Page 17

Renard

I’m forever grateful I’ve menaced the office staff enough over the years to keep my teaching schedule light after mid-day. My species needs nighttime shifting when we hunt. Having others present when the itch to transform begins is irritating, and except for my adopted pack and closest companion, I am uncomfortable with the curiosity my shifted form engenders. I’m able to do things other shifters can’t, and the vow of secrecy my clutch took around those abilities remains deeply ingrained in me, even though I’m no longer living among them.

There are some species you do not want to start a war with.

Henrietta uses my less-than-friendly demands to force me to teach one class of her choosing each semester. This fall, it’s an advanced placement course for fourth and fifth-years about the evolution of shifter politics and governments. Despite Aubrey’s imminently longer lifespan, she insisted my knowledge of the relationship between pred and prey was invaluable to the understanding of students with a career path in leadership.

She told me to present a carefully curated version of interspecies relations, told from the viewpoint of someone who's been alive long enough to remember how it was used as propaganda. Unfortunately for the Council, I have no need of their favor, and I’ll teach the damned class however I see fit. That’s going to make for some very interesting phone calls from angry parents to the Headmistress, but gargoyles are stubborn as fuck by nature and she shouldn’t have backed me into a corner.

The classes I offered this year are far more interesting and useful, if you ask me. My fall schedule—besides the interminable year-long Henny course—comprises Gothic Literature, Shakespeare in Reality, and Music of the Night.

Reading has always been one of my vices, and that love of literature and knowledge is another reason my scaly companion and I bonded so easily. I teach many things to the students here based on how much my clutch moved around—languages, history, culture—but English courses are by far my favorite. I’ve also occasionally taken Chess on in independent study, but both our schedules are often hectic, so these private lessons are sporadic. My secret love of Gaston Leroux and Andrew Lloyd Webber is the reason I named my nocturnal predation course the way I did, and if anyone besides the book wyrm knew that, I’d have to murder them on the spot.

Obsidian is supposed to be hard and unyielding: the depth of my emotions is not something I wish to advertise.

In the spring, I’ll teach botany, Romantic Lit, and poetry, but I prefer to do that when my garden is in bloom. The imagery flows so much better, and I’m able to use the lifecycle of nature to enhance the themes I emphasize. The beginning of the wheel of the year is a good time to show the beauty and ferocity of nature as it ebbs and flows.

Turning to the single Rothschild’s slipper orchid sitting on the pedestal by the bookcase in my Tower, I close my eyes. Like me, it has survived out of its natural habitat for far longer than anyone would have believed. Memories of transplanting that flower into the crystalline container where it still grows flash through my mind, and I shake my head to clear it. The pain that comes with ruminating on the origin of my most prized possession feels fresh, despite the passage of time. I’ve considered getting rid of the orchid countless times over the years, knowing it’s a masochistic symbol of a wound that cannot heal. Each time, I place it back in its suspended reality with its heat lamp and humidifier, unable to bring myself to cut the ties to my past.

Now that a certain bunny showed up in my classroom, I wonder if perhaps it’s time.

“If you want it gone, I can take care of it for you.”

I roll my eyes as the dragon stomps in, offering the same solution he’s voiced a hundred times before. “Have I ever taken you up on that, Flames?”

His eyes narrow, and he glares at my choice of moniker. It’s a game we’ve played for many years, and probably will continue long after those with shorter lifespans are gone. The more our respective days get filled with irritating students and posturing colleagues, the more we rib one another until something amusing enough to break the tension sticks. Our ability to find humor in the petty grievances of day-to-day life keeps us sane, and our grumpy old shifter routine is one of my favorite ways to pass the time.

“Listen up, granite-for-brains. You keep telling me to let go of the past, but you moon over this flower like Viola and the Duke. You’re the poster shifter for handing out sage advice you don’t take,” Aubrey muses. He drops a stack of texts I requested from the library on the end table, running a hand through his short hair, and when I don’t respond, I can smell the sulfur threatening to turn into irritated smoke rings.

So predictable.

Ignoring his insult and unnecessary commentary, I walk over to the balcony outside of the bedroom, climbing up to look out into the starry sky. It’s almost dark enough for us to head out on the hunt. Neither of us needs to go every day—the bland groceries we ingest to seem more like the rest of the population sustains us well enough in between larger kills—but the start of the school year and one chaos-inducing student seems to have shaken up the entire campus, including us.

Aubrey’s destroyed at least ten squishies since she arrived.

Something about Delores Drew has both of our preds in a knot, and I’ll be damned if I know what it is. Even my meeting with her in the garden left me with questions I couldn’t answer and thoughts I can’t escape, so I can’t blame the others for being similarly distracted. Her presence has thrown our comfortable routine into unmanageable entropy, and I don’t know how I feel about it.

