was having at the time, and then Helms’ tonight, which I would have blindly ignored as just another part of his ploy to isolate me had it not reminded me to be worried about Ms. Shirley’s warning now that I knew this was all really happening.
So I left that part out.
When I was finished telling her how Helms had tried to rip out Laith’s throat, Dean Mardone looked at me with something almost like admiration. “So you strangled him.”
I lifted my chin. “Yes.”
A faint smile twitched the edge of Mardone’s bright red lips. “Perhaps I’ve underestimated you, Miss St. James.” She turned back to Laith, her eyes hard. “You could have been killed. Why didn’t you shift?”
Laith’s back straightened. “I didn’t have time.”
Mardone laughed. “The truth, please?”
Laith’s jaw flexed. “Because I knew there wouldn’t be anything left of him if I did.”
“Well, it certainly would have been easier to open and shut this case if you had.” She sighed and shook her head. “Go up to my office and lock the door. Don’t come out until I come for you. I’ll take care of…” she waved her hand at Helms, whose ears were twitching, “… all this.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Laith said, reaching for my hand.
I yanked it away. “No way. I’m not going anywhere until the Gladwells get here.”
Whatever admiration Mardone may have felt for me a moment earlier dried up in an instant. She smiled at me with utter condescension. “I suppose you haven’t spent enough time as a wolf to understand this, but if another wolf—any wolf—walks out those doors and sees Professor Helms like this, the pack mind may very well take over. Laith could be ripped limb from limb.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Laith’s fingers brushed mine. “She’s right, Remi,” he said, and there was real fear trembling at the edges of my name. “We need to go. She’ll take care of us. Both of us.” He gave her a hard look.
“What are you going to do?” I demanded, stomach turning. “Finish him off?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Dean Mardone rolled her eyes like that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. “There’s no hiding a body from dogs.”
***
A spiral-horned skull hanging on the wall behind Mardone’s desk glowed blue in the light from her computer. Laith shut the door behind us, turning the lock with a soft click, as I felt along the wall for a light switch.
“Don’t,” he whispered, and then added, “I’m sorry. I know you’ve probably been alone in the dark with enough jerks for one night.”
“For one lifetime,” I muttered, rubbing the goosebumps that had popped up on my arms. “But I’m going to trust Victoria’s judgment on this one.”
“She wouldn’t steer you wrong.”
Laith crossed the room and plopped down in Mardone’s swiveling leather chair. The computer washed his features in the same eerie light that lit up the leering skull. I noticed for the first time he had a dark smudge over his left eye.
“You’re bleeding.” I touched what would be the same spot on my own forehead.
His brow furrowed and he winced. He touched the spot and then examined his fingertips. “Nah. Not anymore. What about you? All in one piece?”
“I’m afraid to ever look at my knees again, but yeah, I think so, basically.”
On the outside anyway.
“That was pretty bad ass.” The chair squeaked as he leaned back, grinning. “The thing with the cape.”
I grimaced. I really didn’t want to think about it—the weight of the wolf’s body pulling at the other end, his paws scratching at the air, the foam bubbling from his mouth. Just because he technically deserved it didn’t make the sense memories any less disturbing.
“That was a pretty impressive kick,” I said, because I really didn’t want to get into any of those feelings out loud right now.
Laith shrugged. His face grew serious. “We did what we had to do.”
I wandered deeper into the room, standing behind one of the chairs in front of the desk, stroking the polished wood at the top. Angry voices filtered up from two stories below.
“What did she mean about the pack mind taking over?” I whispered. “Is that a real thing or just wolf-hating hyperbole?”
“Oh, it’s real.” Laith snorted. “What do you think all that wolf music crap is for?”
I still hadn’t been able to participate in wolf music yet, obviously, but I’d sat through every three-hour long practice this semester, just watching and listening as all the other wolves on campus—students, professors, cafeteria workers, and groundskeepers—gathered in the amphitheater and howled at the moon. It didn’t do much for me, but I remembered the way it had felt to howl with the Gladwells in the limo, and the way I had once heard the stars sing.
My fingers gripped the back of the chair. “I thought it was just a weird choir.”
“Yeah, a weird choir designed to make your relationship with all other wolves, not just your pack, the strongest bond in your life.”
A shiver ran down my neck. “Pack minds, mental manipulators… they sure didn’t advertise all this in the promo video.”
Laith lifted his arms like, What can you do? “Come for the hot guy, stay for the gradual loss of free will.”
Helms’ warning echoed in my mind. You will become a slave, Remi.
A sharp howl rose up over the human voices outside. Laith’s head tilted, listening, and his sharp angles looked even sharper in the dim blue light.
“Laith?”
“It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not,” I snapped. “Well, I am, but not... I mean… are you safe in here with me? Could they make me hurt you?”
“One, a lone wolf would never stand a chance in a cat fight. Though I am still wearing this stupid cape…” He did the lip-biting thing that drove me crazy. “Two, pack mind isn’t that precise. It’s a blunt instrument. You’d have to actually be with the pack for it to really get to you. It barely even counts as a mental ability. More like extreme peer pressure.”
I stepped around the chair I’d been strangling—Just something I do now, I guess—and sank into the plush seat. My gown puffed up all around me, and I smoothed it down, vowing to never wear a dress this elaborate again, maybe not even to my wedding.
“Laith?” I asked again.
This time, he just lifted his eyebrows and made a sound of acknowledgement.
“You said Helms bound my wolf.” I played with one of the many tears in the fabric of my skirt. “And the way you said it… well, it sounded like some sort of known terminology. And Mardone reacted that way. But if…”
Laith
leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “Then why didn’t anyone think of it sooner?”
I nodded.
Laith sighed and raked both hands through his hair. “What do you know about shifter mental powers?”
Like being able to see things with my nose? But I wasn’t ready to tell anyone that secret yet.
“I know we can all communicate telepathically eventually, but I thought that was pretty much it.”
Laith scratched the back of his head and chewed on his lip, not in the sexy way—okay, it was still sexy—but in an almost manic way.
“Okay. Well. There’s a lot of stuff in between the basic telepathy even bears can manage and what a Manip like Helms can do. Things like laying fake scent trails to lure freshmen into the woods. Technically, that’s a manipulation, too, but…” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “There’s a sort of fail-safe mechanism with most mental abilities. You can’t use them on another trained shifter without them knowing. So, for instance, you can’t cheat on your mate and make them forget about it. They would feel you poking around in their head and hopefully dump you.”
Another howl cut through the night, followed by two more. My eyes drifted over my shoulder to the door.
“It’s locked, don’t worry. Only Mardone’s getting in here without knocking it down, and they’d have to recruit a bear to do that.”
“Dean Embry’s not my biggest fan.”
Laith chuckled. I settled back in my chair and tried to ignore the sounds outside.
“You were saying?”
“Right.” Laith cleared his throat. “So, a Manip is someone who can override that fail-safe. They can get inside another shifter’s head without them ever knowing. And Helms… well, he probably wasn’t just in your head, but the whole faculty’s. That’s why it never occurred to them.”
Just thinking about that man—that monster—inside my head made my mouth taste like his rotten stench all over again. I must have been smacking my lips or making a face because Laith swiveled his chair around, opened a tiny fridge that had been hiding behind him, and swiveled back, tossing me a bottle of water. I unscrewed the cap and guzzled the cold liquid down.
Academy of Shifters: Werewolves 101 Page 14
