Stained Egos Read online

  “We’re waiting,” Cade said. He was not our most patient member.

  Master Lee sputtered and made excuses because he knew damn well that Lily Addams would be up shit creek if he did the browsing spell. It didn’t help matters that the entire graduating class was standing behind them, waiting for judgment to be passed.

  Just as I was about to push again, the blonde spoke up. “M-M-Master Lee, they’re right,” she whispered as she toed the ground with her boot, making herself look about ten years younger than she was. “I-I didn’t mean to, it was just reflex, but before I could stop it, it was too late. I’m so sorry.” She peered around the edge of Raven and looked dead at Marcella, “I’m sorry, Sister Sixth.”

  “There, you see?” Master Lee said, grasping at the opportunity to not cast the spell like a man reaching for a life jacket on a sinking ship. “We will discuss this in my office, but your punishment will be severe, Ms. Addams.”

  “As you wish, Master Lee,” she said as she bowed slightly to him.

  The man grinned to himself as though he’d just won the jackpot or something, and it creeped me the fuck out. I glanced over at Raven and saw fury raging not only in his eyes, but throughout his whole frame. If we stayed here any longer, I was sure Raven and the training master would come to blows, which would be acceptable after we had chosen our Sixth, but not before. The last thing we needed was one of us getting an attitude or holding a grudge against a teacher and fucking the whole thing up. Knowing the Academies, they’d probably just assign us a Sixth if they thought we were ungrateful, high-handed bastards.

  “Marcella, get to the infirmary, Lily, my office, now. As for the rest of you, I expect fifty obstacle course runs before you leave since none of you were even able to last half as long as these two,” he said, gesturing to Lily and Marcella. “Go!”

  As soon as the last word left his lips, the women scattered. Marcella limped off through a door with the symbol for healing on it. I knew we wouldn’t be allowed back there as Westbrook Academy was only for young women, but a part of me longed to join her. And I longed for shit.

  Master Lee and Lily disappeared up some stairs into an office that looked more like box seats at a basketball game. Windows looked out on all three sides with slatted blinds, which were promptly closed when the two of them entered.

  I watched for a moment as the other young women began running. They had to tackle stepping stones, jump from faux rooftop to faux rooftop, maneuver through a low tunnel, climb a rope, jump a ditch, run along a balancing bridge, climb through windows, clamber up cargo nets, and even zip line to the end. Oh, and most of the apparatus was bewitched to move. You know, just to make it easier on them. Freaking magic. I was tired just looking at the obstacle course.

  A door slamming drew my attention away from what had to be an exhausting circuit.

  Raven was gone.

  He probably caused the door to slam. Cade, Keiran, and Barclay were already following him, so I got my ass in gear and went after him as well. By the time I caught up with them, he was pacing in front of the building—our Range Rover had evidently been moved already—and Keiran was trying to calm him down.

  Maybe it was a walker thing, but when they saw something they didn’t like, their emotions could swing wildly out of their control, not that I’d ever seen Raven so upset before. Then again, I’d never seen the other man share his blood with someone before, and I hadn’t heard of him doing it, either.

  It wasn’t all that unusual to have three walkers on a team, but having a dream, mind, and time walker of at least equal strength to each other was not the most common. The Academy loved dividing its resources, so brotherhoods would often end up with one member who outclassed all the others, and it could create some awful dynamics. We were all mostly on the same level, which made us tighter than a lot of brotherhoods out there, even if we didn’t always get along well together.

  Whatever Keiran was mumbling wasn’t helping Raven at all, so I butted in, “Look, why don’t we go for a run? I know Barclay wants to scout the grounds, I can practically smell the curiosity coming off him. We can use up some energy, call it a night, and be ready for whatever shit-show we’re going to walk in on tomorrow,” I suggested. I didn’t add that the druid part of my blood wanted to greet the new space and get to know the land before I had to draw on my magic.

  Raven gave me a withering stare as though I’d suggested he go get a massage or something similar. It was only when Barclay spoke up that he eased off.

  “That’d be really nice. I keep feeling like there’s something about this place I’m missing, but I’m not sure what it is yet.” The part shifter shrugged.

  “Fine,” Raven growled, his silver hair glinting in the sunlight.

  The five of us were upstairs, changed, and back out of the door only a few minutes later. Running with Barclay was an exercise in restraint for me.

  The more vamp blood we had, the faster we could move, the sharper our senses were, and the deeper our emotions. It wasn’t only Barclay I had to pace myself for, though. The three walkers all had human blood in their veins, which meant that compared to me, they were about as fast as molasses in winter.

  Barclay yipped and played in his wolf skin, happy to indulge in his form in a relatively safe space, which is what the Academy grounds were supposed to be. I let my magic bleed out from me as easily as if I had opened a vein. It sank into the ground around us and greeted the ancient magic that resided there. The Academies had been around a lot longer than most of the brotherhoods realized. Sure, the buildings looked modern, but that was just a façade. It was the grounds that told the whole story.

  War, death, famine, restless spirits, and other spirits who had taken up residence in specific trees or rocks . . . they were all there if I looked deep enough.

