Page 34 of Five to Love Him
“When’s your birthday?” Leo asked us.
We were happy about his interest and decided to take another look around that storage room and the printouts we had seen on the worktable at his house. When we got his permission to help with his grandma’s business, we wanted to be prepared.
“It’s May twenty-fifth. It’s a summer birthday almost while yours is winter and fireworks.”
He frowned once more, grew self-conscious again. It made him look undeniably cute, and by this point, we knew that look on him would always melt our heart.
We expected a lot more questions from Leo as we walked into the hidden courtyard of St. Auguste, maybe about our family. None came, and we headed into the foyer from where we had watched him walk away from us only last night. Today, we walked next to Leo in silence, his hand in ours. Things had changed in such a short time.
Leo had gotten a distant look on his face, distant enough to worry us, and we went back to the living room, looked at the framed photograph on the bookshelf. Of course he would be reluctant to ask us about our family, having none of his own left.
We decided to not push conversation on him as we walked through the cool hallways of St. Auguste. It was a safe space, and that human could never hurt Leo here.
We forced that thought out of our mind and focused on the comforting and quiet semi-darkness around us—quiet until two young werewolves very nearly ran into Leo in their shifted form while they were chasing one another in adolescent play.
We grabbed Leo around the middle and slung him over our shoulder to get him out of the way of teenage claws and fangs, acting while he still stood frozen. One of the wolflings glanced back at us, but if there was a sense of guilt on that canine face, we couldn’t make it out.
Once the wolf was back to being focused on behaving like they probably shouldn’t, Leo screamed, “What—whaaat!” before falling silent and tensing. He struggled in our hold, his hands bracing against our back.
“It’s fine, we have you.” We carefully set him down, and he stumbled backwards, off balance but reaching for us to steady himself.
We took his hand and wrapped an arm around his middle while running through the St. Auguste foyer as fast as we could to get to him.
“How did you do that?” Leo asked, his eyes wide.
“What do you mean?”
He pointed the way the werewolves had run with a shaky finger. “There were—I mean, they just came out of nowhere, right? They should have clashed into us. You just…you just picked me up like I’m some rubber doll and jumped out of the way.”
We shrugged. Leo turned to look in the direction we were coming from at a run, saying, “Oh. Two more of you?”
We stopped dead from the run, realizing our mistake.
“Uh, we didn’t mean to upset you. We were just already on the way, back to the underground.” We gathered around Leo, touching his shoulders and rubbing against the tenseness in them. “We’ll stay with you with two. Unless you’d want all of us to stay?”
Leo rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “I mean—”
“What’s happening here?”
The new voice was booming and synchronous but sounding like a multiple. We tightened our circle around Leo and faced the chimera who was stomping toward us. They wore two ties, and the non-human head was sniffing the air.
“Two wolf pups were playing chase and nearly ran into Leo,” we said.
“Leopold?” the human head asked.
Leo cleared his throat and broke through our circle. We let him, of course, but remained close, steadying him with a hand on the small of his back.
“Instructor Arick. Hi, erm…” He gestured at us. “This is my hive. They’re nice.”
The human head lifted a brow and the chimeric one wrinkled his nose. “I’m sure they are, Leopold. I have never met a hive who wasn’t.”
“Uh.”
“He’s still in shock, Instructor Arick. Maybe it’s best if he sits down?”
The instructor waved his briefcase. “Class is about to start. There are chairs in the classroom. You go ahead, Leopold. I’ll let Principal Farrow know he has delinquents on the loose, again. Glad you two are okay.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Just kids, right?” Leo followed that up with a little anxious chuckle.
