Page 4 of Cruel Destinies

Chapter 2

Tobias

I couldn’t avoid the stares. If I’d drawn attention and parted crowds before, now I felt like a recovered plague victim who might still be contagious.

I’d nearly died in that alleyway—shredded with lead pellets from a crazy high-tech vampire cannon—trying to protect my friends. And though I’d been completely healed of all injuries, I could still feel the individual holes each pellet created when they blasted into my skin.

Or at least the ghost of them.

With my heightened dragon senses, I had felt every single one.

“Tobias?” Caesar snapped me from my thoughts, and I looked up to see every eye in Shifter History was on me.

Again.I hated it. I hated that everyone was staring at me like I’d miraculously risen from the dead. Sure, I had just woken up in the hospital wing this morning and been allowed back to my regular routine now that I was completely healed, but it wasn’t like being healed by a harpy was so strange in the shifter world.

Getover it, people.

I stared back at Caesar, waiting for him to say whatever it was that made him call me out.

“Do you know the answer?” Caesar prompted.

“Hmm?” Answer? Had I been asked a question?

Caesar smiled. He was gracious enough not to reprimand me for not paying attention, or bring up the fact that I had never been caught unprepared to answer a question in all my time at the Dome.

I shifted in my seat. “C—could you repeat the question?” I asked, trying to hide my injured pride.

“February. 1899. What major event happened in the continental United States?”

I looked down at my desk as if the answer was written there, but my tablet wasn’t even open.

“Let’s look it up,” Caesar said to the rest of the class, moving his focus away from me.

Returning to my usual student behavior, I opened my tablet and pulled up a search tab in the digital Shifter History textbook.

“Yes, Siobhan,” Caesar called on a student who’d raised her hand.

“There were record-breaking cold temperatures,” she said. “Every state in the nation reached temperatures as low as zero degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Thank you, Siobhan,” Caesar said, walking around the classroom as he spoke. “And what was the event called? Randall?”

“The Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899,” Randall said, reading his laptop screen.

“Thank you, Randall. What else do we know about The Great Arctic Outbreak?”

I raised my hand, determined to regain my status as a student who cared not only about my studies and grades but also about learning shifter history.

“Yes, Tobias,” Caesar said, stopping in the aisle of desks two rows over.

But the director’s expression was slightly different from how he’d looked at all the other students. It was a minuscule flick of his muscles, but I caught it even from where I sat and was thrown right back into that alley, lying bleeding and dying as Caesar stood over me with an intensified version of that same look.

The look that said he didn’t know if I would make it. The look that filled my chest with dread because it advertised the seriousness of the attack.

The look I’d also seen on Arya that night.

Once again, the memory of that kiss as I lay half-conscious flooded my thoughts. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was all I could think about during my brief windows of consciousness over the past few days. Even when the lead in my system threw me into delirium, it replayed in my mind.

Part of me wondered if I’d dreamed the kiss, if it had actually happened, or if it was just something my brain had conjured up as I lay dying. But it had to be real. The clarity of that moment was real. And the way Arya looked at me when she didn’t know I was watching proved that it happened.

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