Page 50 of Legacy Wolf: Semester One (Legacy Wolf #1)
RAWLING
My heart was racing, beating so loudly in my chest I was convinced that everyone we brushed past could hear it if they were paying attention.
Jack was pissed that I was dragging her in the opposite direction of her soccer practice, but I couldn’t wait another second to tell her what I’d found.
As it was, holding it in on our walk home was a challenge and a half.
Had it been anything else, it could have waited.
But this felt huge, like it was connected to my dreams somehow.
Sure, it might be the boogie man of shifters, but if it wasn’t, there was the very real possibility that I was tapping into someone else’s head during my nightmares, because they for sure wanted to hunt.
And me? I wanted zero part of that ever.
Shifter or not, I liked to leave animals be.
“Would you slow down?” Jack grabbed my arm. “Seriously, you look like you are up to something.”
That had me slowing down, as difficult as it was for me to do so. The last thing I wanted was to draw more attention to myself. This could wait a few minutes. Shit, it would wait until after soccer, I just wasn’t willing to allow it.
Phoenix House felt four thousand miles away, but we managed to get there without running into anyone.
Once we got inside, that was a different story.
Not just one or even just two people stopped me to ask about game night.
Nope. There were four people all wanting to know if I had any new games this week.
I lied, not wanting to have to describe the wonder of a game that had arrived. I didn’t have time for that.
Once upstairs, the door wasn’t shut before Jack jumped right in.
“Spill it out, all of it. If you spare a single detail I promise to make you… make you… I don’t even know, but it will be horrific and you will hate it more than anything.” Her hands formed fists at her hips. She meant it.
“Fine.” I went over to my bed and plopped down. She joined me at my side.
“Professor Shaw forgot his book—or he thought he did, anyway. He gave me his key and sent me back to his office to collect it.”
Jack’s eyes went wide, and her jaw dropped. “You fucked Holden in your professor’s office?”
“What? How did you jump from me getting a book to me getting boned?” Sometimes I thought Jack only ever thought about cock. This was one of those times.
“You’re a hot mess, your heart is beating a bazillion times a minute, you need to talk to me so badly that soccer is on the sidelines, and Holden is Shaw’s TA. What else was I supposed to think?” She shrugged as if that train of thought was on any track at all, much less the right track.
“Maybe that Professor Shaw has old books and I found something important?”
She stared at me as if she didn’t quite believe me
“Gods, I can’t believe you’d think I would run an errand for a professor and get sidetracked by cock.
Shaw would scent sex in his office and then what?
Nothing good could come of that.” I wasn’t going to address the Holden part of this whole theory.
We’d never gotten close to sex when we were together or together-ish or whatever you would call it.
There was no way I’d just let him bone me now that we were nothing at all.
And it wasn’t like he was offering in the first place, even if I would want that.
“Oh.” She had the decency to look the tiniest of bits embarrassed by her comment. “You found something important?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. What do you know about hunters?” I asked.
“Hunters? Like hunters in the woods looking to fill their freezer with venison?”
I shook my head.
“You mean hunters—like kill-all-shifters hunters.” Her voice lowered with each word.
“That kind, yes.”
“Let’s see if I can remember it all. It’s been a long time since I heard the stories. My father told us about them when we were about to shift for the first time. You know, to keep us from danger.” Jack turned her body to face me better.
“When I first heard of them, I assumed it was pretend… a way to control us. The lore goes that we were all the same at one point, but the hunters evolved past their beasts or something similar to that. It depends on which animal you are, I think. It’s one of those passed-down oral traditions things.
An ancient game of telephone as it were. ”
I was starting to feel better as she explained a bit about what she’d heard.
It didn’t perfectly match what I’d found, and there was comfort in that.
It was like Santa Claus where each culture told it slightly differently, but at the end of the day, it didn’t matter because it was all pretend anyway.
But she said “when,” implying she no longer believed that.
“Then I got older and was about to head off here—or at least I thought I was. I hadn’t planned on being rejected the first semester.
” Her eyes fell to her lap. “There was a young girl not much older than me who died a couple of towns over. And yeah, it was sad, all deaths are, especially young ones, but it was also terrifying.”
“Because you were the same age?” I had an unusual connection to death, and I wasn’t always sure how others viewed it.
I personally wasn’t scared of death or dying.
Not my own death, anyway. And out of the people I loved, all of them had been gone before I stepped foot in this place.
Now I had people in my life who mattered again, people like Jack.
But also, I was making unhealthy choices in my relationship with alphas, so I wouldn’t say that making strong friends completely filled that hole.
And really, probably nothing ever would.
“No. I mean yes, because it could’ve been me, but that wasn’t the main issue.
It was terrifying because of how they died.
A hunter, as in a guy out in the woods dressed in an orange vest, shot her dead, and because they were in their animal form, there was nothing they could do.
” Her voice cracked a little. “I think her herd took care of him, the hunter, I mean. And for all I know, he wasn’t aware of who she really was until right before his death, but it felt close.
Too close… especially since he shot her but then didn’t bring her home to put her in his freezer. Isn’t that why hunters hunt?”
From growing up around humans, I knew there were multiple reasons to leave a deer, one of which could easily be that she was too small and therefore illegal to kill or possibly he had to go back and find a way to carry the body out of the woods.
“What did your parents think?”
“They think he didn’t have a license and panicked. But I wondered if it really was an accident. Yes, it fit with the lore perfectly, but… I began to wonder. And worse than that I thought, ‘That means I’m probably safe because we are the same generation,’ which was a fun trip to guilt land.”
She had given me so much to think about, but I’d yet to give her anything. So instead, I took out my phone to show her the images I took.
“They are from a book of myths and legends, which means of course they could be pretend. They say that fairy tales were adult stories written by adults to teach adults. It would make sense that a hunter story would be that, right?” It was far better than the alternatives.
“Yeah, I guess. But also, with the two deaths of students here and the girl near me, it’s starting to look like a few each generation are still happening.” Jack had to go and be all logical. “But this mythology or origin story is a tad bit different than the one I know.”
She looked at the photos, reading them carefully and commenting here and there about little things that she remembered differently. By the time she was done, I had a much better understanding of what I’d read, if for no other reason than my adrenaline wasn’t fueling me.
“There’s one thing here that has me scratching my head.” She looked up at me. “This book looks old, right?”
“So very. I was half afraid the pages would crumble as I flipped through them.” And if they did, Profesor Shaw would for sure see that I had been messing with things that weren’t mine to touch. As it was, I was still worried I didn’t put things back as well as I could’ve.
“That’s what I thought.” She enlarged the photo on the screen. “Recognize this?” It was a symbol, and it was familiar, but I couldn’t place how.
“Maybe?”
“This symbol is one your uncle drew in his notes, and that has to mean something.”
The question was, what?