Buck heaved an even bigger sigh. “Fine. Yes, there are dragons here. At least one that I know about, though technically she’s a sea dragon. A Princess of Atlantis, no less. You’ve met her. Moira.”
“Moira?” Out of all the people she’d met at camp, Moira—calm, serious Moira—would have been her last guess as to who would turn out to secretly be a scaled, horned beast. “I thought you were going to say Ragvald. So what does he turn into?”
“No idea. Never met him before today. Though I’ll eat my boots without ketchup if he’s a sea dragon. Most of that lot seem to have had large sticks inserted up their butts at birth.” Buck’s eyebrows lowered. “Don’t ask him, by the way. About his animal, I mean. Shifters consider that rude.”
“You mean everyone here turns into animals and I’m not even allowed toaskthem about it?” Honey flung up her hands, nearly sloshing energy drink across Buck’s mattress. “Can you at least tell me what people are? Is that allowed?”
“I’m pretty sure that technically none of this is allowed.” Buck rubbed his forehead with his thumb. “Look, I don’t know most people here. Just Moira, Leonie, Conleth, and Zeph, really. Moira, you already know. Conleth’s a pegasus.”
“Awhat?”
“Big horse with wings.”
“I know what a pegasus is, thank you.” Honey struggled to imagine suave, sophisticated Conleth sprouting a tail and wings. “It’s just… he wears a suit.”
“He’s a business pegasus. Carrying on down the list, Leonie’s a lion. Well, mostly.”
“How can someone bemostlya lion?”
“It’s complicated.” Buck held up a hand as she opened her mouth. “Look, I don’t like folks gossiping about my private business. I’m sure as hell not going to start sharing other people’s secrets. If Leonie wants you to know, she’ll tell you.”
That was fair enough, she had to admit. “What about Zephyr, then? You said he was your nephew. Is he like you? A, uh…”
“Freakish perversion of nature?” Buck supplied, while she was still trying to think of a description other thangiant glowing wolf. “No, I’m something of a one off, as far as anyone knows. You should be able to guess what he is, though. It’s in the damn name, after all.”
It took her a second to figure out what he meant. Then realization kicked in. She looked down at the logo on her own t-shirt:Camp Thunderbird.
“You’re kidding,” she said, because surely he had to be. “He’s a thunderbird?”
“The, actually. He’s also one of a kind.” Buck grimaced. “But that’s a very long story, and one for another day. We’re running out of time. The others will expect us back at training soon.”
“Oh my God!” With everything that had happened, the reason why she was here at all had fallen clean out of her head. Now realization crashed down on her like a tidal wave. “Buck, I don’t think anyone here knows that I’m not a shifter!”
“Yeah, I’d figured that much,” Buck said grimly. “How the hell did you even hear about the camp? Regular folk aren’t supposed to know about this place.”
“Sheer chance. I’m a teacher. Art, mostly, but sometimes I help out my colleagues in other subjects. I was working late one night, marking term papers for the senior class, and I came across one talking about working as a counselor-in-training at summer camp. This summer camp. Oh God, there must be shifters at my school.”
Buck, understandably, stared at her as if she were insane. “You applied to spend all summer at a place you’d never been, all because of some kid’s homework assignment?”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t even know why I read and re-read that essay so much. I mean, it didn’t talk about magic or animals or anything like that. Just normal summer camp stuff. But for some reason, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I guess it just…” She hesitated. “This is going to sound crazy.”
“Woman, I just told you that this place is a veritable magical menagerie. Believe me, my threshold for crazy is depressingly high.”
“Well, the moment I touched that essay, something about it just called to me. It felt like I wasmeantto find it.” Honey bit her lip. “Like it was… fate.”
She’d expected Buck to snort derisively at this. Instead, to her surprise, he flinched. Some brief flicker of emotion passed across his face, too fast for her to identify.
“Fate,” he said under his breath. He made it sound like a curse word. “Of motherloving course. So you asked the kid about it?”
“I couldn’t. We mark papers blind, to avoid bias, so I didn’t have their name. But they’d mentioned the name of the camp, and that it was in Montana. So I tried to Google it. When nothing came up, that just made me more intrigued. It took some digging, but I finally found a Camp Thunderbird in the Montana state records of registered children’s camps. Barely any details, but it had the director’s name and phone number listed. So I called him. Said that I’d heard about the place from a past camper, and I was interested in applying to be a counselor.”
“And Zephyr must have assumed that meant you were a shifter.” Buck shook his head. “Well, that explains how you found out about this place. But not how you got in. For the love of sweet little apples, didnothingin the interview process tip you off? I don’t care how rude it is, someone must have asked you about your animal. My nephew’s not a complete idiot.”
“There was a question in the application form about my ‘inner animal.’” Honey made air quotes with her fingers. “I just thought it was, you know, a way of getting me to describe myself. You know, metaphorical.”
“Metaphorical,” Buck repeated. He looked like he was in physical pain. “And you answered this metaphorical question so enthusiastically that you fooled actual shifters into thinking you were one of them. What did you tell Zeph you were?”
“A wolf,” Honey said, and winced as his eyebrows shot up. “I know it sounds stupid, but they’ve always been special to me. When I was a little girl, I used to imagine that there was this big magic wolf that no one else could see, who was my best friend. Whenever I felt lonely or sad, I’d talk to him, and pretend that he talked back. And at night, he’d stand guard over me in my dreams…”
