Page 8 of Her Vicious Beasts: The Beginning (Her Vicious Beasts)

Aurelia

I ’m quite happy about the progress I’ve made today with the shadow snake.

I still can’t tell what type of animus the male has, but it doesn’t affect my ability to heal him.

I report back to Mr. Halfeather when Beak and Scuff come to get me.

He never asks me details about the illness or the manner of it, and I vaguely wonder if this is some weird thing my father is doing to test me.

But none of that makes sense, given my father already knows what I’m capable of.

Whatever I did for the animalia behind that steel door, I was acutely aware of the three prisoners I’d seen a little more of today—and the fourth, a hyena, I think, who’d spoken so crassly to me.

There were other creatures in that dungeon—I had seen them as I walked past their cells on the way back.

They were all slumped on the cement floor with their backs turned towards me as if they were half alive.

The only ones who seemed to be interested in what went on were the sleaze bag and the wolf, Savage .

The name given from a fighting family, if I’ve ever heard one. Wolves are notorious for underground fighting rings. It’s a good way to make money if you’re good at it. High risk, high reward, and with that expensive gem on his ear, I bet he did real well at his job.

I leave Halfeather’s manor with Beak opening the door of my Beetle for me once again. Chivalry isn’t dead, and it makes my beast of an anima preen and coo at him.

“Thanks.” I only let myself smile at him as I get into my car.

“Will I see you at the Academy in two weeks?” he asks.

I choke. “You’re going to Animus Academy?”

He runs a hand through his hair, smirking. “Yeah, I got the order a few weeks ago. My parents were so relieved.”

Males seem to think it’s a flex being ordered to attend the college we send our most volatile, promiscuous and errant new adults.

The idea is to temper and civilise them before they hit the workforce and wider community, so they won’t be such a menace to the fearful human population we try to live alongside.

Naturally, once you receive the order to attend, you have to go, otherwise they hunt you down and take you kicking and screaming bound in tourmaline chains.

Beak seems pretty controlled, but there must be a feral hunter under that pretty face.

Why he thinks I’m going there is beyond me.

“Do I look like I need to go there?” I ask in horror.

He smiles sheepishly. “Well, I thought because of your power, you’d be… no? Well, good for you then.”

I leave the mansion, heading to my favourite fast-food drive-thru before I’m due at work.

The entire way, Savage’s face presses in on my mind’s eye.

Seeing these beasts behind bars in such conditions, slumped against the wall, dirty and one even without clothes, makes me cringe.

There is no humanity in it at all. When I head into work, a discounted stack of sweatpants catches my eye and the whisper of a wild thought runs through my mind.

It’s the morning of the third day of my visits to Halfeather’s dungeon and I feel the edges of fatigue creeping in. My power is sizeable, but the strain of both maintaining my seven shields and being around these males has me feeling some kind of way.

But I find that a bubble of eagerness engulfs me.

I’m likely finally going mad, but I actually look forward to it.

It’s almost like going to a real job where I have regular faces grinning at me upon my entry.

I’m wanted here. Beak and Scuff shoot me flirty smiles and Beak even hands me a few Hershey’s Kisses from the frosted glass bowl he keeps at his desk.

“You deserve it,” he says, grinning.

Be still my fluttering heart! I blush and keep my mouth shut in case I say something dumb like, ‘What time do you get off?’

A part of me shakes its head in dismay, but a reasonable part of me googled it last night and I know it has a name: Touch deprivation.

Even in Aunt Charlotte’s shop I’m usually relegated to stacking shelves and cleaning, my contact with clients is limited to the occasional cashier coverage when Charlotte goes to the bathroom to fix her makeup.

My father took me out of school once he moved me out of home.

I’ve been homeschooled since then, using an online system one of the high school teachers in his court had set up.

It was lonely, so I ended up sneaking to the local Salvation Army store, picking up as many books as I could manage after I shopped for clothes.

If I couldn’t be a part of the real world, my fictional book worlds were always waiting for me along with my fictional friends.

No one except Uncle Ben has given me chocolate or anything remotely resembling a gift since I was a kid.

So I know I’m a complete loony as I’m heading down into a dungeon of darkness with a group of apex predators and my anima purrs with glee. My lips twitch with a faint smile as Beak opens the second steel door.

I waltz in with the Hershey’s Kisses in my hand and, this time even the creepy cold can’t affect my good mood.

Beak shakes his head in amusement as I pass him.

He probably thinks I’m mental, and I doubt he’s all that wrong.

They’ve put the lights on for me already, and it’s slightly brighter than yesterday.

Making a surprised noise at the back of my throat at Beak’s further kindness, I stride down.

It’s like my body knows Savage is waiting for me because I immediately forget about Beak’s lingering gaze and clench in anticipation of those wolfish hazel eyes.

I’m walking past the leering male’s cage, stiffening in case I get another lewd comment, but as I glance inside his cell, I stop dead in my tracks.

Dear Wild Mother.

Lying on the stones of his cell is a hyena, clearly having shifted into his animus form before his head was separated from his body.

There’s a pool of blood between the two parts and my stomach gives a fell lurch.

One of my hands finds my mouth, covering it as if I can also cover the scene of the murder from my mind.

“ Lee-ah .” Savage sings my name in the cadence of a happy children’s song.

Chains scrape, a body shifts, but I ignore him and turn, forcing my eyes to the cell opposite of the hyena’s, where the naked male is still sitting on his metal chair.

I can see a little more of him today. He’s a big beast, a late-twenties animalia covered in black tattoos from his feet to his neck.

But one tattoo stands out: five fine lines of ancient text on the left side of his neck.

This and two other signs tell me what his animus is.

Ice-blue eyes glint at me through the dark.

Long, silver hair that brushes his shoulders stands out amidst the gloom.

On the left side of his neck are five lines of text representing five gill slits. He’s a shark.

He’s still. So still as he looks at me, powerful chest taking slow, deep breaths, large biceps pushed out from where his arms are tied behind his back.

In my woeful life healing all sorts of dark creatures, I’d yet to meet a shark—and for good reason.

Most of them go mad on land, the theory being that they were never meant to leave their marine home.

Indeed, almost all marine animalia choose to live out their lives in deep parts of the ocean in converted form, never turning human ever again.

So what the hell is this one doing here?