Zodiac Academy Fated Throne - Caroline Peckham Page 0,173

So maybe I was kidding myself thinking he really could be harbouring feelings for me. Maybe he’d gotten hard while drinking from me because blood turned him on. He was a Vampire, it made sense. So I probably just needed to Fae up, hit my feelings over the head with a sledgehammer then bury them six feet under forever.

My heart pounded harder as I stole a glance at his face, his perfectly straight nose, his eyes overshadowed and intense. I’d known him my whole life and I’d realised he was attractive some time around my twelfth birthday. It wasn’t news to me that he was hot. But somehow I’d always managed to compartmentalise that from my friendship with him before. Now it was all just melding into one so all I could see was how fucking amazing he was and how much I wanted him and how it had been staring me in the face all these years. No matter how much I hungered for him though, it clearly wasn’t meant to be. I just wasn’t sure how to make my heart get the message on that.

“Remember when we stole your mom’s fire crystals when we were kids and accidentally burned down her rose garden?” I said, wanting to remind myself as much as him that we had a whole lifetime of friendship regardless of one awkward boner moment. Nothing could break us apart. Not even our dicks.

Caleb chuckled. “Yeah, and I tried to ride on your back as a Wolf so we could get away faster.”

“Dumbest idea ever,” I laughed, remembering when Melinda had shot after us with her Vampire speed and dragged us both inside by the ears. She’d made us clean out the acid slug infestation she had in her gutters without any kind of magical protection as punishment.

Caleb turned to me, gripping my arm to stop me from walking on. He opened his mouth then closed it again and my heart thudded harder as I wondered what the hell he was thinking. My hand found his in the dark and I laced my fingers through his instinctively.

“Seth,” he said in a low growl that could have been to warn me off or draw me closer. I guessed I wanted to believe it was the latter so I stepped into his personal space, breathing him in and trying to fool myself into thinking there really could be something between us. That I wasn’t imagining it.

“Look, what happened in the woods the other day-” I started, but Tory shouted out a battle cry and the shriek of a Nymph filled the air, cutting that sentence off at the balls.

I gasped, turning to the path we’d been forging through the corn and finding the rest of our group gone.

“Shit,” Cal cursed and we started running after them, pushing between the stalks and hunting for them in the dark.

“Use your speed,” I demanded, but he glanced back at me with a look that said he didn’t want to leave me.

Another Nymph’s cry pierced the air and a blaze of Phoenix fire spiralled up into the sky a hundred yards away. We started running toward it and I shoved Caleb’s back to encourage him to move faster.

A towering shadow fell over us and Caleb yanked me aside with a shot of Vampire speed just as a huge Nymph came charging through the field toward us. I leapt away from Caleb, shifting in the air, shredding through my clothes and the gauntlets around my hands expanded. They encased my front paws so that ten sharp metal claws slammed into the ground as I landed, flames bursting to life around me.

I turned and started charging back toward the Nymph, my teeth bared and my bloodthirst rising.

Caleb was running around it in speeding circles, slashing at it with the dual knives in his hands, Phoenix fire blazing along the monster’s flesh. It swiped a hand through the air, knocking him away and he was thrown back into the dense corn out of sight.

A snarl of rage ripped from my throat as I leapt onto the Nymph’s back, tearing at its barky flesh with my flaming claws of death and sinking my teeth into its shoulder. It reached back to try and rip me off but I held on tight, clawing my way further up until I could see over its shoulder to where the rest of our friends were fighting five more of them out in the field.

The Nymph caught hold of my tail