Author: Audrey Grey
Category: Fantasy
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/26858_20
Valerian’s message pops onto the screen. Sorry I can’t be there for your first day. Want me to send Asher back, just in case?
I release a breath. Eclipsa told me this morning during training that she was accompanying him to the Winter Court, but in her typical cryptic fashion, left out why. I gathered from her grumpier than usual morning mood that it was pretty serious.
If Valerian is taking both the dragon shifter and the lunar assassin with him, it’s really bad.
No way will I leave him unprotected.
Besides, what have I been training for this entire time if I can’t survive the first day of school?
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No, I one-handedly text back, I’m a badass now, remember?
An eternity passes as he types out a response, and I grin imagining him searching for the right letters, erasing, and grumbling. He’s the absolute worst at texting, or technology in general.
Stay out of trouble. The snowflake emojis punctuate the command.
Smiling, I hurriedly type back, Too bad you’re not here tho. Mack and I thought it would be funny to sneak in a couple baby orcs on the first day.
Funny. I look forward to bribing your way out of detention. Be thinking of ways to repay me.
I send him little angel emojis and then slip the phone back into my pocket.
Mack hip checks me. “Just friends, huh?”
I erase the humor from my face and sigh. “Just friends.”
“You lying little B. There is no ‘just friends’ with the ILB.”
As we near the wide steps leading up to the main courtyard, second year shadows Jace, Layla, and Richard join us.
Jace grins, his handsome face brightening, and tips his head. “Ladies.”
Richard stares glumly forward, his fingers clenched tightly around his backpack straps.
A pang of sympathy threatens to darken my happy mood. I can’t imagine what he’s feeling after Evelyn’s transformation to a darkling. Especially considering what caused her change. She was pregnant with a Fae child, what both Fae and mortals cruelly call a dirty-blood.
Evelyn never once mentioned dating a Fae or even liking one.
We enter the courtyard, and I search the throng of students. Each time I find a Fae male, I scour them for signs that they fathered Evelyn’s child.
Which is dumb. It’s not like the Fae who impregnated Evelyn is going to be wearing a shirt that says, Baby Daddy, on it.
“Fae’s teeth, is that for . . . us?” Mack asks.
I follow her wide-eyed stare to linen-draped tables brimming with trays of food and refreshments. Shadows have already started tentatively filling their plates.
Jace groans. “Oh, God, I smell real coffee. Could it be a trick?”
“It’s definitely a trick, right?” I swallow, remembering the hazing from last year. This feels wrong, somehow. There’s no way the Fae are suddenly being nice to us.
“It’s because of her,” Richard points out, nodding to a woman standing near the tables, clipboard in hand. The woman has a pinched face, frosted blonde hair in need of a touch-up, and a dark suit. “She’s a censor from The CMH. They’re everywhere on campus.”
I’d nearly forgotten that the Council for the Mistreatment of Humans opened an investigation into the school. Perhaps with the added scrutiny, no one will die this year.
The skeptical shrew inside me cackles at this absurd idea, but . . . the promise of spending our second year with access to basic human rights lingers.
As Mack sends Thornilia off with her backpack to organize her locker, we line up behind the others, all of us chattering excitedly.
Two plates of chocolate croissants later, I slide in next to Mack at a picnic table. Richard, Jace, Layla, and a few others crowd in next to us.