Page 14 of We Hunt the Night

Yet she was stunning enough to stop my dragon in his tracks and from flying away to safety. He turned and followed her like a lovesick puppy.

The leaves crunch underneath my feet, under the sticks and everything else as I continue to walk towards the borders of the village. I let the noise and smell of the forest distract me for a second, distract my dragon, which is already itching to go back to her. We usually like walking in the forest alone for some peace and quiet, but not this time. This time it feels wrong tobe walking in the opposite direction to my bonded witch, but I need to go back to the village and my dragon needs to chill. It’s important I check that they’re okay. Being bonded means I can’t be there to protect them from the witches, from the witch students that come and play jokes on the village like it’s fun. From other witches who come in just to be dicks and be cruel, knowing they can, and no one can do a thing about it. Small creatures, especially the ones at the academy, are treated the same, and I hate it. The witches don’t think about coming here often when there’s a dragon or four roaming across the skies. But now all four dragons are bound, and it’s a different story.

I’m scared for them, and I know once I’m taken to the war front, I won’t be able to do anything to protect the clans.

I have to make sure they see me coming back, know that I’m coming here, and I won’t be gone for now. We all agreed to take it in turns to come back and make sure we are seen doing so between classes. I know they’re not happy with the situation, but it could have been so much worse. Juniper doesn’t seem like a brain-dumb thing the witches have forced into being their slave and she might even be sympathetic to the shifters—especially if we show her the truth. Some witches in the academy see how bad it is and try to help us when they hear what life was like for their bonded. The leaders of the witches try to make sure they don’t believe us or that we cause this to ourselves.

Not the fact they trapped our ancestors here with spells.

Not the fact they won’t let us leave and they starve us.

Not the blinding fact we are their slaves.

A small part of me is glad that something is changing for once because the years blur by and sometimes I can’t even remember before. I didn’t want to fight in a war, not for the witches, because I hate them, but the war—I do want it over. Juniper is our bonded and there isn’t a way back from this. I know Vale will be trying to make a dangerous and most likely deadly spell upfrom scratch to break the bond, but we all know it isn’t possible. The only way out of this is death.

She’s pretty and I can’t get her out of my head. Her body is that perfectly torturous mix between curvy and slim, where her hips flare out and her breasts—fucking hell, they’re definitely a handful and I want them in my face, on my tongue. Her long brown hair falls in messy waves down the back of her neck, dark luxurious locks and perfect for gripping as she rides me. She’s almost doll-like, her eyes big and a unique shade I’ve not seen before. She’s a beauty and I know nothing about her, other than the fact that if we weren’t bonded, I’d definitely be trying to sleep with her. I can’t do that now and it’s forbidden.

It would fuck everything up to sleep with her. Or try to.

I rub my face, realizing I’m already hard as a rock from just thinking about sleeping with her. Or just her in general. Her hair smells addictive and her scent overall is here to lead me into sins. She smells like cherries and books. I rub my face again. Fuck, I need to stop thinking about her.

After I adjust myself, I jog through the forest to run off some of the energy before I get to the border of the village. I’ve only got about an hour before afternoon training class, which is going to be a shit show for Juniper and there is fuck all I can do about it. The magic of the border is nearly invisible to anyone that’s not a shifter. To me, it looks like orange waves in the sea. I step through it to the other side, onto the weathered stone path. It’s the only path in the village, everything else is mud and sloppy snow that has mixed with the mud to make it brown. The stone pathways are chipped and broken. It sets the tone for the entire makeshift village. Mud bricks and plastic tarps are what hold together many of the homes, which are filled to the breaking point with shifters. The forest looms a shadow over the village, and I step into the darkness as I go down the path. There are some better built houses made of wood and stone, but they areso old that nature has crawled over the edges, chipping away and threatening to pull the entire house down. There’s a smell to the village, a smell that doesn’t linger in the academy but out here it does. It’s the smell of poverty and within is the smell of burning fires heating the homes.

“Good afternoon.” I turn to see Maclan, a kind leopard shifter who never bonded. He might not have bonded, but he always told me to try every year, and I wonder if it is because he regrets not choosing someone. He lifts his hand and waves to the seat next to him to invite me over. I can see nearly every one of his ribs under the small vest shirt he’s wearing that is covered in holes. There are no warm cloaks around here to keep anyone warm from the winter air. All the uniform I was given for the academy has to be given back each night, otherwise we lose points on the leaderboard.

“I’m in a rush, sorry! I’ll sit with you next time.” I carry on walking through the village, feeling eyes drifting towards me. I make sure to light some of the fire pits as I go past with a wave of my hand, my elemental fire magic bouncing off my fingertips. I’m the only one of us four that can do that. They need to shift into their dragon form to cause fire, but I’ve always been able to summon just a small amount of it.

When I finally get to the end of the path, I find my foster house. It’s still standing. That’s a good sign. I haven’t been back for a few days because I didn’t want to be in the forest around the bonding time unless I had to be. All four of us grew up here for the most part, and it made us close. No one wanted to take in four male dragon shifters—especially, not with our well-known fiery temper and lack of control over our magic while aging. Granny Dubois took all four of us in without a second thought and we were little shits. I don’t think there is a day where I understand how she kept going, kept looking after us while we were all grieving and angry. That woman taught us how to bemen, how to fight for our people, and not to believe any of the bullshit the witches try to teach. I would be dead if it wasn’t for her. Vale calls her Hope, and I hate him most of the time, but I agree with his nickname for Granny Dubois. She is hope. Her house has always been full, before and after us, because she fosters anybody that needs help. In this war, there are always fucking orphans that need someone to be kind and take them in. I get why hardly anyone else takes them in when they are just another mouth to feed. Two kids, twin rabbits who are about eight years old, are sitting out the front playing with a withered checker set that I used to play with too. They look up, but they don’t say anything to me. They don’t speak and haven’t done since they were found as babies in the forest, covered in their parents’ blood. The witches didn’t bother to make up a reason about what happened to them. They just knew it was one of their students and they didn’t care. “Good afternoon.”

