Academy of Beasts VI Read online

  Academy Of Beasts VI

  Becca Fanning

  Copyright © 2020 by Becca Fanning

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Also by Becca Fanning

  Untitled

  Last Time at Beast Academy

  “Hello, Fiona.”

  His voice was different. All too familiar. My jaw dropped as he took a step forward, out of the darkness of the doorway and into the moonlight. Looking at him now, I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before.

  The tight jaw flexing with an underlying will to prove something. The strength of his presence. The ruthless confidence.

  He pulled off his mask in an agonizingly slow movement.

  Ren.

  “Fiona. It’s time you know the truth.”

  Chapter 1

  When Priscilla opened the door, I stumbled through with a panicked sob. Every logical cell had left my brain and dropped at the clock tower.

  “Fiona!” she cried out and tried to catch me before I slammed face-first into her dorm room floor. I felt her hands shaking me roughly, but I couldn’t seem to find her face. Everything around me swirled. She swore and dragged me over to her bed. Her footsteps faded away as I blinked, trying to orient myself in her room.

  Purple everywhere. The color of dragons. Dracus. Dragon-shifters. I swallowed a cry in my throat and broke into another sob. She ran back into the room.

  “Here,” she said and tried to pull me up to a sitting position in her bed. I knocked into her and spilt some water from the glass that she was holding up to me. She forced me to drink some. Her hands found me again. She wrapped her fingers firmly into my arms and forced me to face her.

  “Fiona, I need you to tell me what’s going on,” she said. Her gaze was fiery and severe. She was worried. My heart broke as I realized that my feet had carried me automatically to Priscilla without realizing where I was going. I chugged the glass of water and then burst into tears into her arms. She stroked my back. Dragon-shifters were warm, thanks to their fiery nature. I leaned into her warmth and cried until my voice broke like a child.

  “Can I trust you?” I asked her in a breaking voice. She nodded furiously, pulling back to look at me.

  “Yes, Fiona. What happened?”

  I opened my mouth and told her absolutely everything from beginning to end. I told her about my parents, about the visions, about the struggles I’d been having.

  The last thing I told her before passing out from exhaustion was what happened on top of the clocktower with the Council boys.

  They had told me the truth, and I wasn’t ready for it.

  The wind had stopped, but I felt as if someone had struck me with an open palm straight in the face. The cozy, complicated bonds that I had formed with the Council boys were fragile…and they were crumbling rapidly into dust.

  I gasped as Ren stepped forward.

  Ren was Mr. X.

  I turned to regard the other figures with an open mouth. They stared back at me. There was a tinge of guilt whispering beneath most faces. Even Jasper’s gaze was pained as he looked upon me. Despite our situation, they looked impressive gathered together. They had been chosen to be a team for a reason. The Officials had done a good job choosing them.

  Too bad, they hadn’t expected me to come along.

  “What’s happening?” I asked with a shaking voice. “What are you talking about?” I pointed an accusing finger at Ren as he took another step towards me. His proximity made me want to recoil. This was the bastard who pretended to be a sexy psycho to get information out of me. Worst of all, I had found it immensely attractive.

  “Fiona,” he began slowly, and I wondered how I hadn’t seen that he was Mr. X all along. The voice was a clever ploy, but now that I could see him without the mask, it was Ren down to the bone. Those lips usually were curled into a sneer when I was with Ren. With Mr. X? Those same lips had been on top of my own once before, and I loved it.

  “You,” I said in a loud commanding voice at Ren, “are an absolute sociopath. What kind of sick freak parades around kissing girls and then pretends to hate them?” A guttural sound came from Theo’s throat. Of surprise? He was always shocked when he heard of me kissing someone. He was protective…not protective enough to warn me about this meeting, though.

  I turned around to glare at the other four with every stitch of fury that I could muster. “And you guys are absolute sickos because you knew what was happening.”

  Dracus cleared his throat. “Fiona. We’re not here to talk about Ren’s moonlighting as Mr. X. We’re here for something else.”

  An anxious feeling dropped into my stomach. I stared at him hard.

  “What are we here to talk about, exactly?” I asked with crossed arms. I was tired of this shit. There were secrets upon secrets being kept between these boys, usually away from me. Dracus wasn’t the type for dramatics. This meeting served a purpose. My eyes narrowed.

  “Fiona, when we spoke last time…I told you that I didn’t know what you were,” Dracus said. A chill ran up my body as his pupils, the slight diamond shape, shrank as he focused on me.

  “What?” I asked, my voice rising with anxious anticipation. My gaze went across the other three gathered beside him. Theo’s eyes looked down. My chest burned painfully.

  This isn’t good, Fiona.

  Dracus sucked in a breath and took a step forward. I was boxed in between him and Ren on either side. Even if I made a run for a certainly suicidal jump off the clock tower, the boys were fast enough to catch me. Jasper covertly stepped near the edge of the tower, as if he had already guessed my insane exit strategy.

