Page 6 of Wolf Trial

SADIE

Iknew instantly that the severe, silver-haired woman who stood in the middle of the circular chamber was the one in charge of this place. The robed piece of shit was just the welcoming party, and her lackey. I eyed her warily as I took careful steps, still helping carry the brunette woman who moaned, her head lolling onto her shoulder. That taser thing had seriously fucked with her. It was probably set on vampire level.

Because apparently vampires were real. I was still buffering my thoughts about that; I had no bandwidth left to acknowledge that the words your world had been used, implying there was more than one world. And this wasn’t Earth.1

I kept my mind in the present, even if I was so close to spiralling, and fixed my stare on the silver-haired woman who stood with a stillness and poise that made me think she was a vampire until I registered the lack of screaming, instinctual warning. Still, her arms were gloved from fingertip to elbow, giving her a timeless appearance. That, or she was covering bloodstains and she’d just been up to her elbows in someone’s sternum. Vampire or not, she was a threat.

The hooded prick was something. A vampire, or a shifter. But despite the aura that surrounded the woman who waited for us to join her beside the veiled woman sculpture, I had a feeling she was as human as I was. Had she been dosed and dragged into this place once, like the rest of us? Or was she a twin like my new kinda-friend?

I wanted to ask what the hell that meant, but I liked the thought of keeping my throat intact more than I craved answers, so I stayed silent as we halted a few feet away from the woman.

“Thank you, Ezren,” she said crisply, addressing the robed fucker. Ezren. Pretentious name. Was Ezra too ordinary for the knobhead kidnapper? “I know you must be confused,” she said to the rest of us. “Some of you will be angry, because you’ll already know where you are and for what purpose.”

“I’m plenty angry, and I have no idea what’s going on,” I muttered under my breath.

“You have all been recruited for Lunova Academy, where you’ll enrol tonight and begin your studies tomorrow.”

Huh. Guess Gran wasn’t full of shit when she mentioned going back to school after all. But what kind of academy drugged and abducted people?

“What if we don’t want to enrol?” the male kidnappee asked sharply.

The silver-haired woman smiled. It wasn’t a reassuring smile meant to put his mind at ease; it was the smile of a wolf who’d sighted her dinner. “If you choose to leave tonight—which you are free to do—you’ll be left outside the boundary.”

For the wolves to rip us apart and gnaw on our intestines. Pass.

“If you choose—wisely—to remain,” she went on, meeting each of our stares, neatly passing over the now-unconscious brunette as if it was a normal sight, “you will be provided with accommodations, meals, and all the equipment needed for your studies. You will also be paid a stipend equal to twenty thousand pounds or twenty-three thousand euros for every term.”

My eyes widened, and I blinked once, then twice. Twenty grand for every… I lifted my hand and waited for the woman to nod at me. “How long is a term?”

“Three months.”

Damn, okay. Twenty grand every three months. That was ninety for a year, assuming the vampires didn’t eat me before I could enjoy the money. Ninety thousand pounds and no rent due.

“Are bills covered?” I asked in my most polite voice.

“You will have no bills.”

Twenty thousand every three months, free rent, and no bills? Well, shit. Gran might have done me a favour by drugging me.2

“When you say studies,” Nose Ring Girl said suspiciously. There was an accent there, soft and musical, that made me think the euros applied to her. “You don’t genuinely mean we’ll be killing werewolves?”

“I do.” The woman’s expression didn’t waver. “That is Lunova Academy’s purpose. This is a war academy, where the finest warriors are trained to kill the vampires’ mortal enemy. More will be explained at your initiation tomorrow, but I’ll warn you now. Wolves are ruthless, monstrous, and without mercy. We’ve been at war with the four packs for ninety three years, and if they aren’t defeated, their kind will overrun Lunova and tarnish any culture, community, and goodness we have here.”

She definitely believed in her spiel, I’d give her that. But I was naturally resistant to impassioned speeches, and cynical enough to see it as propaganda, so it didn’t exactly inspire me to take up a gun and shoot silver bullets into the wolf pack apparently lurking outside the boundary. Still, I nodded like a good little kidnappee. Talk of ninety thousand pounds had made me shockingly well behaved.

“And when they’ve sullied everything good here,” she went on, looking at me, Nose Ring Girl, and the guy who now looked like he’d swallowed a lemon, “they will pass through the cracks into your world.”

Interesting. I bet those cracks were how we’d been smuggled here. Into wherever the fuck Lunova even was. Maybe it was somewhere on the edge of Earth; maybe it wasn’t a new world, after all. I felt better when I thought I was still somewhere within a flight’s distance of home, even if those seven moons lurked in my mind, accusingly. And there were vampires in this place, training to murder freaking werewolves.

Just let me have my delusion, dammit.

“So it is in your interest to work with us to defeat them,” she added. Ezren was definitely picking up when she was putting down; he nodded emphatically. Definitely a wolf hater. I’d never met a wolf, even a regular, non-shifting kind in a zoo, so I couldn’t say I had any strong feelings either way. I had big feelings about that stipend, though.

A year at Lunova Academy and I’d go home with enough money to set me up somewhere new, far from the flat where I’d lived with—and been betrayed by—Gran. My mind was already made up, but I made a token effort at listening to her recruitment speech.

“So, if we stay, we’ll be made to fight wolves?” the sneering male said, his head at a cocky angle. Something about him reminded me of Derek, and that alone made me wish to see him eaten by wolves. “What if they kill us?”

“They won’t,” the woman—headmistress?—said with steely confidence. “We only train the best at Lunova.”