They look away and go back to their game. Another foster kid, Romano, is leaning against the wall, his red hair shaved. He’s coming up to the age of being ready for the academy. Seventeen, one more year to go for him.

“You’re bonded now.” He says it like a question.

“I am.” I lift my chin and look into his eyes. Challenging me. I know it’s normal for wolves to try to dominate everything they come across, either by staring it down or peeing on it, but I’m a dragon. He would be a snack for me and my dragon holds the gaze with a silent warning. He looks down at the ground. “You alright, Wolf-boy?”

“No. I have less than a year before I become you.” He snarls at me before storming off into the forest, shifting at the last minute into a brown wolf. I know his mother was bonded and died two years ago, but his father didn’t claim him or step up. I’m not sure he even knows who his father is—if anyone does at all. We all know what that feels like to be a kid and drowning inpain. How to push the boundaries with everyone that cares. I feel nothing but rage sometimes and that rage began years younger than he is. It shaped who I am, and I try not to let it take over. Rage for how the witches treat us, rage for the fact that we are nothing but slaves that they put shiny collars on and drag into a war to protect them. They don’t look at the elderly and young in the villages as they suffer. If I don’t go to my classes and don’t keep up the leaderboard, they don’t get food sent here. They don’t get any help with supplies and medicine either. It would be so simple if magic worked right in the village and the forest, but it didn’t then and it doesn’t now. Even now, with the boost from the bond, my magic is dancing around my body like a frayed electrical wire. It’s too dangerous to attempt to use it.

“She’s inside. She’s on one today.” A girl hops out of the front door. I don’t remember her name and she is one of the neighbors’ kids, I think. “She’s speaking a lot.”

Brilliant. I hope she has been taking her medication, but there is a good chance she isn’t. There’s a smell of cinnamon in the air when I step in and shut the door behind me. She might be making cinnamon bread, and she mostly makes it from things she plants in her garden. The soil isn’t good in the village, so most things do not grow, but somehow, she gets her herbs just right. Cinnamon is an easy one because there are five trees in the village, all spelled to survive the weather, and everyone shares. I turn around the corner and I find that she has four loaves that are on the counter, steam rising off them into the air. She’s in front of the old stove, two candles lighting up the room from the counter at her side. The table is in the middle of the room with a pot of daisy flowers and other little potion bottles of her medicine. They are empty, and my heart hurts. She ran out, and she didn’t say anything. Dubois is slightly hunched over from a spine condition and her long grey hair falls off her shoulder. She never wears anything, but her oncebonded uniform of Bloodstone Academy—black clothes that are now not tight anymore, they’re withered and hang off her frail form. I’ve offered to get her clothes from trading at the academy, but she refuses. She never speaks about her bonded, or her time in the war, but sometimes I see her looking out of a window or in a mirror like she is remembering another time. Something precious to her.

She turns when the floorboard creaks under my foot, and there’s a kind smile on her face as she sees me. “My boy Maz!“ She always sounds delighted to see me, and it makes me feel good about myself. “Come sit. I’ll cut you some bread up. I know it’s your favourite.”

“No, please don’t.” I walk over and touch her shoulder, where her bones stick out. “They feed me at the academy, remember? You need it. Children need it.”

She huffs like I’ve annoyed her, and she pours me a glass of water, with a drop of lemon in it, and comes to sit with me at the table. We always sit around the table when we need to talk, when I’m not sure what to do. Kane is always sitting with her. Black rarely does because he bottles his life up and Vale? I’m not sure. If he did sit here, he wouldn’t tell anyone.

“I took in another one this morning. Just three and traumatised.” She looks at me from the other side of the table. “The sweet darling is upstairs napping right now. Keeps asking for mum and dad. Both dead, I presume, they haven’t come back from the war. She was with her uncle, but he went missing.” She leans in. “I checked in with my friend and her mother’s witch has been confirmed dead. Had a big fancy funeral a year ago. Don’t know what they did with her mother’s body, but you know they don’t send us our dead back. We don’t get to bury them.” There’s a bitterness in her voice, one that I grew up listening to, one that fed my very thoughts, until they became my own too.

“I look forward to meeting her.” I send a silent prayer to any god or goddess who might listen to it for that sweet girl to know peace.

“You will, she’s nice. Talks a lot, even at three.” She looks at me like she is waiting for me to explain why I need to talk. I’m not sure how she always knows, but she does.

“I’m going to keep up with all the classes. Make sure enough food is sent here to help.” I offer. I’m beating around the bush when I need to fucking jump into it.

“I know all four of you do as I’ve raised you to be honourable men. The fucked-up parts of you are unfixable.” So blunt sometimes, but she is right. “How is your bonded witch? Tell me she isn’t a brainwashed fool?”

I clear my throat. “Her name is Juniper Daygan. She has no relatives left in the Daygan clan. She’s the last one and I don’t think she is stupid.”

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