  As we moved through the acres of forest, paddocks, and vineyards, we passed a multitude of trees, everything from towering redwoods to slender birches, and I sent out a greeting to them all.

  When we came to the jagged, rocky coastline, we all ground to a halt.

  My three walker brothers were breathing hard, and I felt a little sorry for them that we still had to make it back to the Academy, but the view was worth it.

  The coastline wasn’t anything that would be used for get-togethers or beach bonfires, oh no. There would be no surfing or fishing in these waters. They churned and lashed themselves against the rocks, threatening anyone who came within reach of being sprayed with water and the occasional piece of seaweed.

  As we turned to go, I felt a familiar tingle on my arm, right where my tattoo that allowed me to speak with the dead was. Most people saw my tats and thought I was rough around the edges. They weren’t wrong, it just wasn’t for the reasons they thought. Each piece of ink represented a spell or a facet of my gift that I had etched into my body, a way of helping me easily identify the myriad sensations the land often gave me.

  We started to run back, and I made a mental note to come out here alone later and reach out to whatever spirit was there, just to make sure it was happy with where it was. There was nothing worse than a spirit that got angry because it was trapped somewhere it didn’t want to be, that’s how poltergeists and vengeful ghouls happened. The last thing anyone wanted was something like that on Academy grounds where the Sixths might be vulnerable to its pull. And if it got its hands, metaphorically speaking, on a Sixth? I shuddered at the thought. Nothing good would come of it, that was for sure.

  As we started to run back, the sun was setting and darkness fell before we could even reach the forest that ringed the Academy proper.

  I felt a tug at the tattoo on the back of my neck, which almost made me stop dead in my tracks. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that whatever had triggered my tattoo was powerful enough, and evil enough, that I didn’t want us to be caught outside with it unawares.

  “Pick up the pace, humans,” I called to the walker trio who were starting to trail further and further behind me.

&n
bsp; “Screw you, you warlock,” Cade ground out as he urged himself to run faster.

  I knew that was the right button to push for him. The man hated being considered weak, or even the mere suggestion of it. The other two were a little harder to motivate, but they were hustling and that was all I could ask for.

  The sense of evil was fading, which was good. For a while there it had felt like I was trapped under the gaze of the eye of Sauron. I tried to talk myself out of investigating it later, after all, we were here for a reason, and we were close enough to the edge of the Academy’s property that whatever it was, was probably on the other side of the border, but the feeling of it gnawed away in my gut.

  When we were finally through the forest and in the clearing with the school buildings, I felt like I could take a deep breath once more.

  Bursting through the doors into the main building where we were staying, most of the guys went upstairs to shower and probably collapse into bed, but something I couldn’t explain pulled me toward the training room.

  My senses were on edge from the run. I’d bombarded myself with a thousand stimuli, and had rubbed up against something my powers didn’t appreciate. Still, it was like Mother Earth was whispering to me.

  In an attempt to soothe me?

  I couldn’t say.

  As much as I wanted to hear her whispers, the closer I got, the more the sound pulled away, until I was standing outside a set of large double doors that were all too familiar, and I could hear the grunts and faint curses coming from the other side.

  I eased the handle of the door down, careful not to make a sound, and cracked it open just enough to see what was going on beyond.

  Half of me expected to find Master Lee up to no good with one of the students, while the other half expected a late-night training session.

  Becoming a Sixth was brutal work, and they were nothing to mess around with. If they wanted to be top of their class, best of the best, then they had to put in more work than just normal training and study sessions. And that was exactly what I found in the gym.

  Marcella was there, running the obstacle course, looking like a hawk in flight as it chased after its prey in the grasses below. Her blood-red hair was streaming out behind her, and she was moving so fast, barely even pausing between dismounting from the zip line—which took her back to the start—and launching into the side-to-side stepping stones that marked the beginning of the course.

  I watched her do ten runs of it before I started to feel uncomfortable, especially as she was starting to mess up, causing her to grunt and curse under her breath. Part of me felt guilty for not letting her know I was there, but the rest of me had enjoyed the show too much to put an end to it, and I had no doubt that if I’d announced my presence, it would have stopped her in her tracks and possibly even hurt her.

  As I made my way back upstairs to our rooms, I couldn’t scrape the image of her twirling through the air like a bird or a butterfly from my mind. She threw her body around like she had nothing to live for, except being the best version of herself she could be. It was clear from the way she moved on that course and her fight earlier in the day, that she didn’t fear death, and she certainly didn’t fear pain.

  I didn’t know her, but what I did know was that no one should live their life that way.

  Certainly not a spoiled pureblood Princess.

  3

  Barclay

  Two days later

  “Do you have a death wish?” I asked the question, not in malice or with a desire to harm, but out of genuine curiosity. I’d been watching the female for days now. Truth be told, there was little else to do other than watch all the females in the final year, but the redhead?

  She invited my curiosity.

  Not just because Raven had donated blood to her, but mostly because she was different.

  My Wolf picked up on that where I don’t think the others did. Or, maybe I was wrong. Maybe they did, because I was certain Marcella had captured everyone’s attention, even if we never really talked about the bewitching female.

