by Cate Corvin
“Third semester will be work on your final project: your job will be to find and take down a Shadowed World anomaly, be it a moonspawn nest, a demon spawn-portal, or a vampire bleeding ground, as a team. No solitary work will be accepted for a grade. If you manage your final project without dying, Libra will be glad to see you all graduated as slayers with full honors.”
Constance Holmwood was as useless as a slayer came. Only Father’s blind, and frankly incomprehensible, obsession with the wispy blonde woman was keeping her alive now, holed up safe in Godalming Manor where no big, bad, scary demons could reach her.
She didn’t hold a candle to Michèle Godalming, and yet it was the superior slayer’s memory which had been erased like so much dust in the wind. I’d searched my home high and low, looking for any sign my mother had ever existed: a picture, a letter, even a strand of her red hair… but there was nothing. Since Constance and Victoria had walked into our lives, Father had erased every trace that Mother had lived there, hoping to make his new bride more comfortable.
All that was left of her was a white headstone in a quiet cemetery, remains forgotten and moldering underground.
I could thank Tori for that, for obliterating all traces of my mother, all because her own mother was an empty-headed little twit who couldn’t stand knowing she could never fill Michèle’s shoes.
The summer had been hell, having to see Father walk around with Constance always on his arm, acting like everything had always been happy and care-free. Like we hadn’t spent three years in stiff, cold silence, my mother’s absence a glacial gulf between us.
Then there was Tori, everywhere I looked. Father was so taken with her, running his thumb over the sickle-marks on her wrist, asking what flavor of fucking ice cream she and Constance liked best, outfitting the training room for her needs, offering her a full-ride scholarship to Libra to make his replacement wife happy…
I knew why he loved his new family so much, gloating over how beautiful they were, how nice it was to have life and happiness in the manor again. Because he didn’t have to think about Mother when he looked at them. He didn’t have to remember that her death was his fault.
But because I was hers, he would never see anything but Michèle when he looked at me.
I’d have taken the frigid coldness between myself and Father over knowing he’d replaced Mother like she’d been nothing but a footnote in our lives, when she’d really been the heart.
Tori sat back in her chair and Sura leaned a touch closer. Christ, if he needed to get laid that badly, he could have Apolline. Tori was off-limits.
I gritted my teeth as Knightley continued, limping to the desk and shuffling through his notes.
It would all be so much easier if my stepsister disgusted me on a physical level, but the memory of her moans last night was mixed with my memories of Tori back home in the training room, every curve of her body under the tight shorts and tank tops she wore, olive skin shining with sweat.
All the blood in my body rushed straight to my cock and I shifted uncomfortably. I could go find Selena again after class, provided she kept her mouth shut. After the music of Tori’s voice, Selena’s screaming would just sound like a half-dead beached whale.
Maybe I’d just gag her.
I’d closed my eyes while I was in Selena and imagined Tori’s long legs wrapped around my waist, her honey eyes heavy-lidded while she moaned in that slightly-raspy contralto, and came harder than I ever had in my life.
Self-loathing had immediately crashed over me in a sickening tidal wave.
She’d taken my place in Father’s heart, erased Mother, and thought she was the better slayer because she had a few more tattoos. Now she’d infected my mind against my will.
I’d fucking ruin her.
Sura leaned over and whispered in her ear, and she glanced at him with a faint smirk on her lips, her mouth opening to say something.
Her eyes drifted past him, catching me staring back at her.
It wasn’t hard to glare at people with total searing disdain. I’d perfected it by practicing on Father. She blanched and looked back at Knightley.
“Did you have something to share with the teams, Enver, Holmwood?” Knightley leveled his dark glare on Sura, who shook his head.
“I have a question, sir.” Of course she had a question. She was probably going to snake right into his good graces and make life hell for the rest of us. It’s what she was best at.
Knightley raised an eyebrow, waiting.
“You said we’re covering vampires, moonspawn, demons, and the Fae,” she said, tapping her pen on her notebook with the name of each Shadowed World race.
