Great. Another reason for Elaine to hate her. Not that it mattered at this point. Although Ava's lips turned up slightly at the satisfaction of knowing Elaine was actually jealous of her budding friendship with Tarun. Serves you right, Ava thought.
Her concerns about Elaine and her petty problems dissolved from her mind the moment she and Winta stepped into the school's extremely ancient library.
Because she had been opting to get outside as much as possible since she made it to the school, rather than be cooped up, this was her first time inside the library itself. And it was quite a sight to behold. Like every other part of the academy, it was overwhelming—in size and ornate decoration. Massive shelves, mounted side by side, stretched from one end to the other, top to bottom. Set up like dominoes. That would be quite the mess if one domino fell over! There had to be hundreds of thousands of books. Ava couldn't even see the end of one shelf. And every single one was stuffed full.
Students, mostly foxes, wolves, rabbits and a few assorted others, sat at wooden desks, crouched over heavy dusty tomes. Someone dimmed the lighting to an uncomfortable level, even in the reading areas. And it smelled like dust, leather, and burned wood. Ava didn't care for that scent though, it gave her a headache. Honestly, she didn't like being inside at all. Back in Miami, she’d been part of the track team, which meant a lot of time outside, just the way she liked it. And during the summers, she went to the beach with her friends. Her mother always said it was weird that she was so outdoorsy because house cats were supposed to prefer the indoors. Lucy certainly did.
Winta seemed to know exactly where she was going. Weaving between the shelves, carefully avoiding ladders, she finally stopped in front of a shelf marked "Alumni."
Ava stepped right next to her. "So many yearbooks," she breathed. The shelf alone was huge. It went from floor to ceiling, so these yearbooks probably went back several hundred years.
The four of them, Ava, Winta, Tarun, and James, stood together looking at the plethora of books in awe. "Our names will be in here soon, too," Tarun whispered.
"Indeed." Winta nodded.
"Have you ever been down here?" Tarun asked James.
James twiddled the flowers he plucked from the bushes between his fingers. Ava assumed he just hadn't gotten the nerve to give them to Winta yet. "Sure, once. What are we doing here?" He watched Winta as she traced her finger across the spines of several books in a row.
"Matthew Carrington, Ava's father, supposedly attended Animage," Tarun explained.
"Oh, really?" James's eyes grew wide. "So he must have been way more than a tabby cat then, right?"
"Dude." Tarun glared at him. “Way more than a tabby cat? What the hell is wrong with you? Do you hear yourself when you speak?"
Ava just shook her head. Winta ignored all of them.
"No! I just mean that, being a tabby-cat shifter wouldn't have gotten him into this school. Unless maybe he was Australian?"
"I guess that's possible," Ava agreed. She hadn't thought of that, actually. But that could really be the only explanation. The academy never would've allowed a non-Australian tabby-cat shifter.
"There's no way." Tarun scrunched up his brow. "I mean no offense, Ava, but even as a native Australian, Animage wouldn't have allowed a tabby-cat shifter before this year. There are a lot of Australian wolves that didn't even get in unless they came from a rich and powerful pack. This school has always been super selective."
"Until now," Ava grumbled. "And still, none of us know why."
"Hey now, I'm not complaining," James pointed out. "I wouldn't be here either if it weren't for the new rule. So I get it, Ava."
That was true. Of the four of them standing there, James was definitely the only other one who really understood. But he knew exactly where his parents were. So it still wasn't quite the same.
"But you seriously didn't know your dad used to be a student here?" James asked Ava.
Ava shook her head, her hair falling in front of her face as she did so. "No idea. My mom never talked about him. And I don't even know if he's alive. I've never met him. I couldn't even get her to tell me his name until a few years ago."
"I'm so sorry." James looked at his feet. "Here." He shoved the flower at Ava.
Ava looked down at the flower in surprise and then cast a sideways glance at Winta. Winta was looking at her with an expression of…well, Ava didn't know what that expression was. Confusion? Amusement? Jealousy? She really had no clue. "Oh. Well, thank you, James." She accepted the flower from him, not knowing what else to do.
