Azure Dragons (Supernatural Shifter Academy #2) - G. Bailey Page 0,3
sidle up next to the two of us, smiling broadly when she sees us. “What are you up to?”
“Just trying to help Boots here practice her wolf form a little more,” Shade replies, elbowing me playfully. “She has a practical this week, and believe me, she’s screwed.”
“She is right here, you know,” I retort, pushing between the two of them and linking my arm through Hazel’s. “And she is going to ace that damned test if it kills her.”
“Well, I guess positive thinking is the first step,” Hazel says, smoothing things over as she shoots Shade a look over my shoulder. The two of them haven’t exactly gotten on swimmingly in the weeks that I’ve known them, and I suppose I can understand why: Shade’s personality is a bit abrasive—certainly more so than our other companions—and his reputation around the Academy precedes him. It sounds like he’s a bit of a problem child, which makes some sense—all of us are castaways, in some way or another, either separated from our families, with no families to speak of, or with families we don’t get along with. We needed each other, I think—more than any of us ever really expected to. That said, I don’t know much about Shade’s story other than the fact that he was adopted. From the sounds of it, he didn’t exactly get on swimmingly with his new family, either. He doesn’t seem too keen to talk about it, so I don’t push the issue.
The three of us make our way into the large dining hall, where the students are fanning out to find seats at the long tables and pounce on the buffet which is stocked with an assortment of delicious foods. I pause in the doorway, looking around until I catch a glimpse of a familiar face near the back of the room: Landon Thyme, the siren shifter, is sitting at one of the far tables, and he seems to have cleared a space for us. Next to him sits Hunter Ash, the surly vampire shifter who might as well be a self-parody, if it weren’t for the difficulty he also has changing into his form. We’re two of a kind in that sense, which is for the best, considering that we couldn’t be farther apart in every other way. His father is one of the Academy board members, and it’s obvious from square one that it’s a family of stuffy, uptight over-achievers and high expectations.
None of this is helped by the fact that his sister, Amelia, is an overly protective upperclassman hellbent on getting her little brother’s shapeshifting abilities up to the same level as her own. She also seems to take issue with me on the grounds that I’m a hybrid, although part of me can’t help but wonder if her reasons go deeper than that. My origins, while clearer to me now, are still shrouded in mystery, but Hunter’s family has connections with the Academy and, most likely, to the experiment that brought me here in the first place. It was a bastardization, if the most vocal opponents are to be believed, a repetition of the kind of horrific rituals used by witches hundreds of years ago in order to combine shifter powers. A child, taken from the hospital as a baby, was used as a test subject, a blank slate for men in white coats to give her the powers of one of each of the other shifter species. I’ll give you one guess as to who that child was.
The twist, of course, was that the other children used to grant me my abilities turned out to be the same guys in my friend group now. The fact that we all ended up in detention together only lends credence to the idea that we’re all in this together, pawns in some game that we don’t understand just yet. All we know is that all subsequent attempts to recreate that experiment failed, but that hasn’t stopped the powers that be—the alliance in charge of making sure humans and shifters could coexist, without ever revealing our existence to the world—from continuing their attempts. It all came to a head soon after I arrived at the Academy, with Brody’s disappearance; one of the two recruiters who brought me to the Academy in the first place was overseeing the experiment that killed the poor guy, and if we hadn’t stumbled on the plot, others would no doubt have followed suit. She was hauled off by the