“Yes, Holmwood. They do encompass the majority of the Shadowed World.”
“What about angels?”
Instead of ripping into her, Knightley crossed his arms over his chest with a slight frown. Half of Tenebris started tittering, followed by most of Lux.
“God is dead, you blithering idiot,” Apolline snapped, leaning forward in her chair. “Heaven is sealed. Why would we worry about them?”
My ex-girlfriend was the real blithering idiot, but that was neither here nor there.
Aislin Liddell made a derisive noise from the other side of the room. “Some of us don’t believe that, Moreau.” The rest of Lux immediately shut up, following their prefect’s lead.
Knightley glanced at Aislin, his dark eyes lingering on her crown of blue-black hair. “You two believe God lives?”
Tori nodded, holding her chin in the air, and met Aislin’s eyes across the room in solidarity.
I needed to nip that burgeoning acquaintanceship in the bud before it blossomed into actual respect. I couldn’t afford Tori having a haven of friendship.
“Some of us here would disagree with you after what we’ve seen.” Knightley’s smile was bitter. “But far be it from me to deny you hope.”
“But what if Heaven was unsealed?” Tori pushed. God, what a suck-up. “You have a dead angel in your foyer set up like a centerpiece. You think the Kingdom of Heaven would overlook that insult to their dead just because we’re on the same team?”
Aislin was nodding with my stepsister’s accurate but moot point, her clear blue eyes fixed on Knightley. Her deep crush on him was transparent to everyone but the prof himself.
“If Heaven is ever unsealed, Holmwood… there is no force in this world that could save us.” Knightley’s face had grown a little tighter, same as it always did when his ruined knee was paining him. “There’s nothing I could teach you that would help you survive an avenging angel. You would be better off praying for a quick death.”
“Which would be a waste, because it’s never going to happen.” Apolline drummed her nails on the table and rolled her eyes.
Tori just shrugged. “Probably not. But I’d rather believe that God lives than believe only Lucifer survived the war.”
“We covered this two years ago,” Apolline said snidely. “While you were in the trailer park. Maybe you should just shut it already? You’re wasting valuable class time.”
Apolline had never cared about class time before. I held back a scoff and let Tori soak in the humiliation. Faint pink flags had risen on her cheeks. “For an institution that lauds itself as the top of its kind, I did in fact expect an education on angels, too.”
“It was a worthy question, Moreau,” Aislin said, and my idiot ex didn’t dare snap back at a prefect.
“Regardless of our views on God, it’s time to move on to an overview of our actual plan.”
Knightley limped to the board and began drawing the spheres of the Shadowed World. “We’ll start with vampires this year. The Clouded Court has shown signs of upheaval lately, and it’s likely they’ll become pertinent for your third-semester project. Who remembers the current king?”
“Jean Guilloux,” Aislin said promptly.
“I’d put good money down that’ll change within the year. A few new contenders have moved in on Clouded Court territory over the summer, i
ncluding Càel the White Wolf and his sisters, the Morrìgna. Rumor has it their Maker might be involved as well.”
Several of the girls in the room shifted when they heard Càel’s name, some of them whispering to each other with little smirks. Tori gave them an opaque look.
So, she didn’t approve of slayers lusting over vampires. That was something to keep in mind when we went out to Club Bathory.
“When you young, invincible folk head out to the clubs this weekend-” Knightley held up a hand, silencing the few protests- “remember the rules of their court. They are the only rules that will stand between you and a slow death.”
I kept a careful eye on Tori, whose pen was poised against the page.
For someone who was brimming with knowledge of moonspawn, she’d never had much experience with vampires. She came from Port Leona, a small town next to a sunny beach, exactly the kind of climate vampires hated. Another tidbit that might tip the scales in my favor.
“Respect their monarch, first and foremost. Never offer your blood- it’s not compulsory for slayers entering their courts, only humans. And do not kill them on their own territory, or the others will swarm.”
Tori surreptitiously scrawled the bare-bones rules down, and an idea shimmered at the back of my mind.
