Page 87 of Legacy Elite

She comes at me the way a person comes at you — one step, shoulder-first, the sort of shove you'd give a friend — and it is like being hit by a door. I get my weight back and take two steps and she stops immediately, ears flicking, apologetic and entirely unrepentant at once.

I put my hand up against the side of her face.

I don't decide to. The animal is enormous and the fur under my palm is coarse over the bone and warm underneath, and she leans into it about an inch, and my heart clenches, hard.

And then Jessica Miller — direwolf, extinct, royal line, political catastrophe of the age — turns her head and licks me from jaw to temple.

Everything stops.

She freezes.

I freeze.

We stand there. Her eyes have gone enormous. Slowly, with what I can only describe as horror, her ears go flat back against her skull.

And the sound is out of me before I have any say in it at all.

I laugh.

Properly. Out loud, from the chest, in a field, with wolf saliva on the side of my face — and her ears go further back, which shouldn't be possible, and she takes an actual step away from me, and the enormous extinct predator standing in the middle of Luftis Academy looks mortified, and that makes it worse.

I don't stop for some time.

I can't remember the last time this happened. I mean that literally. I've been sitting here for a second trying to place it and I can't.

She shifts back in about a second and a half, which is significantly faster than she went in, and stands there scarlet to the ears.

"We never speak of that," she says.

"Of what?"

"Soren."

"I have no idea what you're referring to."

"You have my—" she gestures at the side of my face "—you have it on you, you can't just—"

I wipe it off with my sleeve, without hurrying, holding her eyes.

"There were witnesses," I say.

Her head snaps around so fast she nearly loses her footing.

There are no witnesses. Voss went in twenty minutes ago. The field is empty in every direction and has been the entire time.

She works this out at approximately the speed I expected.

"I hate you," she says.

"No, you don't."

And it comes out flatter than I meant it to. Not a joke. Just the fact.

She doesn't say anything. Neither do I, because I've said enough, and today is not the day.

"Do it again tomorrow," I say instead.

"Tomorrow?"