  Damn. I ground my teeth together.

  “I know what you are now,” Dracus announced. The tension in my mouth left as my jaw dropped open. Every feeling from the last few months crawled up my throat. My vision blurred with hot salty tears that burned my eyes.

  “Not a shifter,” I ventured in a wavering voice.

  Dracus’ gaze never wavered. “Not quite, Fiona. You’re something quite rare. You’re a Calm.”

  The announcement crashed over me. I stumbled backwards with such a speed that Ren had to catch me before I accidentally slammed into him.

  “A Calm,” I repeated hollowly. “You’re wrong. I’ve read about Calms, Dracus. They’re incredibly rare. I would’ve had to been born with a shifter twin.” He should know that. How ridiculous. I shook my head from side to side, the tears flying from my face. Ren’s hands wrapped around my shoulder. Oddly, his presence was comforting.

  “There’s more,” he whispered in a low voice near my ear. I forced my chin up to regard Dracus once again. His face was strained. It was an odd look on the dragon-shifter. He was normally the picture-perfect example of cold composure. A strangled sound escaped my throat as the tears came back with a fury. Whatever the news was, it wasn’t good. I could tell that much.

  “You’ve been having visions ever since you came to campus,” Dracus said in a slow voice. “Those visions aren’t what you think they are. Those are your memories, Fiona.”

  My hea
rt stopped. For an instant, all I could see in front of me was the face of the kind-hearted man opening that white gate for me. Reminding me that I was special. The toddler next to me, shifting on the rug, turning into a bear cub with unsteady steps. My bottom lip trembled.

  Somehow, I had kept it together at Beast Academy since my arrival.

  No more.

  But Dracus wasn’t pulling punches. It wasn’t in his nature. He would give the whole truth even if it was a sucker-punch to the stomach. I was grateful that Ren was holding me, despite his deceitful act as Mr. X, because the truth kept coming.

  “You were a twin.” There was a pain in Dracus’ tone. I cried more at hearing it. He continued, “You were a twin in a bear shifter family. Your family lived remotely. They fancied themselves outcasts from shifter society as they didn’t want to live in clans. They didn’t inform any shifter group that they planned to live their lives in the mountain. Nobody knew that you or your sister existed.”

  “My sister?” I asked in a rising voice. I tried to imagine the toddler from my visions. Would we have looked exactly the same as we grew up? I choked back a painful sob. I could have had a sister. Someone had taken that opportunity away from me.

  “Your parents, the ones you grew up with, were not your true parents. Your real family was killed by a mysterious group. Possibly the same group that has been involved in the recent slaying of other shifter clans.” Ren stiffened behind me.

  “When they found you, they assumed it was just you and your parents. They hadn’t found your twin. They took you to be raised by a human couple…but we weren’t fast enough in finding you again…because someone else got there first.”

  I swallowed. Someone had stabbed a knife through my chest.

  “Before they got to my other parents,” I added. A silence fell over them. For a moment, all I could hear was the sound of our collectively held breaths. Nothing seemed to move. The tears burned on my face.

  Everything I knew was a lie.

  Chapter 2

  Dracus closed his eyes and bowed his head.

  “I’m so sorry.” An apology coming from his lips was more devastating than I could imagine. It cemented his confession as reality. I couldn’t run from it.

  “Was it the same group?” I asked, surprised that I could manage a functional question. “The same group who killed my…birth family?”

  “That we don’t know,” he said. “We suspect it. Fiona, I want you to know that we would’ve told you as soon as we figured it out. I’ve been absent trying to confirm details before we were ready to tell you.”

  “Confirming with The Officials?” I guessed hotly.

  He gave a brief nod. “Yes. I can tell you this much: The Officials are not our enemy or yours. They’re a group of extremely powerful and wise shifters that have assembled together to keep shifters safe from threats. They’re actively investigating your case, especially the murderous group that was responsible for this tragedy.”

  “And you five,” I said and stepped away from Ren. “You five go on missions that The Officials give you. What are you doing for them?”

  “Neutralizing threats,” Ren said as he strode to stand beside Jasper. “People try to breach the barrier often. That’s the reason I was able to catch you the night that you tried to make it over. We each trade-off on barrier duty for nights. There has been an increased number of attempts in the last few months.”

  Since I arrived? I furrowed my brow. That explained some of their disappearances. The Council boys were prone to running off without any explanation. I got used to it after a few weeks.

  My investigative mind was forcing Dracus’ shocking confession down into the pit of my stomach. My entire body burned with agony, but…I couldn’t explain it. It was as if my body was taking over to allow my thoughts to process. Is this what being a Calm was like? It couldn’t be true.

