Page 34 of Legacy Found

"No," I say immediately.

"Maybe," Torres says from the floor.

I turn approximately the color of a stop sign, and Sophia gasps like she's won the lottery and takes off down the hall crowing something I can't fully hear.

I look back at Torres.

He looks at me.

And we both just start laughing — the giddy, ridiculous kind, the kind you can't stop — and he shakes his head at me and I shake mine at him and neither of us says a single word about what almost happened, because it doesn't need saying. Not yet. It's just there now, warm and new and unspoken, and that's enough.

"Go," he says, still grinning. "Before she tells the entire dorm."

"Too late," I say. "She's telling the entire continent."

I catch up to Sophia halfway down the hall, and she loops her arm through mine and doesn't even try to be subtle about it.

"So," she says. "Torres."

"We were comparing Merit Marks."

"You were comparing something." She's grinning so wide it must hurt. "Jessica. In one week you've charmed a professor, gotten carried off by a prince, made an actual enemy, and now you're getting cozy with Torres. I've been here the same amount of time and my biggest relationship is with the coffee machine."

"What can I say," I tell her, completely straight-faced. "It's a whole hot-guy buffet around here. I'm just filling my plate."

Sophia stops walking so she can laugh properly, doubled over in the middle of the corridor, and I'm grinning too, and I decide — buffet aside — that this is the best I've felt since I stepped off the plane.

Chapter fourteen

Jessica

I am a terrible lizard mother, and I realize it in the middle of Shifter Ethics.

It just hits me. It's been weeks since orientation, weeks of classes and Merit Marks and princes and almost-kisses, and in all that time I have not once gone to see Pickles. He's been living down at the faculty cottages this whole time and I've been so swept up in becoming a wolf that I forgot about the only family member I actually brought with me. The guilt is immediate and enormous.

So after my last class I walk down to the faculty side of campus, which turns out to be its own quiet little world — the professors' cottages are tucked into the trees, older and softer than the student dorms, with actual gardens and woodsmoke and none of the frantic Merit-fever energy that hangs over everything up the hill. It's peaceful in a way that makes my shoulders come down. I find the one with Jon's name on a small brass plate and knock.

There's a pause. Then the door opens, and for once, Professor Matthias doesn't look composed.

His sleeves are rolled up, there are reading glasses shoved up into his hair, and he's holding a book with one finger keeping his place, and he blinks at me with the unguarded surprise of a man who was very much not expecting company. It's the first time I've seen him look anything other than completely in control since the day he shifted into a wolf in front of me, and it's oddly reassuring to learn he owns a "caught off guard" setting.

"Jessica," he says. "I— this is a surprise. I don't think students usually—"

"I need to see Pickles," I say, and breeze right past him into the cottage.

Behind me I hear him close the door, and when I glance back he's still standing there with his book and his glasses in his hair, looking faintly like he's lost control of his own afternoon. "By all means," he says, to the room I'm already inside. "Come in."

"Pickles?" I call, scanning the place — which is warm and lived-in and full of books, exactly the cottage I'd have designed for him if you'd asked me. "Pickles, it's me, I know I'm a disgrace, I've come to grovel—"

I hear scratching. I follow it. And I stop dead.

Because Pickles has upgraded.

The enclosure taking up half the far wall is enormous — easily ten times the size of the sad little tank I left him in back in England. It's custom-built, clearly, with real branches and climbing shelves and multiple heat lamps throwing warm pools of light, hiding caves, a water feature, little enrichment toys, and a food dish containing what are visibly nicer bugs than I have ever provided in my life. And in the middle of it, draped across a heated rock like a tiny reptilian emperor, is Pickles — fatter, glossier, and radiating the smug contentment of a creature who has clearly upgraded his entire quality of life since we parted.

"Oh my gosh." I turn around, delighted, overwhelmed, and completely on instinct I throw my arms around Jon in a hug. "Thank you, thank you, I've been so worried about him and you built him a whole — you built him a palace, you—"

Jon goes completely rigid.