Page 34 of Legacy Wolf: Semester One (Legacy Wolf #1)

RAWLING

Board game night was officially canceled. The stupid school decided to redo the flooring, changing the tile to carpet. The tile never fit in there, but to do it this weekend sucked.

It was silly how much I looked forward to playing games with my housemates.

Truth be told, it wasn’t the games so much as getting together with people and feeling like I sort of belonged.

I didn’t allow myself to believe it, of course.

I saw how some of the students looked at me still.

I didn’t belong here. At least now I understood why.

In their eyes I was latent, the second worst thing you could be.

The number one on that list: Human. Yeah, I was batting a thousand before I even got up to bat. Wasn’t I lucky. Not that anyone knew except Jack and Professor Shaw.

But starting board game night seemed to level the playing field for a short time, and I loved it. Heck, even Atticus had shown up a few times, and he wasn’t even a dick to me while he was there. But all of that was moot tonight because game night wasn’t going to happen.

I wandered over to the dining hall with the bad news. I’d put up a sign so no one would stand there waiting for us, but I wanted to bitch to my friends about it.

Channon and Jack were already in line to get their food when I arrived. It was breakfast for dinner, which I didn’t mind. I’d prefer burgers, but this came with bacon, and bacon always made everything better.

I was the first to sit down, not wanting to wait for the waffle station.

A minute later, Riley, a squirrel shifter from Minotaur House, asked if he could join me.

Geo, a rabbit from Phoenix House, came over next.

By the time Jack and Channon arrived, there were two more shifters joining us, Lyla, a cat, and Asher, a tiger.

It was the first time since I arrived that anything like this had happened.

I mean, there was the whole Sable Hounds thing, but I tried to push that down where it could never see sunlight again.

I hated that I fell for whatever hazing bullshit that was.

I’d bet money that Atticus set it up in the first place, but even if I could get some form of proof?

Then what? Go to the staff and say that Atticus was mean to me and tricked me into trying to buy some friends with dumbass stunts?

Oh yeah, and if you look on the security cameras, you can probably see a great picture of my ass from one of those stunts.

No. It was best to ignore it and move on.

The group of us ate, Bardoul stopping by to say hi while he worked his shift.

“You guys know that we can’t play today, right?” I figured it was best to get that out of the way. “They are redoing the flooring, and the space is off limits.”

“So we can’t play there, but there has to be somewhere else,” Lyla said, and forty minutes later, we were all packed in my room like sardines about to start a strategy game where we had to destroy the ogres.

What did the ogres do to us? I had no idea, the game left off that part of the world building, but we were all ready to take them down—together.

I looked around the room, surprised by how many people had joined in.

The only one who couldn’t make it was Geo, and that had everything to do with the fifteen-page paper due tomorrow that he’d started at three pm…

today. I wasn’t going to jump to the conclusion that they would become our friends, but they all had the potential to be.

And there were a lot more people in this room than there were people who were friendly to me my entire first week on campus.

“Who wants to set up for Bardoul? He should be over soon.” Unlike us, he had to stay until the end of the dining service. It was his job.

“Not having a wolf here is fine by me,” Lyla said.

“Because you’re a cat and cats are contrary,” Asher teased.

“No, jerk, not because I’m contrary or even because I’m a cat.” She rubbed her ear with her hand—so very catlike I’d have probably guessed her beast even without Jack’s help. “He’s a wolf, and you know how that goes.”

I didn’t, but the couple of automatic nods around the room had me thinking I was the only one who had no clue what she was talking about.

“Bardoul’s not like that and you know it,” Jack snapped. “If you have a problem with him, you can leave before he gets here. He’s my friend, and no one is going to treat him like crap just because his beast has privilege. That makes you as bad as them.” She didn’t indicate who them was.

I’d have to ask Jack about it later, when she could talk to me like the human that I was and not someone who understood everything around them.

Although, I was getting better in that arena.

I now knew the beasts of most of the people in Phoenix House, understood more conversations that happened around me, and didn’t put my foot in my mouth quite as often.

I owed that to Jack and what I’d learned from my godfather’s writing.

“You’re right,” Asher said. “He’s here on work study, and that makes things different.”

Maybe it was a mistake to let these guys come over after all. I would be fine with my handful of friends. It was a handful more than I had back in high school.

“No. He is amazing because he is Bardoul. Full stop. If you want to buy into the hierarchy bullshit, you can do it somewhere else.” Jack wasn’t having it.

All eyes snapped to me.

“Oh, don’t even think I’m going to save you. Jack’s right.” Probably. I wasn’t quite sure of the nuance of this conversation.

