Page 1 of Dry as a Fish (Chaos God Sugar and Spice Companion Shorts #3)

Chapter

One

SLOANE

T he ice-cold drink dribbling down the inside of my dress wasn't the worst part of my night so far.

I grabbed the front of my dress, pulling the wet fabric away from my chest, the sugary liquid trickling down to my belly as I swore softly under my breath. "Holy fudgesicles!"

Well, maybe that didn't count as swearing, but the one time I tried anything harsher around my momma, I had to shovel out every inch of the old pig pen into a wheelbarrow, then haul it over to the new field.

When I pointed out we should have just penned the pigs up in the field and they would have done all the churning and fertilizing for us, my momma took a belt to me for talking back.

It took around fifty wheelbarrow loads with a stinging rear, and I learned that it was better to sound like I belonged in an old black and white film than say the kind of things my momma didn't approve of .

Of course, she never would have approved of me being at a party like this or wearing a dress like this.

She definitely wouldn't have approved of me going to this school, which was why I put in the extra effort to make it here.

She said college was only for meeting a good man from the right kind of family, and I didn't really need college for that.

Going to a school that promised to teach me magic?

She would have thought that was devil worship.

After I found my college applications in the trash, I stopped caring about what she thought was witchcraft or not.

I'd spent hours filling them out, and she just threw them away when I was done!

The instructions on the pamphlet I found in the mail a few days later seemed like a gift from God.

I thought I'd see if I got in and then tell her afterwards when it was too late for her to rip up the application.

I'd done the ritual, summoned my familiar, packed my bag, and went to the admissions interview, and it turned out they wanted us to pack a bag because we weren't coming back.

Orientation had made it pretty clear that going home wasn't an option.

A hand reached out and pushed napkin against the front of my wet dress, pressing it back against my tits, bringing my wandering mind back to the present predicament.

I grabbed the napkins out of his hand and pushed his arm away, wishing I'd brought Kili to the party instead of leaving her sleeping.

The school worked her harder than me. It was starting to feel like I only got into this school because they wanted Kili's ability to find anything and anyone, and I was an afterthought.

If she were here, she could have tripped him for me so I could go hide behind the drink table until he stopped looking for me .

He pulled another napkin out of his back pocket and reached out towards me, trying to touch my chest again.

"I can do that myself," I said, gritting my teeth as I batted his arm away a second time.

Why did he have napkins shoved into his back pocket?

Suspicion swirled in me as my feet shifted in the sand of the lake's beach to back away from him as I dabbed my wet chest with the napkins.

The thrumming bass of the music rolled over us, carried across the night's surface of the lake, bouncing off the sheer cliff walls on the far side of the body of water.

The worst part of my night so far was standing in front of me, an empty cup in one hand and a wad of napkins in the other, he stared at my wet chest.

I couldn't remember his name, so I'd been calling him Chad in my head.

He'd been following me around at the lakeside party, talking loudly to me, ignoring all my attempts to separate from him.

I'd made the mistake of smiling at him when he shoulder-checked me on the dance floor, and he'd taken my instinctual reaction as an invitation.

Though at this point, I was pretty sure he would have taken any expression as an invitation, given the fact that he wouldn't take a hint.

I don't know why. I thought I had been clear.

But every time I tried to say I was going to go find my friend, or go get another drink, or literally anything I could think of to walk away, he just followed anyway.

It was like he couldn't hear me at all over the sound of his own voice.

Now the entire front of my dress was wet.

This was the first time I'd worn it! I'd gotten it from a store in town and hidden it from my momma, thinking I might get a chance to wear it at college.

"You should take that off before it stains," he said, his eyes fixed on my chest .

"It's a black dress," I said, hearing the flatness in my own voice. "You were drinking iced mead. It's not going to stain."

"You can wear my shirt instead," he said, ignoring me as he grabbed the bottom of his white shirt and pulled it up over his head.

I got an eyeful of pasty skin and muscles before I yanked my gaze away.

All the guys at this school were fit. They had to be.

The school made them fight like caged roosters.

Everyone here trained. My arms and back still ached from my martial class where the teacher had us learning archery. I was pretty confused by that. Arrows were neat and all, but the school had tablets. If they had tablets and other technological things, why didn't they have shotguns?

I asked the teacher, and she said arrows could be inscribed with more spells, and bullets were easier to block with a simple magical shield. It had something to do with velocity.

I pressed my lips together, pushing them up towards the bottom of my nose.

For some reason, it was only women in archery.

Hand-to-hand fighting or fighting with weapons was reserved for the men.

We didn't even get to use the fun-looking obstacle course.

My women-only martial class had us working on archery, and that was it.

It was lame. The obstacle course looked like fun, but there was no way I was going to go use it.

Orientation had made me extremely concerned about sticking to the school rules, as the punishment for disobeying the school was a heck of a lot worse than a simple belting.

The rules didn't say I had to talk to jerks who deliberately dumped their drinks down the front of my dress.

He shoved his shirt in my face, and I recoiled back from the stench of it.

"Here!" he shouted .

"No!" I replied, stepping backwards towards the edge of the water.

"Just take it!" he insisted, closing the space between us. "I'll help you change!"

"No!" I shouted, putting my hands out to ward him off.

He ignored them, pushing into them and bending slightly to grab the bottom edge of my dress with one hand, the other shoving his smelly shirt in my face.

One thing I'd learned growing up with horses and other large animals was that when you had to deal with a fresh gelding that was mad about his bits being chopped off, you had two choices.

You could leave him alone to let him work it out on his own, or you could wait until he was off balance.

It was no good trying to fight a thousand-pound animal when he had all four feet planted on the ground, but if he was up in the air, all twisting and thrashing about, one good yank at the right moment could take him down to the ground.

So I didn't try to fight Chad off by pushing him again.

I stepped to the side, twisting as I grabbed his arm and yanked. I caught his ankle with my foot as I sidestepped, and down he went, sprawling and splashing into the shallow edge of the lakeshore.

"You fucking bitch!" he spat out as he splashed back up to his feet. "You're going to re-"

His words cut off as he suddenly fell face forward as if his feet had been yanked out from under him.

His eyes met mine, widening in horror.

There was one heartbeat, a pause before the storm.

Then he slid backwards, vanishing into the water so fast he didn't have time to scream.

My brain short-circuited for a moment at his sudden disappearance, and I took a step back from the lake edge .

"Chad?" I whispered. I took another step, the next words croaking out of my mouth as I tried to find volume that wasn't quite there yet, like I was caught in a nightmare where I couldn't scream. "There's something in the water."

I turned back to the party, turning to run back to the edge of the dancers that were a few yards up on the lakeshore. "There's something in the wa-"

"LYCAN!" someone screamed at the top of their lungs, and the crowd erupted into screams that swallowed my own.

A gargantuan fur-covered monster, at least ten feet high, smashed its way through the crowd.

There was a woman slung over its shoulder, held there by long black claws the size of daggers.

Everyone was screaming, and the crowd burst into motion, all running away from it.

A tall man crashed into me, and I bounced off of him, falling back, knocking the air out of me.

I landed hard on my side in soft sand, rolling several times from the momentum of the impact.

I struggled to catch my breath as my foot set down in something cold. .. something wet.

The sensation was so minor, but it drew all my attention as adrenaline screamed through my system.

My foot was in the lake.

Warm, wet fingers wrapped around my ankle, the heat of them a stark counterpoint to the coolness of the water.

I didn't have time to scream.