Page 12 of Bound

My phone buzzed with an incoming text.

West: Pine or Hemsworth?

Topher: Filling out your fantasy celebrity werewolf pack again?

West: Yeah. Cause that’s what I was asking.

Topher: Please tell me you aren’t using my Chris preference to choose which book I have to read next. We all know how well that worked out last time.

West: Two words. Cerulean. Sea.

Topher: Okay. That book was magic sauce. And I don’t even like fantasy.

West: You do. You just don’t know it yet. One day the student will become the master.

West: BTW, running late. Marching band fundraiser. Can you run over to my place and feed the demons?

Topher: K, but you owe me onion rings.

West: Someone’s hangry. Have a cookie.

Topher: There’s something seriously wrong with you. And after last time I’m HALO dropping the tomatoes over their cage. Thinking 3-4 feet…

West: They were just excited to see you.

Topher: The spiky one drew blood.

West: Dean said he was sorry.

Dean and Castiel were the world’s two most spoiled guinea pigs. They lived in a palace constructed of chloroplast, fourteen-inch snap-together grids and enough fleece to swaddle a baby mammoth. Dean, the temperamental one, looked like the unfortunate result of a late-night hookup between a tumbleweed and a loofah. His multi-colored fur spiked out around him in four inches of constant chaos and I was forever checking to make sure I was actually feeding tomatoes to the end with fangs. Castiel (because Caldwell’s geekery knew no limits) was white, short-haired and a total Hufflepuff, squeaking pitifully the moment Caldwell got home until someone buried his cries under a pile of lettuce. I’d informed West once that they totally owned him rather than the other way around, and he’d scowled while proceeding to make little kissing noises over the demon spawn’s ears, imploring it not to listen to me.

Which of course, left me unable to stop staring at his lips.

Topher: BTW, if the cookies are your attempt to soften me on the subject of dragons, may I remind you we agreed no punishment reads?

West: And Dostoyevsky was?

Topher: This from an English major.

West: Please. I can Russian Lit with the best of them.

West: *dragon emoji*

Growling, I shut down the screen. “You think it’s possible things between me and him could ever not be weird?”

Cal tilted his head. “What would that look like to you?”

I stared down at the line of fang marks extending up the inside of my wrist, barely visible in the moonlight. Briefly, I flashed back to that moment we’d been a tangle of limbs and teeth at the top of the cliff. When Caldwell had stopped me from ending my life.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

West Caldwell had once stayed up for three nights straight when Dean (demon-possessed guinea pig, not the Supernatural hunter) was sick, syringe feeding him ground up pellets while singing a Blink-182 song I totally hadn’t recorded as blackmail. Really. He disappeared on grocery runs at midnight when he learned one of his students had no food in the house. He was an endless source of snark, the two of us nearly ransacking his loft over a fight involving sushi and obscure Lord of the Rings trivia. And somehow every time I woke up screaming in the night, dog-eared paperbacks from Zombie Books that he knew I would love mysteriously appeared on my doormat.

“One last thing.” Cal studied my face, his dark eyes unwavering. “Releasing aggression, especially at the full moon, is a good way of burning off feral urges. But this isn’t the first time West has reported you’ve been hurt. The hunting. The fighting. That you’ve gone off on your own where you could have been abducted, even killed.” A beat. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I would kill Caldwell. “I’m not trying to hurt myself.”

Cal raised an eyebrow. With shapeshifters, our regenerative abilities meant a cut left by a razor was gone within the hour. Unless a foreign toxin like silver, wolfsbane or vampire blood was introduced, we didn’t scar. The vampires who’d held me had implanted each of us with a tracker. Once or twice, someone had managed to break out. Every time, our handlers had dematerialized straight to their location and brought them back. It took me almost a year to locate my tracker. And another month to wait for circumstances to align themselves for my escape. For a while after I was out, I cut for the release, and because it was the only way to control my wolf. I’d scavenged razor blades. The sharp edge of a plastic lid. Sometimes used my own teeth. But I’d stopped.