Page 48 of Legacy Wolf: Semester One (Legacy Wolf #1)
BARDOUL
Rawling had been a hot mess for a while now.
He was running on fumes. My guess was it had to do with the increased workload that came at this time of semester, but that was just a guess.
When he didn’t come into the dining hall tonight, making it three consecutive dinners missed, I decided a food intervention was in order.
Rawling was one of the few people on this campus who never once looked at me like I was less-than.
Even the other scholarship students did from time to time.
I didn’t get it, but it was almost as if they had to be better than at least someone and that somehow miraculously became me.
Even Channon had been caught in the pity stare when we first met.
We were besties now, but there were a few times at the beginning of our friendship that…
that he saw me the way everyone else did.
I used an extra swipe left on my meal card that I had from earlier in the semester and grabbed some dinner to go.
My boss looked at me funny, but when I told him I was in for an all-nighter and knew I’d be famished, he let it go.
It was a good night too; chicken and gravy.
It was one of the campus’s favorites, making Rawling’s absence more worrisome.
It felt a bit weird, knocking on his door with a bunch of to-go containers in my hand unannounced.
His groan echoed after the first few knocks, and by the time I did the third, he was grumbling that he was coming.
I was officially second- and third-guessing my gesture by the time the door swung open.
“I brought you food.” I held it out to him, miraculously managing to make the entire thing even more awkward than it already was. “You missed chicken-and-gravy night.”
Thanks,” he mumbled, and I looked up to take him in for the first time since he opened the door.
The guy looked horrible. Like someone had kicked his puppy awful.
To my surprise, he turned and walked in, leaving the door open.
I took that as an invitation to follow him.
If it wasn’t his way of letting me know I was invited, then it was him forgetting to shut the door in his awful whatever this was—funk maybe?
If that was the case, he needed me to stick around and make sure he was okay until Jack got home.
In either case, walking in was my best option.
“Is there a new episode?” Rawling asked. “Honestly, I’m not sure what day it is. I was just napping.”
“No new episode. I was just worried you missed dinner.”
“Coach sent me home, so I took a nap.” He let out a long yawn. “Said my head wasn’t in the game and I shouldn’t stay up all night.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?”
He shook his head. “Not really. Thanks for dinner.” He put the food on his desk and popped what he thought was the lid, but was actually the bottom of the container and potatoes slathered in gravy poured out onto the desk and his hand.
How the containers all got turned upside down was beyond me, but from the cry that Rawling let out, the potatoes and gravy were still hot.
“Fuck,” he grumbled and pulled at his ring as he ran to the bathroom, presumably to run cold water over his burn. That wasn’t a surprise. It was what I would’ve done also. What was a surprise was the scent that slammed into me.
That was no latent scent. Rawling wasn’t latent. He was human. The one thing I was a thousand percent sure of was that I scented a human and myself in the room.
“You okay?” I called to him, pretending that everything was good in this world.
And it was, I supposed, except for the part where Rawling had been lying to me.
Or maybe he hadn’t. What if he didn’t know that he didn’t have a beast anymore?
That information was not something you sprang on a shifter, latent or not.
Was that even a thing that happened? Could a latent’s beast just leave like that?
It was the only explanation I could think of, but even that didn’t make sense. Not fully.
“Uh, yeah. I just burned myself.”
I righted his food container and cleaned things up as best as I could while he was treating his burn.
When he came out, his ring was back on, and I took that as a sign his burn wasn’t too severe.
His scent was back to normal. Maybe I just imagined it.
No. That couldn’t be. Humans had a very distinct scent.
It had definitely been a human scent flooding my senses.
“It looks like it was more me freaking out than it was actually bad.” He showed it to me, and sure enough, it was pink but not red and no signs of an impending blister.
“Yeah, it looks pretty good.” I indicated the containers. “I righted them all, but I used tissues to clean up the spilled potatoes.”
“Did you want to stay to watch the new episode?” The poor guy was still not fully with it.
“That’s not today,” I reminded him. “I’ll let you get your dinner eaten and go back to bed. You look like you’ve been staying up too late studying.”
“Something like that,” he said around a forkful of potatoes. “Sooo good.”
I excused myself and went straight outside, needing some air. Rawling was human, and I wasn’t sure if he knew it.
Channon
My beast had been restless all day. It was the day I had boring class after boring class, and he was done. What he wanted was a run, but I didn’t feel safe doing that alone, so I did the next best thing and went for a walk.
It was the perfect evening. The moon was high enough that I could see with my human eyes, but not full where everyone started to act weird. They could call that hogwash all they wanted, but the full moon made everyone a bit off kilter. The cool evening air was exactly what was needed.
“Hey!”
I looked behind me to see Bardoul rushing to catch up.
“I need someone to talk to,” he said as he reached my side. “But like a private don’t say anything kind of talk.”
I agreed, assuming it had something to do with his scholarship. I assumed wrong.
We found a nice patch of grass away from everything and sat down. “What’s up?”
“So the thing is, I brought Rawling food on account of him missing chicken-and-gravy night. No one does that, so I figured he was sick or something.”
He had a point. The dining hall was always super crowded on days it was served.
“To make a long story short, he burned himself, and when he did… for like ten seconds tops, he scented different.”
“That makes sense. His wolf was probably closer than normal because of the injury. Latents don’t not have an animal, they stay quiet is all.” At least that was my understanding of them.
“When I say different, I mean human.” He all but whispered “human.”
“Like his wolf tried to permanently leave?” My heart sank. If I lost my beast I’d be broken.
“I don’t know. I have a couple of theories I’ve been contemplating during my walk.” He rubbed his nose the way he did when he got nervous and then proceeded to info dump all of his theories.
His thoughts ran from that those gross protein bars he ate were a magical spell covering his scent, to he’d been around a human and the scent hit funny, to he didn’t even know he was human. None of them made sense, but then again, a latent scenting human didn’t either.
“What should we do?” He fell back onto the grass, looking up at the moonlit sky. “If he doesn’t know, that’s one mess, but if he does know, he’s been lying to us.”
I hadn’t considered it from that angle. Keeping shit from us would suck, but I tried to think of a time he’d actually said he was latent and came up with nothing. Sure, there were lies by omissions, but still…
“Here’s the thing, I can’t pinpoint when he should have told us, but at the same time, him not telling us sucks.
But also, it’s a secret for a reason. He’d be kicked out at best. At worst…
I don’t want to think about it.” I joined Bardoul, lying beside him.
“And even though we’re good friends now, we were strangers once.
So where is the line, the one where we should be in the know? ”
He stayed silent for a full minute before answering me. “I think we probably haven’t reached that point yet. I mean, when I showed up at his door with food, I second-guessed if it was too weird. And with you, I’d have given it not a single thought. Does that make sense?”
“It does, actually. But where does that leave us?”
“We keep his secret and keep him safe and cross our fingers he isn’t losing his wolf.”
It wasn’t a great plan, but it would have to do.