Page 44 of Wolf Trial

I groaned. “Don’t make me punch the other tit.”

Elix held up her pad, and the two words she’d written made me smile wider than I had since I’d arrived in this infernal place. Group hug?

“Hell yes,” I agreed, opening my arms.

Paige threw hers around the both of us, resting her head on my shoulder. “I thought you were dead. I thought we’d find you hanging from the staircase with your eyes gouged out like Fioranna.”

I shuddered. Was that what Rev would have done tonight, if Beaufort hadn’t interrupted us?

“I’m lucky I got the pushed to my death treatment instead of the eye gouging kind.” Maybe Rev and her cronies switched up the methods of every murder. Knowing this place, that was probably one of the lessons—Murder Methods for Beginners. Maybe Rev was just going through the textbook.

“What was this I heard about sabotage?” Paige asked, lifting her head to look between us.

“I have a few ideas. We need to—”

A scream made all three of us startle together, and I tightened my arms around my friends on reflex, Elix’s wide eyes colliding with mine.

What if Rev knows you’re not dead? Elix wrote hastily.

“Oh, she does,” I said in a snarl. “I ran into her in the grounds.”

“If she knows she failed to kill you,” Paige said, staring at the door as the scream continued, shrieking and loud. “It sounds like she found another victim and made sure they’re dead this time.”

The three of us ventured cautiously into the hallway, armed with weapons Elix had pilfered from the House of Stone wing of the building during her tour. We weren’t the only ones who’d come to investigate; others spilled out of the doorways along this hall, some of them doing double takes when they saw me. Rogue, whose room was at the end of the hall, spotted me and rushed at us so quickly I didn’t see her move. One second I was pointing a dagger at the hallway, the next my hand was by my side and her arms were tight around me.

“Surprise,” I said, though I was the one surprised by her reaction. “I’m not dead.”

Rogue drew back to sweep a look down my body, and my stomach flipped at the wrath that entered her eyes. But she didn’t rat me out, didn’t sniff out the new wolf scent on me, and when her stare lingered on my scratched arms, my sore hands, I realised she was enraged at the sorry state of me. Maybe she, like Elix, assumed my attacker had stolen my clothes because she didn’t even blink at my new wardrobe.1

“Who’s screaming?” Paige asked, brushing past Rogue as she released my arms—I didn’t even realise she had hold of me—and searching the hallway.

“Lilis,” Rogue replied, her composure back in place as she gazed down the crowded corridor. “She arrived in the same shipment as me.”

Elix held up her paper. Is she hurt?

“Not physically by the sounds of it,” Rogue replied, her shoulders moving with a sigh, drawing my attention to the flimsy night shirt she wore. I dragged my stare away, not trusting myself not to stare at her boobs again, and startled when a tall, graceful blonde woman raced into view, covered in blood. “She’s in a relationship with another slayer. Soria Runel.”

“Her arms,” Lilis wailed, covering her face with bloody hands. “They took her arms.”

The four of us shared a look. First Fioranna’s eyes, and now Soria’s arms? “Jesus,” I breathed.

“It’s like Frankenstein,” Paige said at the same time I said, “It’s fucking Build-A-Bear.”

It was an inappropriate time to laugh, but I’d just narrowly escaped death, returned as a wolf, met two men who claimed me as their mates—I was still figuring out the importance of that—and snuck back into Lunova Academy where we were trained to kill people like me. I think I’d earned some inappropriate humour.

It died when Elix held up her pad:

Someone’s picking us off one by one.

Rogue nodded, arms crossed over her chest. “And the victims never met each other, which means any one of us could be next.”

CHAPTER 26

SADIE

Fioranna’s murder had clearly caught the professors and tutors by surprise, because our classes were cancelled that day. The same courtesy wasn’t extended to Soria Runel. She was murdered only last night, but by morning, it was business as usual. Breakfast was tense as slayers considered there was a hunter among us whose prey was their kin, not just wolves. Then instead of a morning training session, the four new recruits were swallowed into a larger class of students for a poison brewing class.

I spotted Maveline slouching into the tower room ahead of me, the moonlight slanting across the classroom like gauze making her resemble a ghost, deathly pale, sad-eyed. Here was my chance.