They all mumbled their agreement, just in time, Bardoul coming in only a few minutes later.

“Sorry I’m late, but I brought leftovers.” He held up a large paper bag. “It was breakfast, so nothing too great, but I have biscuits and bacon.”

“You are my hero.” We may have just eaten, but bacon on a biscuit sounded like exactly what I needed.

The others agreed, and we devoured his bag of goodies before beginning our game.

It ended up being far more complicated than we thought as we went over the rules.

An hour in, Lyla gave up, thanking Bardoul for being awesome.

I was glad. I didn’t like to think that we’d made a friend only to lose them a few hours later.

Asher left about half an hour later with Riley, after an ogre massacred his village, ate his livestock, and stomped him to death. Up until that point, the game hadn’t been very violent, but Asher kept rolling horrible rounds with his dice.

Soon it was just Jack, Channon, Bardoul, and me. Well, us and an army of ogres coming to destroy us the way they got Asher.

“Don’t be mad, but this game sucks.” Channon pinched the bridge of his nose.

“It takes a lot of thinking, it’s easy to have the ogres destroy everything you’ve done, and there doesn’t seem to be a real path to victory.

I vote we put it away and give it to people we don’t like next board game night. ”

“I’m with him.” Jack put her cards down and leaned back. “This is too much thinking for tonight. We could do something simple or maybe vampires?”

We opted for vampires. I was the only one who saw the potential in the ogres, and it was one of those games I probably needed to bring to open play at a game store, which sadly this area was lacking.

I put away the game while Jack brought out the snacks we had. Channon and Bardoul excused themselves to go get blankets to snuggle with while we watched. I used that as my opportunity to ask Jack what the heck had been going on with Lyla earlier.

“So you know how Atticus is like one of the kings of this place?” she asked.

“I swear if my asking why Lyla was shitty to Bardoul leads to me hearing about Atticus’s cock, I will never ask another question again for as long as I live.” Which was a bold-faced lie but could potentially save me from hearing about his junk.

“I wouldn’t talk about his jewels now… with…”

“When Phelan and I have broken up.”

She nodded, even though it technically wasn’t true. You couldn’t break up if you were never together. I needed to be more like Jack, to have less heart and more lust in my life. It would make things so much easier.

“Now before they come back, what I was going to say but did a shitty job of saying was that wolves rule this place—most places. It’s like someone randomly said that wolves were the best and latents were the worst. Lyla was taking out the social BS on Bardoul.

And even though he is a wolf, he’s work study which puts him down by us anyway.

” She grabbed her laptop and booted it up.

“So it’s like a class system but based on people’s beasts?”

“Yeah. Pretty shitty, huh?”

Understatement of the year.

We had more to talk about, but the guys came back with their blankets, and we jumped right into vampire time. There were no new episodes this week, and we ended up deciding to watch from episode one all over again.

It was nice, because instead of shushing each other out of fear of missing something important on the show when someone talked, we chatted, our focus only halfway on the blood-sucking creatures of the night.

In episode three, the teen who was about to be killed begged the evil vampire not to do it, telling him he had his first job interview in the morning. Of course the vampire didn’t care and sucked him dry. He was evil, after all.

“Maybe he did him a favor,” Bardoul teased. “It could have been for a call center job.”

“I did that for two whole days,” I said. “Last semester. I was broke and they hired me on the spot. It was every bit as awful as you think it is.”

“I interviewed for a job this week.” All eyes were now on Channon. “It was in the school library, and they gave it to a wolf. I had experience, but the wolf got it.”

“If it makes you feel better, I’d hire a fox like you over most of the wolves in this place,” Jack said.

“Not all?”

“There are library science majors, you know.” She shrugged. “Sue me.”

“I can’t. I have no money. They gave my job away.”

Bardoul offered to give him an in at the dining hall, but it turned out that Channon wanted to work at the library because it was the library. I got that. Books were the best.

Five episodes in, and I started to nod off. I didn’t fully fall asleep , but it was getting close. I squinted to look at the projection and watched as the racoon walked across the yard on their way to get into some mischief with the garbage cans. They weren’t called trash pandas for no reason.

It would’ve been a funny and cute little segment of the show if it didn’t bring my brain rushing back to Mika and the mystery of his disappearance.

He too was a racoon, and I half wondered again if the wolves of the Sable Hounds tried to set him up the way they did to me with that hazing bullshit.

Nope. I was certain based on Atticus’s reaction that night that they knew nothing.

Why did it seem like everything was coming back around to Mika? Poor Mika.