“If you lurk there, staring at the sky long enough, some idiot first-year is going to think you’re Batman when you shift. It happens every year, you morose asshole.”

My eyes narrow as I look over my shoulder at the bulky librarian as he fussily sheds his accouterments to prepare for our nocturnal feeding. He’s one to talk about being a sulky old grump—when I came to Apex, it took him fifty years to even speak to me. Even after thousands of years, my scaly companion was so immersed in his shame and misery, he barely talked to anyone unless the Headmaster at the time forced him to.

After the first decade, I almost taught myself sign language because I thought he might be deaf; that’s how anti-social he was.

“I’d rather the dimwits think I’m the morally gray, winged billionaire than a roided-out Indiana Jones. Elbow patches have never been hot, and your wardrobe needs serious attention that doesn’t involve folding it into origami because you’re so obsessive,” I reply.

His snort makes me grin, and I give in, half-shifting so I can stretch out my wings. I don’t know what it feels like to shift for other species, but for winged shifters like Flames and I, letting your wings out is like stretching your legs after they’ve been in a cramped space for a long time. If the two of us weren’t such fucking novelties at Apex, we’d probably stay half-shifted most of the time.

Alas, neither of us enjoys feeling the weight of explaining our entire species to looky-loos and exotic shifter buffs.

“I see you had the appetizer in class yesterday,” the dragon remarks, tapping his finger on my notes as he sets his glasses down. “She’s working in my lair as an aide—Thoth only knows why someone in the office thought I would want an intruder there multiple days a week...”

The look I give him is skeptical, and it doesn’t take a polymath like him to decipher it. “We’re all aware you let her ride the dragon coaster down to your special collection, Flames. Out of our small circle, I’m the least likely to believe that’s out of the goodness of your black heart. Sell it to someone who’s buying.”

Before he answers, Aubrey half-shifts, his wings stretching out behind him and his tail whipping back-and-forth in agitation. His multi-colored eyes find mine as he flexes his bulk, walking out onto my balcony. “Are you asking or asking ?”

Pissing him off is always so easy and so worth it.

I rise to my feet, tilting my head back as the moonlight washes over me and the transformation that comes with a full shift occurs. The light glints off of the obsidian now surrounding my skin as my size multiplies until I’m towering over the massive man beside me. To his credit, Aubrey has never once commented on either my diminutive human body or my massively intimidating shifted form. Once he finally spoke to me, our similarities were far more important than our differences.

“I believe you know the answer to that question.” Tossing him a wink, I launch myself into the air, my wings catching on the slipstream as he curses below.

“Cheater! Charlatan! Crook!”

I knew he wasn’t ready for our usual race to the buffet, but that’s a future Renard problem. Right now, I’m in the lead and he’ll have to give chase if he wants to harangue me further, whether about the ingenue bunny rabbit or my dastardly ways. My wings stretch as I make a sharp turn into a gust of wind, using tailwinds and windshear to soar to a higher altitude and pick up speed.

My scaly friend is in an exceptionally playful mood tonight—despite his cranky exterior—and I know him well enough to recognize the extra ‘spring in his wings’. If his interactions with Delores have affected him so much, maybe I should prepare myself for similar emotions.

Perhaps it really is time to put the past in the past.

A dinosaur-like scream echoes over the hills as my companion goes full Smaug before appearing at my side, one jewel-toned eye glaring. I knew he’d catch up eventually—gargoyles have high aspect ratio wings and do more gliding and soaring. Dragons like Aubrey have larger wings, with a shape that reduces drag and doesn’t require nearly as much vertical thrust or horizontal taxi space to take off and gain speed. On any day, one or the other of us pretends we don’t actually understand the physics of our flight and lets the other win, even when the odds are unfair.

After hundreds of years together, it’s easy to compromise, so we both feel like we can come out on top.

“You didn’t say I had to count down,” I growl into the wind, knowing that will irritate the shit out of him.

An unmanly squawk escapes my throat when his answer is to yank the pointed end of my tail with the spiked end of his, causing me to hit the wrong wind gradient and spiral into a dive.

And he says I cheat?

I barely turn downwind fast enough to catch another shear before I end up with a face full of trees. It’s a close call, but I get lucky when the slope shoots me up into the air, higher than he can match until he banks along the ridge. Spying a good place to start our hunt, I take a sharp left toward an open-air campsite with dots of firelight and smoke billowing from several points.

Like items on the menu…

I glance at Aubrey before gesturing to a lone campfire isolated from the others, but he simply gives me a noncommittal shrug in return, which makes me smile. People like to talk a lot about dragons and their tempers over their hordes of gold, but as a longtime member of the ‘crisped by a pissy lizard’ club, I know there’s not a single thing they treasure more dearly than their bloody pride. You can take that little tidbit of trivia to the bank—that is, if you’re like me and can survive being roasted alive.

Hopefully, Little Miss Cottontail is worth the effort.