“What’s that?” She looked up to meet her friend’s eyes.
“Brains. Fashion sense. A great nose for sniffing out a bargain. Okay, so that’s three things, and I’m sure I can come up with a metric shit-ton more.”
She scrubbed at the sleeve of Aurora’s sweater, coaxing a laugh out of the melancholy necromancer.
“Oh, my gosh, group hugs?” Ryan appeared at the door. “Can I get a piece of that?” He draped himself around them and the two girls fell into a fit of giggles. “What are we hugging over?”
“Fashion sense,” Aurora smirked.
“Oooh, good,” Ryan cooed, snuggling in even more. “I love it when I catch people talking about me. Now, where’s the fresh drink I was promised? The natives are getting restless.”
“You got that right.” Nathan stood lazily against the door frame, looking at the trio of huggers with the same lukewarm eye with which he viewed everything.
“Just in time, babe!” Ryan let loose one of his arms and tried to wave Nathan over. “Come on, you want a piece of this action?”
“Not likely. Are we moving things in here or what?”
“All good parties end up in the kitchen,” Ryan smirked.
“Like hell!” Kelly started doling out armloads of drinks. “It’s a pretty night, and we never sit in the solarius. Solanium? Oh, fuck it, the greenhouse. Now, let’s scoot! I’ve got a fresh round and backups for everybody.”
She led the charge toward the door, but Aurora held back.
“Hey, Nathan?”
“Yeah?” he lingered, clearly ready to get back to wherever the others were.
She’d done what she could to make amends, but Aurora felt that he still held just a bit of a grudge.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry again, about Reavis going nuts and dive bombing you and stuff.”
“Forget it.” He started to leave again.
“No, I’m serious. It wasn’t on purpose, and it’s not something I did to get at you or anything. Actually, I think it was because of the wolf.”
“So you reanimated my favorite bat and turned it against me because of your werewolf creeper?”
“Kind of? I dunno. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve figured out that whenever he’s around, I get all riled up. And when I do, my powers start doing things I didn’t plan on.”
“Like my dancing lesson?”
Aurora blushed deeply at the reminder. “That, too. That was the first time I saw him. For whatever reason, I felt like I had to get out of that room immediately and I needed a diversion. Before I knew it…”
“I was high-kicking and tapping. I remember.”
“Sorry,” she cringed.
He just shrugged and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Eh. Ryan liked it, so I’d say we’re even on that one. But tell me something.”
“What’s that?”
“You say that every time you’re near this werewolf guy, you get all flustered and shit starts happening? Then he comes at you with his fated mate talk and you’re surprised? I mean shit, girl. You broke out the Fourth of July fireworks inside a courtroom. You might wanna think about that.”
“Language,” she murmured to herself. But everything he said made a terrible kind of sense.
“I had your back out there because you seemed really resistant to the idea, but fated mates are a thing.” He pushed off from the wall and gave her a sly smile. “But if you really want to make it all up to me, you could help me have a bit of fun.”
The glint in his eye along with the mischief lurking there was so rare for him, she couldn’t help getting a little giddy at the thought of being complicit.
“What is it?”
“The collar of Ryan’s jacket is mink. If something were to happen that made him, I don’t know, take his jacket off, I’d say we’d be square.”
She shared in his evil smile. “I think that can be arranged.”
“See you in the solarium.”
He sauntered off, and Aurora took a moment alone to beam at herself. It was the first time she felt like she might actually become friends with Nathan.
Weaving back to the door, she stood for a moment and looked at her roommates laughing in their little circle. However mixed up she might be about certain things, it warmed her to think she could call these people friends. Friendship had been a rare thing in her life, so she appreciated the preciousness of it.
One thing Kelly had said was very true. She worked hard to keep herself under control—from the way she dressed down to what she allowed herself to feel. Maybe that was part of why so many crazy things were happening around her. The energy she kept pent-up had to get out somehow.
“Are you just gonna stand there all night, mooning over your wolfman?” Tiffany had an eyebrow up and was giggling at her own joke before she’d made it to the end.
“Heaven forfend!” Aurora put a hand to her pearls in a gesture of mock indignation, eliciting another crack of laughter from the group. Even Nathan chuckled. She was never goofy and it actually felt pretty good.
Heading back to her seat, she met Nathan’s eyes, and he kept flicking them toward Ryan, who was in the middle of some story nobody seemed to pay much heed to. Settling in, she closed her eyes and contrived to be daydreaming.
Really she was letting all that nervous energy she’d been squirreling away coalesce into that familiar ball of light in her core, growing it by gentle degrees. It was only a small patch of mink, so she wasn’t going to need to go full bore. Just a glimmer trickled down her arms, and she raised her fingers enough to point them at Ryan’s collar.
“Holy shit!” He was on his feet, fretting his arms up to his neck. The collar flapped wildly at him, tugging in every direction at once.
“Ryan,” Aurora chastised in her most matronly tone. “Language, please!”
The laughter grew to epic proportions as the fairy writhed and tugged at his clothes. At last, he clawed at the buttons and threw his jacket to the ground in a heap.
He was shirtless underneath and his pale skin nearly glowed under the moonlight streaming in through the windows. His translucent wings flapped. As soon as the jacket was off, Aurora released the collar and it fell back into stillness. For a moment, Ryan looked around, feebly trying to cover up his chest.
“What’s everyone looking at?” he demanded.
“Nothing, darlin’,” Nathan said, wryly lifting his beer to his lips. “It’s just a relief not to be the only shirtless one around here.”
Ten
Aurora sat hunched over her work, trying even harder than usual to shrink into herself. Her head throbbed lightly after the drinks she’d had the night before. In her typical fashion, she’d deprived herself of anything to chase away the hint of hangover. It was her penance for letting herself go.
Even more so, it was a way to erase what had passed between her and Dane in those chambers. And she was aching with the hope that the viper pit around her would let things rest. As always, in this room with eight other juniors, at least one of them was bound to do something to rattle her cage.
“So what happened up there?” Zander asked, nudging close to her. “What was all the noise about?”