James grinned, but then looked at Winta, and his face fell, clearly thinking he had made a horrible mistake. He opened his mouth, as if to make some sort of excuse, when Winta put him out of his misery—she cleared her throat loudly. "Got it!" She pulled one yearbook from the shelf and started thumbing through it.
"Is that really it?" Ava questioned her. "How do you know?"
"Well, if it isn't this one, it will be one of these." Winta tapped her pointer finger on the adjacent yearbooks to where the one she was holding sat on the shelf just moments before. "He would have attended between ages sixteen and twenty. You think he was around your mother's age, which you said is forty, so if he was born forty years ago, he would have attended the academy between twenty and twenty-four years ago, so…" Winta extended the yearbook she was holding out toward Ava and gave it a little shake. "This should be right in the middle of that timeframe."
"All right. I can't argue with that logic. Very well done." Ava gave her friend an approving nod.
After a few moments of silence, Winta slammed the yearbook shut. "Okay, it's not this one," she said as she grabbed hold of the ladder in front of her, stepped up one rung, and slid the book back in among the others, extracting the one next to it in its place.
Same thing.
This time, Winta pulled down four yearbooks and handed one to each of them as she stepped down to the floor.
Each of them opened to the front few pages and started scanning the table of contents.
After looking through the names, at the bottom of the very first page, Ava saw it: Matthew Carrington. "I found him," she whispered. "I found my dad."
The others looked up and closed the books they were holding, giving her their full attention. They gathered around her. Winta put a comforting hand on her shoulder, and Tarun slid his hand against her lower back. Normally, Ava would freak out about that, but she was too busy freaking out about this now instead.
She closed the yearbook again and admired the black leather front cover. There was a stamp across the front with the griffin seal, just like on her application.
Ava's heart went into overdrive. The implications were limitless. Perhaps she could finally know who the man was that abandoned them. She would finally get to see what he looked like. Maybe she could even track him down, if he's still alive, and punch him in the face for leaving, and of course get an apology for her mother. "I'm so nervous." She wiped her palm on her dress and then petted the griffin seal on the cover.
"I’d be nervous, too," Winta agreed with her. "It's a big deal."
Ava smiled tightly. She was too strung up to walk over to the desk chairs. So instead, she just plopped right down on the tiled floor, crossed her legs, and opened the book again. Her friends piled down next to her, leaning in close.
She turned to the first page.
"Oh, is that Levine? She looks the same!" Tarun exclaimed.
Ava nodded absentmindedly, flipping the pages quickly, even sneezed hard at the dust a few times. Apparently no one thought to clean these books…ever.
She saw Professor Bills and Sir Waters as well. Neither of them had aged as gracefully as Headmistress Levine. Shockingly, Professor Bills used to be quite handsome.
"The page numbers are so faded it's hard to even read them!" Ava complained. Several minutes of page flipping—and a bit of cussing—later, she stopped. "That's him."
"Oh, wow, it sure is!" Tarun agreed. "You really do look just
like him!"
Ava sat there staring, open mouthed, at the picture of a boy, dour faced and serious. "My mother is blonde," she whispered, running her fingers over it. His hair was brown, that ugly, dirty brown, just like hers. And his eyes, his eyes were just like hers as well. She wondered what kind of cat shifter he was. Why was there no mention of the students’ shifter species in there along with their name and graduation year? Shouldn’t that be important to mention? And also, why hadn't she taken after him—whatever he was—instead of her mom's tabby? Interestingly enough, his eyes didn't look quite as catlike as Ava's, but they were definitely the same eyes.
His roughly cut hair was down almost to his neck, and he had an impish, slightly mischievous look about him. His nose turned up at the end, very much like Ava's, and his upturned collar proved he didn't much care about his appearance.
"Yeah, Ava, if you were a boy, that's what you would look like, for sure," James agreed.
Ava tried to chuckle, but it suddenly clogged in her throat. "But why didn't mom tell me?" she asked, more to herself than the others.
"She must have had a good reason," Winta offered, petting Ava's back.
