Page 5 of Zodiac Hybrids

In the silence of the empty hall, I stared blankly at the door to what would be one of my primary subjects for the next four years or more, run by a man who just sniffed me. Who trapped me against a door and made my heart beat with more rapid consistency than machine gun fire.

A total creep who wants me to join an Astrology club…

What.

In the actual.

Fuck.

Chapter 2

I verified the door was locked as soon as she was in the hall. Her scent was still in my nostrils, messing with every synapse in my brain, and I needed that barrier between us as soon as physically possible.

What was it about this random girl that had my mind and body in such a tizzy? I couldn’t act that way with a student. If she never came back, she’d be all the wiser for it, yet I knew she would come back. An annoying, instinctual part of my gut perhaps even hoped she would. Hell, I’d practically encouraged it in a brief lapse of sanity. I was going to be stuck seeing her again and again and again for the foreseeable future if she was pursuing a degree in aerospace.

Wild.

And confusing.

And something I should absolutely not be getting mixed up with. It must have been some cruel joke that she ended up in my class.

Then I invited her to join the Astrology Club? Because I needed her getting more mixed up in this. Fucking brilliant.

I scoffed with pure sarcasm, then I shoved my hand through my hair and took a ten count to gather my composure again. The fact that the moon was so close to being full was the only explanation for the irrational urges. This was a dangerous position. The last thing I needed was to find myself seeking out something I very much shouldn’t. And by the devil, she was something I very much couldn’t.

I took a seat at my desk and tapped my index finger idly on the mahogany.

She had no clue what I was talking about when I asked what she was. I doubted that her acting was good enough for that answer to have been sarcasm or a clever lie. She could barely look at me without quivering.

Could she be human? I’d lived in Graves so long at this point, I barely remembered what ordinary mortals smelled like. Perhaps that was why I couldn’t place her scent. It wasn’t a baiting scent, nor was it spiked with anything comforting like an Alpha or Beta might sport. It was warm but dark and indistinguishable. Was that what mortal flesh smelled like? That had to be it.

A human.

Not something special or unusual.

Well, humans were both special and unusual in a place like Graves Academy. Only a handful were allowed to enroll every year, largely to create a constant test assuring the rest of us could keep our gifts hidden in ordinary society. If it was obvious who was what, it would be entirely too easy to develop bad public habits. Like, I don’t know, sniffing your students.

One very deep breath eased the headache I was giving myself. Another, and I was back on my feet, pacing the classroom.

I need to be careful around her.

Chapter 3

At the conclusion of the last class, everyone was roused from their dorms for the Club Faire in the courtyard of Graves. I should have been excited—all I thought about was my own loneliness, and I was literally being forced to have a sort-of friend group to spend the afternoons with. This was prime opportunity to do the cliché finding myself thing. Join a club, make friends, maybe even my first boyfriend, get kissed, party, lose my stupid virginity, feel like I had some form of real, honest freedom, and pretend to be half way cool.

But instead, my introverted brain didn’t care about any of that, and I remained filled with existential dread, and I just kept thinking it was a distraction I didn’t have time or energy for. Maybe no one would like me. Maybe I was too weird. Maybe everyone at Graves liked to sniff people. I don’t fucking know.

But as it stood, the only person I’d had a conversation with thus far was a thirty-something-year-old teacher, and it would be good to start interacting with people my own age. I didn’t want to end up a teacher’s pet again, even if I wouldn’t mind getting pet by that teacher.

No. Bad, Lila. Stop it.

A professor shouldn’t be occupying this much of my mind at this point in my education.

Forcing my focus back on the present, I took my first step into ye olde Club Faire. The courtyard at Graves was expansive, with a plush and open field, great for relaxing between classes if you could stand the imposing eyes of the dragon and gargoyle statues that surrounded the place, and the sheer quantity of students bustling about the event was overwhelming. The seemingly endless rows of booths advertised everything from sports, to art, to chess, to anime. There was certainly a wide range, but I didn’t have much interest in any of them.

Where was the robotics club? Where were the space nerds or astronomy clubs? None of these were relevant to my major, and I didn’t have much time for silly hobbies.

Maybe Professor Karras was onto something when he suggested that astrology voodoo nonsense. At least it involved stargazing. It was an excuse to stare up into space and call it an elective, and maybe some of the old mythology would make for decent stories. I knew a touch more about it than I wanted to, so I wouldn’t be at a total loss going in, even if I thought it was all pretty dumb.