The rest of the class passed in relative peace, and when Knightley released us to the training grounds, I was polishing the rough details on my plans for Tori. Sura led her ahead of the rest of Tenebris, walking a little closer to her than was really necessary.
What the fuck did he think he was playing at?
I couldn’t tear my eyes from Tori’s profile when we walked into the massive gym, an underground slice of nature than had been carefully terraformed into biomes that replicated multiple environments: a flat, grassy plain, a section of jungle forest with dips and ravines, an urban sprawl of concrete, glass, and pipes.
She looked amazed, craning her head to take it all in. What a bumpkin.
Selena hung on my arm, giggling and saying something inane to Apolline, and I regretted asking her into my room last night. She’d been something to do, a distraction from my own irritation, but Tori had ruined that by superimposing herself in my head.
I shook Selena off and caught up to Sura. Tori had wandered ahead, examining the edges of a freshwater swamp.
“Getting cozy with the target?” I muttered.
Sura shrugged, finally dragging his eyes away from my stepsister. We’d met our first year in Libra, when my grief was still fresh and raw like an open wound. He’d become my best friend almost immediately after we teamed up to knock out Silas Vaughan, the annoying little cunt who’d thought he could get away with feeling up my girlfriend at the time.
I no longer cared about Apolline, but Sura… sometimes I felt so close to him it frightened me. Like he was connected to me with invisible strings, my actions affecting his and vice versa. There was something weird about Sura; sometimes when I saw him, I could swear that reality was changing in front of my eyes, that he didn’t have clan tattoos, or that his skin was a slightly different color.
But that was impossible. The Enver necklace was tattooed right there on his neck, the Bracelets of Fortune clearly limned on his wrists. And I didn’t care about Sura’s weirdness, anyways. He was loyal and steadfast, my best friend when everything felt like it was falling apart around me.
Right now, he looked obnoxiously awake, almost jittery with energy. He’d come to breakfast with way more zest than a six a.m. wake-up call warranted, especially after we’d committed to our plan to piss off Tori all night with groaning and the loudest sex possible.
“You told me she was an annoying bitch.” Sura’s eyes drifted back to Tori like she was a lodestone. “She’s not annoying at all. Or a bitch.”
“You didn’t have her living in your house all summer.”
Tori was wandering a little close to the alligator pen. Part of me hoped she’d fall in.
“She’s fucking luscious,” Sura murmured. “Look at that ass.”
I wasn’t going to look at that ass. It was the kind of ass I wanted to sink my teeth into, and I already had a hard enough time wrestling with that mental image because I’d seen a lot of that ass in cut-off shorts this summer.
“She’s probably got the sweetest pussy you’ve ever tasted. I’ve got an eye for that sort of thing.”
Tori’s husky moans echoed in my ears. Would she make those sounds if I laid her out across my bed and pinned her long legs apart, sucked her clit between my lips and pushed my tongue into her?
A prying hand cupped my stiffening cock and I jerked, looking down into Selena’s pale eyes. I’d never had an erection wilt that fast in my life.
“Get the fuck off me.”
Selena withdrew and slunk away, glaring at me over her shoulder. She was too timid to snap back, which was fine with me. There was no way I could fuck that harpy again, anyway. Her screeching was the single most irritating thing I’d ever heard.
I was getting painfully hard picturing Victoria Holmwood, the evil stepsister, the one who was responsible for Mother’s memory fading into mist. The sole reason I had nothing left of Michèle Godalming.
“I’m not going to force your hand on this, Sura,” I said quietly. “You’re your own man. But whether you’re with me or against me, Tori Holmwood isn’t getting through this semester intact.”
He was taut, his eyes on Tori, his body leaning towards me. I felt those strange, invisible strings again, trying to pull us together onto the same path.
It was disconcerting, but I pushed back my unease. He was my best friend. We were a team.
After what felt like a small eternity, Sura swallowed hard. “I’m always with you, Will,” he said, his voice gruff.
