Page 18

A boy in the center of the quarrel had his hands firmly on the chest of the one who was growling, trying to calm him down. But the growling boy heard none of it. His breathing camelouder and more forceful, and his eyes began to glow a bright red. I thought I was seeing things and blinked hard.

“James, no!” the mediator yelled, and before the last word was out of his mouth, the growling boy’s body ripped out of his uniform, sprouted a thick coat of ashy brown fur, and mutated into a giant, snarling wolf.

I gasped and jumped away from the scene, clutching my bag to my frantically beating heart.

No one else around reacted the way I had. Many either rolled their eyes and shook their heads or laughed in derision, making fun of the boy, who was now a huge hairy dog. Was this a regular occurrence?

“James Barnes, what do you think you’re doing?” a woman yelled as she made her way across the yard.

“Oh, he’s in for it now,” another student snickered before fleeing the scene like everyone else.

All too eager to get away, I did the same, rushing even quicker toward my first class. I didn’t know if I would ever get used to seeing people turn into oversized beasts, but it didn’t look like I would have much of a choice.

Once I entered the building, finding my classroom was easy. All the doors were labeled by subject, and Shifter Biology was the eighth door down, between Chemistry and General Biology.

I was the first student to arrive, and I was happy that I wouldn’t have to awkwardly struggle to find my seat in front of a full class.

The teacher, dressed in the same style of formal clothing as Celeste had been last night, looked up from her laptop when she saw me enter.

“Ah, you must be Arya.” She rose from her desk and walked over to me, offering me a welcoming smile. “I’m Mrs. Sharp. I’m very pleased to have you in my class.”

“Uh, thanks,” I said, smiling back. “Are the seats assigned?”

“Yes. Your seat is in the second row, third column.” Mrs. Sharp held out an open hand toward the seat in question. “I know you’re a bit new to all of this, but we get new shifters in class at least once a month, so we often go back over the basics. If you have any questions during the lecture, feel free to speak up.”

Mrs. Sharp’s demeanor was so sweet, almost motherly. I already felt calmer for being in her presence, and the reassurance that a refresher course was in order was also a big relief.

I nodded and took my seat.

As more students began to fill the seats around me, I studied the educational posters and diagrams on the walls. There were diagrams of about a dozen different creatures, complete with skeletons, musculature, organ structure, and vein maps.

There was a dragon to the right of the dry erase board, a gryphon next to that, some kind of large furry creature with nine tails—and again, I wondered just how many different shifters there were.

The mermaid diagram was especially interesting, and I studied it until class started, imagining just how a human’s bones could mutate and combine like that.

“Good morning, class,” Mrs. Sharp announced. “As we’ve had a couple of new students recently, I think it best to go over the basics.”

There was a collective groan from the class, and I sunk into my chair, hoping to avoid blame for the repetition.

The other students began pulling tablets out of their cases and setting them on their desks.

So I don’t need a pen and paper after all.

I was glad that I had the sense enough to take the tablet with me. I pulled it out and started it up on my desk, finding the keyboard pretty much attached itself with some sort of magnetic clasp, then set my sights back on the teacher, eager to type down everything she said.

Mrs. Sharp flipped a switch to dim the lights, and a machine projected an image onto the whiteboard. The image was of ten different creatures separated into groups.

“All shifter species are classified into the four major categories,” Mrs. Sharp lectured. “Who can tell me the four categories?”

A girl somewhere behind me must have raised her hand.

“Adina,” Mrs. Sharp called.

“The four categories are archaic, avian, were, and the best of all, oceanid,” the girl said with a haughty tone.

Mrs. Sharp frowned at the girl but continued to say, “That’s correct. There are three major shifter species under the archaic class, which are gryphons, kitsunes, and nagas.”

She pointed to the group on the top left of the image. Obviously, I already knew what a gryphon was. The other two creatures, though, I didn’t recognize at all. One was a fox-like creature with a cluster of fluffy tails, and the other was some sort of lizard-man that honestly looked the most frightening of all.