But that wasn't what Ava wanted to hear. Without being able to control herself, she spat out, "Damn her stupid reasons! I deserved to know!" She shoved the book off her lap and jumped up in one leap.
"Ava," Tarun cooed, trying to put his arm around her, "it's okay, just calm—"
Winta tried to wave Tarun down as he attempted to soothe her, but it was too late.
"Don't tell me to calm down! This is all their fault! Both of them! Every day, I feel lost. I don't know anything about that half of me. I didn't even know my hair was dark because of him!"
She started to pace back and forth down the aisle. "First thing I'm gonna do tomorrow morning is write her a very scathing letter. She is going to get quite the earful—or eyeful, I guess... Whatever."
"Yes, you could do that. Oooor, you could find out more…" Tarun suggested.
"But the letter first."
"Are you always this impulsive?"
"Shut up, Tarun."
She was in no mood to be talked out of her very justified anger. Her parents had betrayed her. Both of them. And she would make them pay. Both of them. Assuming her father was still alive, anyway. She would find him, and she would make him sorry.
15
"Please, and I will not ask you again, get out of my way," Tarun growled. He stood in the hall just outside the library, facing Elaine, Deacon, Colin, and a few of their friends.
Just what he wanted. It turned out Elaine had followed him and watched him go into the library with the others, and then gathered reinforcements. Was she even capable of not causing drama?
Almost every passerby couldn't resist staring as he raised his voice at the pissy bird.
Ava and Winta had already walked off, for obvious reasons. And he couldn't blame them for not wanting to deal with Elaine. But James still stood by his side, the faithful and consistent friend he was.
"Don't tell me you’ve fallen for her little innocent act because that's all it is, you know: an act," Elaine insisted.
"I didn't fall for anyone, Elaine. You gotta stop this crap. What exactly do you even want from me? Do you just not want me to have friends, or do you want me all to yourself? Is that it?"
"No! I mean, you know what? You can have as many friends as you want. But I would think you would know better than to hang out with her." Her voice dripped loathing.
"She's right though, you know," Deacon added in. "I mean, I get it. I think she's hot, too. But not at all worth talking to. And her little woe-is-me act is pretty sad. She obviously just wants attention."
"There is no woe-is-me act, Deacon, don't be such a jerk." Tarun knew there wasn't much of a point in arguing, but he couldn't help wanting to defend her.
"You should really be more conscientious of who you spend your time with," one of Elaine's flock—Lois he thought her name was—spoke up this time. "Present company does not suit you." As she said the last words, Lois gave James a side glance.
James stiffened next to him.
Oh, no, she did not.
"None of my friends have done a single thing to you." Tarun said the first part to Lois, and then he turned his attention back to Elaine. "They've done nothing to deserve the way you treat them, which is like dirt."
"But that's what they are if you think about it. They’re filthy little animals. Well, except for the massive one—she's a filthy, gigantic mass of a beast."
Tarun knew exactly what was coming, and he threw his arm out to the side just in time. James had tried to leap forward to attack Elaine for what she said about Winta. Tarun couldn't blame James, but he knew that would not help the situation. None of the school staff would welcome James attacking Elaine. They would probably suspend or even expel him. Especially because Elaine had a prestigious family, and James was just a hummingbird.
"Elaine, listen to yourself. Do the words you're spewing honestly make sense to you? Ava is the sweetest, kindest person I've met in a long time. She's honest and friendly. Something you wouldn't understand." The further on he went, the more flushed his face felt. His palms folded in on themselves, tightening into fists. Sure, he had restrained James, but for now, the only way he prevented himself from pouncing on that bitchy bird was by reminding himself that he was taught never to hit a woman. He could feel his tiger just itching to come out and take care of her.
Her jaws snapped and popped intermittently from the gum she was chewing as she stared back at him, stroking her long blonde hair. Considering her vacant expression, he wasn't sure she'd even heard what he'd said.
"Everything okay here?" One of the library attendants had heard the commotion and come out to check.