I didn’t realize how tense I’d become, how unsure I was of Sura’s allegiance, until my muscles relaxed with an almost painful relief.
Tori turned away from the swamp and headed back to us. I took in the sway of her curvy hips, the shadows in her eyes, and the picture of Tori sitting on my desk, stripped down to naked skin and wrapped around my cock, flashed back into my head.
I indulged the idea for a few more seconds, how tight she’d be, her heavy breasts swaying with every thrust, teeth buried in my shoulder.
Would seeing her humiliated be as satisfying?
I was willing to bet the answer was yes.
A murmur went through the group and I stepped to the front of Tenebris. Our training grounds tutor, Professor Ermengol, watched us all with her arms crossed over her chest. She was a petite, hard-faced woman in her fifties, with white streaked through her short dark hair, wearing the body-skimming enchanted armor of a full-fledged slayer.
She held up her hand and revealed an acorn-sized glass orb nestled in her palm, glowing a pale green. “There’s a matching orb somewhere in the forest,” Ermengol said. For such a small slayer, she was loud as hell, bellowing the words. “First team to retrieve it owes me one hundred push-ups. Losing team owes a thousand.”
Not a single slayer hesitated.
Tori was just ahead of me, sprinting towards the forest biome, and a dark shape came at her from the corner of my eye, hands reaching for her wrist. I grabbed Juno Endelyn and drove my elbow into her neck before tossing her aside.
Ermengol’s bellow echoed behind us “ENDELYN! To Mater Dolorum!”
One down, nine enemies between us and that orb.
Ephraim pulled ahead of Tori and made the mistake of pausing instead of plunging into the forest. She nailed him like a freight train, sent the guy flying into a tree, and skidded down the embankment of a ravine without missing a beat.
Okay, that was pretty hot, I had to admit.
Still hated her, though.
Aislin had two teammates flanking her, and they crested the hill over the ravine, leaving the rest of Lux to face Tenebris. Bad move.
I tipped my chin and my team scattered, ganging up on Lux’s remainders.
Sura picked up Silas and lifted h
im overhead to toss him back out of the biome. Tori watched him with a rapt expression, her eyes glittering. There was no way, absolutely no way she was getting turned on by that.
Beatrice Glover slid down the embankment behind her, and I watched with bated breath as my stepsister spun on her heel and executed a perfect snap-kick, her boot thunking right into Bea’s tits.
Sura let out a low growl and punched Ethan in the face, knocking the guy out cold, and Tori sucked in her lower lip, giving Sura a slow up-and-down look that spoke volumes about her thoughts.
Another Lux guy tried to come at her from the side but she grabbed his arm, yanked it over her shoulder, and threw him over her back. His breath was knocked out of his lungs in a sharp oof when he landed in the mud.
My traitorous best friend took a step closer to her, firmly planting his palm on a girl’s face and holding her at arm’s length, and Tori threw her elbow backwards to catch Caleb’s nose. They were only a foot away, staring into each other’s eyes like they were hypnotized.
Un-fucking-believable.
Caleb stumbled away, cursing and gushing blood like a fountain.
“Sura, take down Aislin.” I cut through their sexual tension like cold iron through a Faerie. “Tori, get your mind out of the gutter and stay on the objective.”
They both spun away from each other like they’d been burned, Tori’s cheeks turning red. She sent another Lux girl to her knees with a haymaker that had my cock stirring.
When most of Lux was groaning on the ground, bleeding, or both, I gathered the remainder of Tenebris. Everyone was gleaming with sweat, panting, and looked thrilled as fuck.
“Remember Ermengol’s lessons last year?” I asked, stepping on Ethan’s hand. “Look for the most obvious answer first. Aislin just left her team to eat shit because she thought it was supposed to be a challenge. Half go left in the ravine, half go right. It’ll be out in the open. Tori, you’re new, so you’re coming with me.”
Her nostrils flared the tiniest bit, the only show of her irritation at me giving orders, but there was a little hope there, too. I couldn’t wait to crush it underfoot.
