Azure Dragons (Supernatural Shifter Academy #2) - G. Bailey Page 0,4
bureaucrats and never seen again. But I don’t believe the conspiracy ends there.
Not for a second.
We make our way across the dining hall and to the table Landon’s saved for us; I slide into the spot next to him while Shade and Hazel take seats on opposite sides of the table. “I heard the two of you were getting up to some ‘extracurriculars’ out in the woods earlier,” Landon remarks, his eyes gleaming.
I groan, rolling my eyes. “It was nothing like that.” Shade catches my eye then, smirking, and something passes between us, but I push it away. “I’ve got an exam this week. Aaronson wants to see how long I can hold my wolf form.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard, should it?” Landon replies. “You held it for a while when we fought Samantha.”
“Yeah,” I reply, “but that was an emergency situation. I don’t know if I can replicate it. I certainly haven’t been able to with my other forms.”
Hunter frowns. “At least you can shift,” he remarks. “I’m stuck listening to Amelia give me shit every other day.”
“Why the hell do you put up with that, anyway?” Shade asks, turning to the vampire shifter. “You’re a big boy—can’t you just tell her to lay off.”
“Charming,” mutters Hunter, before sighing and running a hand through his red hair. “If your dad was on the school board, you’d be talking differently, Ivis.”
“If my dad was on the school board, maybe I’d have an easier time passing my Integration class,” Shade fires back. “I swear, now they’re just holding me back for the hell of it.”
“I seriously doubt that,” comes a familiar voice, and I turn around in my seat to see Silas Aconite, the tall dragon shifter, making his way over to us with a tray of food in his hands. He sits down next to me and leans forward, glancing at the others. “What did I miss?”
“Just Hunter bitching about his sister,” Shade replies. “You know—the usual.”
“You’re in top form today, you know that?” Hunter fires back at him. “You’re just trying to piss me off, aren’t you?”
“It took you long enough to catch on.” Shade turns to Silas, raising an eyebrow. “You look like you’ve been run over by a train.”
“Gee, thanks,” Silas replies, rolling his eyes. “Rehab hasn’t exactly been easy, for your information.”
Shade clears his throat, looking down at the table. “Right,” he mutters. “Ah, sorry. Forgot.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard the wolf shifter apologise, but we’re all treading a little lightly around Silas in the aftermath of our showdown with Samantha.
The tension propelling the current state of affairs hits closest to home for Silas. His parents seemed to be on the verge of acting against the humans overseeing the shifter community when they were taken away from him, never to be seen again. It’s possible they knew something about the experiment, and were on the verge of saying too much, but it’s never been clear. Silas was the one who discovered the truth about my origins, and my ties to the other guys, and that revelation nearly got him killed. If we hadn’t come to rescue him from an underground testing facility beneath the registrar’s office, he would have been, and that thought is enough to make my blood run cold.
I’m not sure if I can even put my finger on the nature of our relationship, exactly. It’s certainly not platonic, but even after kissing each other, we’ve been dancing around labels as if trying to define it will jinx it somehow. Maybe he’s picked up on my attraction towards the others, or maybe he’s shying away from anything that might put us in danger the way that his discovery of the truth did. Either way, my heart skips a beat when he settles into the seat next to me, and his presence is enough to make me flush a little. “Boots,” he says, nodding to me, “are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I reply, a little too quickly. “Just wondering how you were holding up.”
“Could be worse,” he says, shrugging his broad shoulders. “At least my powers seem to be more or less back to normal. Using them still takes it out of me, but they are coming back.”
I clear my throat, feeling a little awkward under the scrutiny of the others. “I’m… glad to hear it.”
He gives me his signature crooked smile, the one that always sends me reeling, and the feeling of his leg brushing up against mine is nearly enough to make