Fang And Claw (Nocturne Academy 2)

I opened my arms and Kaitlyn slid out of my lap at once.

“Thank you,” she said again, ducking her head and hiding the left side of her face, though to me it was as beautiful as the right. I wished that I could make her see that—could make her understand that her beauty, to me, was so much more than skin-deep.

But these things take time.

“I’ll see you later,” she said and turned to go.

“I’ll see you here, just before dinner, L’lorna,” I told her, the name slipping out again before I could stop it.

She looked at me with wide eyes and then nodded again—another quick jerk of the head—before she pushed through the heavy wooden door and was gone.

43

Kaitlyn

I honestly didn’t know what to think about any of it—I guess I felt dazed. I wandered back to my History of Magic class, only to find that the bell had rung while Ari fed me and I was now late for my next period.

I retrieved my books and hurried to the next class which I thankfully didn’t share with the big Drake. I was glad to have a little time to myself—I needed it after all the crazy, confusing things that had happened to me lately.

The thought that kept going round and round my head was why?

Why would a big, handsome, important Drake like Ari Reyes want so badly to feed me his blood? Why would he care about a scarred little human—no, I corrected myself—a scarred little Nocturne—enough to make an oath to slake my thirst and then go out of his way to be certain he honored that oath?

And why were the emotions when I bit him—when he held me in his arms and let me take his vein—so incredibly intense? Of course, Griffin had warned that they would be and Megan had confirmed it often enough, blushing when she told us how good it felt when Griffin sank his fangs into her flesh. But I had never expected to feel what I felt when I took Ari’s vein with anyone—except maybe my husband if I ever got married and we had sex, anyway.

Seriously it was that good.

Or maybe it was better—I didn’t honestly know, being a virgin. But all this better-than-sex biting felt strange, especially when it was happening with a boy I hardly knew—a boy who was so far above me on the social scale of our school he might as well be a prince while I was the pauper.

So the question remained—why?

I no longer believed Ari’s wish to care for me was really about the awful things his fellow Drake had done to me in PE class. Surely even the Drake sense of obligation couldn’t run that deep.

But if that wasn’t his motivation, what was?

It couldn’t be because he cared for me in any way. He didn’t even know me and even if he had, how could someone like him care for someone like me?

He couldn’t, I told myself flatly. There was just no way in H-E-double hockey sticks as Avery liked to say when he was being funny.

So again, I had no answers—and it didn’t look likely that I was going to get any in the near future, either.

44

Kaitlyn

“Maybe he genuinely cares for you,” Avery suggested at lunch, when I hesitantly told my Coven-mates what had happened after I collapsed in History of Magic.

I had no choice—it was already all over the school, apparently. How Ari had swooped me up to take me to the Healer and how neither one of us had ever come back to class. All of Nocturne Academy was buzzing and I saw plenty of interested faces turned in my direction as people who had never given me a second glance now openly stared and speculated about what was happening between me and the big Drake.

“No, that can’t be it,” I said, looking down at my tray with its greasy cold French fries covered in several layers of weird goop.

Today the Lunch Ladies had attempted a kind of poutine—the Canadian dish where you ladle brown gravy and cheese curds over fries and serve it up piping hot. It’s actually a delicious dish when done right—but unfortunately the Lunch Ladies had gotten it wrong.

Instead of brown gravy, they had used some kind of fish sauce—or that was what it smelled like to my newly sensitive Nocturne nose. And Instead of cheese curds, there were chunks of canned tuna. Though there was, of course, still the obligatory layer of melted orange-crayon cheese that they apparently thought was one of the four food groups here.

The whole mess smelled fishy and wrong and totally awful. And even if I had still been human, it wouldn’t have been an appetizing sight, either.

Now that I was Nocturne, human food disgusted me—just looking at the mess on my tray nearly made me puke. I had only gotten it in order to avoid suspicion about my new state of being but now I wished I hadn’t.