Tarun took a few steps backward and jerked his head up and down. "Everything is perfect, Mr. Jerome."
Elaine also nodded her head in agreement and then had the audacity to reach over and interlace her fingers in Tarun's. She twirled her hair between her slender fingers, rolled her eyes, and stretched a plastic smile across her face.
As the library attendant grunted and walked away, Tarun yanked his hand away from Elaine so quickly it felt like he could have pulled something out of socket. Fortunately, he hadn't allowed himself to give in to his urge to hurt any of them, after all, there was a zero-tolerance policy at the school for fighting—pretty important rule when you have a school full of people who turn into wild animals. He stalked away. And he’d missed it, but James had already gone.
Elaine, with a flip of her hair, gathered Lois and her other stupid birds, and started after him, but—thankfully—maintained her distance. He could still hear them squawking. Deacon and Colin must be close as well because Tarun could hear their voices in the mix.
But he did wonder where James had gotten off to...that conversation couldn't have been fun for him to witness.
The next class was as awkward as could be because they were all together. It was a class for predators only, so James, Ava, and Winta weren't there. But Tarun was stuck with Deacon, Colin, Elaine, and the rest of her ditzy flock.
He had taken the shortcut from the library to his next class just so he could avoid any more confrontation than necessary. It was general training in the largest training room in the school. The same one the oversized shifters used for combat training on Mondays and Wednesdays. He would have skipped the class that day, but it was Headmistress Levine's class, and missing it would have been, well, bloody.
So he did his best not to interact with the others as much as possible. He went through the motions, morphed when he had to, roared, pretended to stalk his prey, and roared some more.
He usually liked Levine's class. It allowed him to indulge the tiger within him. She taught them how to hunt as the animals they were. Which is why it was strictly for predators. There wasn't much she could have trained a hummingbird to do. And after all, it was imperative for them to learn how to survive in the wild as wel
l as indoors.
And of course, at one point, the headmistress had teamed him up with Elaine. He was hoping to avoid her the most, but, to his relief, she studiously avoided him as well. She even avoided his eyes when they were forced to attack each other. She gave a half-hearted attempt at dive-bombing him and dodged out of the way just as he made to swipe at her with his massive claws. A few more times she got close enough to be touched, but she flounced out of reach before he could get to her.
Fine by him.
By the end of class, he was more than ready to go. Entering the hallway, he immediately caught a whiff of Ava's scent as she waltzed past him. Her head held high and shoulders straight. Winta at her side.
"Elaine's right, you know," Deacon said, appearing at Tarun's side and noticing the direction of his hungry gaze.
Tarun rolled his eyes. "About what? Don't tell me she's gotten to you, too?"
Deacon adjusted his backpack on his shoulder. "I'm just saying she's right. Ava is a little tabby cat. Everybody here makes fun of her. And you are the legendary white Bengal tiger. People look up to you, Tarun."
"What the hell are you trying to say?" he questioned him as they turned to Gold, their dormitory.
"Just that you are one of the best shifters in our class. You have a lot of natural talent—heck, maybe you're the best shifter in the entire school. You might be better off if you stayed away from her. And you know I'm not the only one who thinks so," Deacon finished, stopping at the entrance to their room.
Tarun desperately wished James had been assigned as his roommate instead of Deacon. Then he wouldn't have to listen to this.
Deacon leaned on the wall next to the door, facing the stairs. That way he could greet people and be social while he still talked with Tarun.
"I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to feel however I like about whoever I please," Tarun huffed. "I've never heard any of you complain about James, and he's a smaller animal than Ava!"
"Are you kidding me?" Deacon raised a disbelieving eyebrow. "None of us would put up with James if you didn't insist on keeping him around all the time." He shifted his shoulder away from the wall and leaned in toward Tarun. "You'd be better off without him, too. And I think you'll figure that out as your time goes on here. When you leave the academy in four years and join the shifter combat district, like you know you’re destined for, it's not going to help you to have a hummingbird buzzing around your ears. You might as well get rid of your dirty laundry now."
Animage Academy: The Shifter School Down Under Year One Page 11
