Page 10 of Wolf Trial

“Let me guess,” I said, gazing at the room, like something out of Dracula’s castle. “You mucked out the stables of a fire-breathing dragon. Your boss was a controlling minotaur who used to charge at you with his horns whenever you got to work late.”

Elix laughed, bright and musical, and something about it untied a knot in my chest. It didn’t touch the gnarled mass of my anxiety, but I was able to breathe a little easier.

I wish, she wrote, her pencil moving rapidly over the pad. Dragons have been extinct for decades, although my cousin swore she heard a dragon roar from the mountains above Cresemire once.

“Damn.” I leaned back on my elbows. “Dragons are real?”

Elix shrugged. They used to be. What’s a minor tor?

“Oh, minotaur. They’re these massive, buff guys with bull heads and horns. They’re not actually real. I don’t think,” I added. “I didn’t think vampires and werewolves were real, either.”

My head ached, trying to digest my new reality. “So what did you actually do for work?”

Elix’s shoulders hunched inward as she wrote her reply, and I frowned, reading her body language. I worked the silver fields around Silverton.

The way she’d braced for my reaction, I expected something more divisive than that. I was missing something. “So you’re a farmer?”

No, she wrote. Labour.

“Oh,” I murmured. “Shit. I’m guessing not the paid variety.” She shook her head, her shoulders bowed. “That’s illegal, at least where I’m from. Then again, so is trafficking people and forcing them to join a school of wolf killers.” I really don’t think this was what Aladdin meant when he sang a whole new world.2 “I’m sorry people suck. But you’re out of that place now, right?”

Not that Lunatic Academy would be much better.

Elix shrugged, so I added, “Maybe when you’ve trained to be a total badass, you can go back to the silver fields and murder the piece of shit who owns the place.”

A smile flickered at the edge of her mouth, though her eyes remained sad. And here I’d thought her being non-human made her a threat to me. I was right with my first assessment of badly mistreated doll. I didn’t expect her to come from slave labour, though. Jesus Christ. What kind of world had I been abducted into?

My grandfather, Elix wrote on her pad, and I swore soundly.

“Your own grandfather forced you into slave labour?”

I wouldn’t marry the lord he promised me to.

“Vampire lord?” I asked, an eyebrow raised.

She nodded. An old, traditional vampire who would have made my life hell. Grandfather gave me the choice of marrying him or the fields. He thought I’d choose the lord.

“Damn,” I murmured, admiring the hell out of the woman even as sympathy crowded my chest, elbowing my anxiety aside to make room for itself. “No wonder you’re not phased by this academy shit.”

She laughed. Wrote, I’m petrified.

“That makes two of us.” On reflection, my own family and upbringing were a picnic under a cloudless sky and a bright rainbow. “I’ll watch your back if you watch mine,” I offered.

She was already nodding before I’d finished speaking, pushing a lock of flaxen hair behind her ear.

I meant to ask her a dozen more questions, but she wrote, We should get some sleep. Tomorrow isn’t going to be easy. And I’d have been a fool not to take that advice.

So I took my pyjamas into the adjoined room—a bathroom, thank god—washed the dust from the prison wagon off myself, peed in what was thankfully toilet-adjacent instead of a bucket, and climbed into bed. My entire body tensed when howls sounded outside. Not right under the window, but too close for comfort.

Wolves. The shifters I’d been brought here to fight, to kill. I laid there in bed and tried not to think about it, to convince myself I was still at home just so I could fall asleep.

By the time noise began to stir through the hallway outside, I hadn’t slept a single minute.

CHAPTER 7

SADIE

Breakfast was an interesting affair, but I made it through, with the help of my new bestie.1 I managed to put together a bowl of porridge, sweet berry jam, and syrup that wasn’t just palatable, it tasted good. And as a nice bonus, thanks to Elix, I avoided sausages that were made of meat from dubious sources.