  At my question, she jolted, and I could tell my presence had surprised her, as she hadn’t sensed I was here until I’d spoken.

  Everyone seemed to believe shifters were lumbering beasts who clodhopped from one place to another. It was pleasing as fuck to be able to right those particular prejudices, to prove people wrong—my kind got a lot of shit in our community.

  To Vampires, there was no lesser supernatural than a common shifter.

  Which often begged the question why they fucked them so much. On average, there were more kids like me than any other spawned. So, yeah. Apparently, the purebloods got a kick out of fucking animals.

  “Excuse me?” The question didn’t come with an attitude. If anything, it was just perplexed. She stared at me a few seconds, gaping, and then when I realized why, I felt my lips start to twitch.

  Seriously, how I kept them in line, I really don’t know.

  Her eyes were all over me, though, and I had to admit, it felt good. With my brothers, it was easy to feel like the lesser being, mostly because of my wolf, which fucking sucked because my wolf was not only badass but pretty, too—he was jet black, not even a white sock in sight. But down my sides, I had gray markings that my mom, before she’d died, had called my thunderbolts.

  Sadness welled in me at the thought. Not just of the memory, but of my mom. I hated that thinking of her made me sad, but shit was shit.

  Wishing things were different didn’t make things change.

  “I wondered if you had a death wish,” I repeated, not even feeling all that bad about posing the question.

  She gulped, but her cheeks were pink as she tried, and failed, not to look at my chest. We were outside in the training circle. The equipment here was pretty sick, and I’d been keeping my stamina high by doing the rounds on the obstacle course with the girls.

  I hadn’t really thought much of approaching Marcella without a shirt on. Mostly, because I hadn’t expected her to be attracted to me.

  That she was definitely stroked my ego.

  “I don’t have a death wish,” she whispered, her eyes somehow managing to stay on mine this time. I could see how much will she had to exert to make that happen, though.

  I crouched down beside her, so she didn’t have to peer up at me. With my arms over my bent knees, I slouched forward and looked straight ahead—sharing the view with her.

  She was staring at a wall.

  Just a wall.

  Brick. Nothing unusual about it.

  “There a reason you’re looking at that?” Hell, not just looking at it. Staring at it like her life depended on it.

  She swallowed, turned to look at me, then turned back to eying the wall, and shrugged.

  “Come on now. You do know if you make it to our brotherhood, you’ll have to get used to sharing secrets?”

  That had her eyes flaring wide. And not in the same way they had when she’d been drooling over my chest and ridged abdomen. “Really?”

  I cocked a brow at her. “Yeah.” I wasn’t even bullshitting her. “Secrets are a weakness. We can’t afford to be weak.”

  “Makes sense,” she whispered. “I guess I’m just not used to sharing.”

  I’d noticed that. The girls all clustered into cliques. Not Marcella. She was alone. On the outskirts.

  Was that also why she called to me?

  I mean, she shouldn’t have. I was a pack animal, after all. I should have naturally been attracted to the cliques. But Marcella, with her haunting eyes and that bewitching red hair that made me want to bury my nose in it, no, she was different.

  I found I liked different.

  “Well, start now,” I encouraged. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “How do I know that’s the truth?”

  “You don’t.” I tried not to feel stung by that question. It had been a long time since someone hadn’t believed in my word. In my integrity. Not after my graduation, to be honest.

  Eastbrook�
��s Masters were notoriously hard on my species. They never cut us any slack because they said we needed the discipline. But after graduation, when I’d been welcomed into my brotherhood, that had changed. My brothers trusted me, had faith in me. I’d grown used to that.

  “I’ve hurt you.” She tilted her head to the side in bewilderment—at the fact she’d hurt me or that I hurt, period, I wasn’t sure. “I apologize.”

  The angle of her head reminded me of Gideon when one of his tattoos was talking to him—he hated when I said they talked to him. But fuck, what else was it? The damn things were like silent alarms on his body.

  “Thank you,” I replied, touched by the swift apology and fully aware she’d meant no harm. “I understand, though. The Academies don’t exactly foster trust.”

  “They do. Just never with me.” She waved a hand to indicate the obstacle course. Five minutes ago, this area had been full of chattering girls. Now? It was empty save for her and me. “I’m destined to be alone, I fear.”

  “You really feel that?”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Don’t you think you’ll make it into a brotherhood? I’ve seen you fight, Marcella. You’re strong enough.”

  Marcella cut me a look that was loaded down with an emotion I couldn’t identify. Not because, as Cade claimed I was emotionally stunted, but because I couldn’t understand why she’d look at me with pity.

  Pity at my being stupid?

  That was the only thing that made sense, but again, it didn’t compute.

  If that blonde bimbo hadn’t used her powers on her, then Marcella would have never lost the first fight I’d seen her involved in. And the way she’d moved? This auburn-haired beauty had as much fire in her belly as she did on top of her head.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” she grumbled, turning her attention back to the wall.

  And for some fucking reason, that pissed me the hell off. I didn’t want her to be able to turn away from me. I wanted her to open up to me, and I wanted that even though I knew it was goddamn stupid.