  “Your mark,” Jasper said suddenly. “I saw it in the library. I recognized it from an old text that I’d seen. That’s why I stole your book.” Unconsciously, I felt for the mark on my body, placing a light touch on it. There was no way that such a small mark on a body could mean so much. I hadn’t thought there was enough light for Jasper to see it when my shirt rode upward in the library.

  “And you knew then that I was a Calm?” I asked him. He shook his head.

  “No. None of us confirmed it. It wasn’t until your incident with Enrique that we knew something was up, but we needed more confirmation.”

  “I didn’t need more confirmation after that,” Enrique said and cleared his throat. His molten stare turned on me, the heat of which reminded me why I’d been more than happy to follow him to his private lounge.

  “I knew what you were. It scared me,” he admitted. “You stopped me from going any further with my power. It was as if you turned me off like a light switch. I knew it from that moment, but it took some convincing for the others.”

  “Calms are extremely rare,” Dracus said. “None of us had ever dealt with one. The Officials were extremely skeptical that this could be the case for you. This was why we had to hide so much from you in the beginning. If we had made a mistake and said you were a Calm without knowing your full background, it could be potentially dangerous. There were many unknowns. We had to go look for information.”

  “But we strongly suspected it,” Jasper admitted. “I trusted it from the beginning. That mark is extremely distinct.”

  “Enough that you stole that book from me,” I muttered pointedly. My gaze darted to Ren. “And you took the other book that could have been helpful in my search.”

  “We hadn’t been careful enough,” Dracus said firmly. “We were sloppy with our initial preparations.”

  “The Officials gave us a whopping twenty-four hours to prepare for you,” Theo said in a loud voice with his hands on his hips. “We never expected you to be so curious.” I raised an eyebrow. The tears had dried on my face, but I could feel another wave behind them. They might not stop if I started again. I tried to keep my throat from tightening.

  “The Sam incident.” I bit my lip. “He suspected that I was a Calm too, didn’t he? And we silenced him.”

  “I had a chat with him,” Enrique said as he awkwardly scratched his neck. His powerful muscles flexed beneath the uniform. “Look. We had to keep your secret. I strongly suggested that he was misunderstanding what he thought happened. I also strongly suggested that he never do something so stupid again if he liked the use of his hands or legs.”

  “We started training after that,” I said abruptly, putting two and two together, and stared at Theo. “Was that for actual self-defense or because you thought I was out of control?

  “It was for self-defense,” he began with a nervous twitter. “But it was also preparation. Dracus and I wanted to be ready if we confirmed that you were a Calm. We wanted to be able to start training you to be on the team.”

  “The team?” I echoed. “You mean, actually be on the Council? Be one of the Council boys?”

  “I rather think we are men. We knew that you were going to be unique,” Dracus insisted with a smooth air. “We knew that you would be a valuable asset to the Council.” I was unconvinced on the men’s part. Despite their sharp, handsome faces, they still seemed childish to me. I suppose I wasn’t much better. My stomach twisted as my mind ran through every instance that I tried to find out more information. I had been—and still was—desperate for truth.

  If I had more information, I could reason my way to something. Maybe I could reason my way out of my grief for this tragedy. There was no logic to it. Why would someone want to hurt me? Why had someone killed every family member in my life?

  Tears pricked my eyes. “You didn’t think I was valuable enough, apparently. Not enough to trust me, at least.”

  A shadow crossed over his face. Anger flickered beneath the surface. I had wounded the dragon’s pride.

  “Fiona. Don’t say that. Please. I beg you to understand the situation we are in. Our job is to prote
ct every student at this school and then some. We’re not running around on schoolboy errands.” The graveness of his voice sent a chill down my spine. “We operate elite missions that require leaving campus for far-off places. We infiltrate government agencies. We steal confidential documents. We track down killers.”

  “That’s why you guys disappear so much,” I realized aloud. It wasn’t simply perimeter sweeps on top of the barrier. He gave a small nod of confirmation.

  “Many of the students believe that we have privileged positions as Council members. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a smokescreen. We have to let people believe that we skip school for fun. Trust me; this isn’t the case. If we had told you, then we would’ve immediately put you into grave danger.”

  “Try explaining our skipping school to Professor Sahni for once,” Theo muttered bitterly. Dracus ignored him.

  “You should know something else.” His jaw set tightly. “The Officials don’t know that we’re telling you all this yet. They wanted us to wait longer.”

  “Lucky for you, dragon pride is far greater than work obligations,” Enrique said with a snort. Jasper smirked.

  “We have seen you suffering,” Dracus said. “And we have let you suffer long enough while trying to stop all your little investigations.” He surely didn’t mean to add insult, but my heart couldn’t take much more.

  “Well, I’ve been busy myself with my little investigations,” I told them in a wounded tone. “I know about the tunnels underground. I know about the grandfather clock.”

  Dracus stiffened. “Which tunnels have you been in?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I asked him, crossing my arms tightly across my chest. The tears were threatening to brim again. My heart was pulsing with grief.