Page 83 of Prey It By Ear

“I will,” I say as I check my laces to make sure they’re knotted tightly for the flight.

The elder tiger stops drying and crosses to me, leaning down to brush my temple with a kiss. Felix murmurs, “Be good. Stay warm and don’t stray far from those two.” Then he squeezes my shoulders and lets go.

Just as the stuffy cat lets go, Aubrey materializes in the hallway and surveys the room. He nods at each of us, and then says, “Snacksize, we need to go to the back courtyard. Our mate will take off from his tower, but I must have room to shift.”

“Gotcha, big guy,” I reply as I wave to the others. “Time for the danger zone, suckers!”

With that, I take off for the back door eagerly despite the aches from earlier. Shifting again to hunt will probably help those, as will the supplemental nutrition I’ll get while out. Aubrey is already at the back door and he pulls it open. The world on the other side is pitch-black and unseasonably cold for fall. I note the annex’s flagstone is slick with dew and above, the sky is a thick velvet, only the faintest cutouts of stars visible behind a mess of clouds.

I wish there was less going on so I could enjoy how pretty this campus is—it’s got a much better design and architecture than my other two colleges and it’s far enough from cities to have real nature shit.

Covering a small shiver at the wind, I burrow my hands into the kangaroo pocket of Fitzy’s hoodie for maximum efficiency. Frowning when I feel something inside, I pull it out and roll my eyes when I notice that it’s a set of lock picks. Of course he carries those randomly—why wouldn’t he? It’s Fitz.

Aubrey cracks his knuckles as he gets into the open air and, without preamble, drops into a full dragon shift. Bones crack, flesh warps, and a sonic shudder splits the night as his body swells outward, blue-black scales blooming like paint poured over muscle and bone. His huge wings unfurl, leathery and iridescent, and his face stretches into the sharp, regal lines of his true form. The whole thing takes under three seconds, but leaves the air trembling with its aftermath.

I squeal, unable to help it, and clap my hands together. “I have missed this so much,” I blurt, bouncing on my heels. “You have no idea how lame everything is when you’re not flying.”

Dragon Aubrey cranes his head, one massive golden eye the size of a dinner plate tracking me with uncanny intelligence. He drops his chin to the ground in a deliberate, slow-motion invitation. As I approach, he gives me a look that says he absolutely knows how lame it is when he’s not flying and that I’m crazy for saying otherwise.

Even his dragon is full of biting sarcasm, it seems.

I sprint over, sneakers slapping against the grass, and vault onto the low slope of Aubrey’s shoulder. He rumbles, the vibration like rolling thunder through my legs and up my spine. The scales under my hands are cold and smooth as river stones, and I use the ridge of his neck as a climbing wall, scrambling up to the crook between two dorsal plates. There’s a flat spot there, perfect for riding as I know, and I hunker down and lock my arms around one of the spines like I’m a cowboy at the world’s weirdest rodeo.

The urge to say ‘giddy-up’ is one I suppress before I lose my ride for making him annoyed, and the dragon waits for my thumbs-up. When I give it, he bunches his haunches and launches us upward with a force that almost rips the breath from my lungs. We go straight up at an angle so sharp I have to flatten myself against his neck, my eyes watering from the wind.

We climb, then bank hard to the right. The entire world tilts, and the only thing keeping me from sailing off into oblivion is the death-grip I have on Aubrey’s scale ridge. I laugh until my lungs ache, and then Aubrey levels out and glides, wings stretched wide and steady as an airplane. The air up here is even colder, and the wind howls so loud that I can barely hear my voice when I almost scream with pure joy.

That’s when I see it—a shape streaking out from the bell tower, just above the library annex. It’s Renard, in a half-shift with onyx wings spread wide, his form outlined by the campus lights. He drops in like an enormous hawk, using the height advantage to fall into perfect formation just off Aubrey’s left wingtip.

From up here, the world is beautiful. The roofs of the buildings are lined with frost, and the lawns are crisscrossed with the faint tracks of animals that only come out after midnight. In the far distance, I see the orange glow of a village and the ink-black sprawl of forest that runs all the way to the lake. We rise together, two predators and their happy as hell grinning bunny mate, and I know—down to the last molecule of my blood—that nothing in this world or any other is going to stop us tonight.

Let the hunt begin.

Aubrey and Rennie ride the currents north, the wind slicing through my hoodie like a thousand tiny knives, but I don’t care. The view is fucking unreal—below us, the world is a patchwork of fields gone dark, scribbled with tree lines and the occasional glow-worm vein of a road. Far off, a small town looks like a licked-orange smudge, and the campus behind us is just a pale stain on the landscape, every building reduced to a pixel.

My gargoyle keeps pace in perfect parallel, and even in half-shift, he looks too pretty for reality, like someone airbrushed a romance cover model into a scene from How to Train Your Gargoyle. His eyes find me every ten seconds, making sure I haven’t been yeeted off by a stray wind shear. I flip him a ‘still alive’ sign with my free hand, and he gives me the world’s most dramatic eye roll before banking left to check the horizon.

After maybe ten minutes of this, the novelty should have worn off, but it doesn’t. Up here, with the wind making my nose run and my tailbone bouncing against muscle-armor scales, I feel more like myself than I have in weeks. There’s nothing to perform for, nothing to prove; just sky and bone and the pulse of three hearts that, for tonight, are tuned to the same frequency.

We sweep the sky in a wide, searching arc, looking for a good place to set down and eat. Below, the woods are a dark, dense tangle—exactly the place you’d find a dead body or, more likely, something that wants to become a dead body. Aubrey’s head tilts, and I know from the way his wings flatten that he’s found what he wants. We spiral down, losing altitude in long, lazy sweeps.

The adrenaline is racing in my veins now, and I have to hold on tight to Aubrey so I don’t bounce off in excitement.

My dragon skims the edge of the tree line, and then drops the last twenty feet in a deadfall that leaves my stomach in my throat. His claws hit the ground with a muted thud, wings folding in with a snap that echoes through the trees. The clearing is big enough for two of him, but he only stays in full dragon form long enough for Renard to land, then shifts down to half. Aubrey is still huge like that, but he’s more man than beast. His forearms are scaled and massive, claws gleaming, but he can speak without it being a boom that will scare things off.

Rennie touches down as lightly as possible and then cracks his neck. He’s humanoid but for his onyx skin and wings, so he can move quietly. “It is cold and dark, ma petite. Stay close, and if you sense anything, speak up. The woods at night are rarely empty.”

Aubrey grins, his teeth a line of dragonish daggers. “Not with us in it, they’re not.”

I slip off Aubrey’s back and nearly ate shit because my legs are numb from the ride. Staggering, I grab for Renard—who is at my side instantly, steadying me with one warm claw. “You should half-shift,” he murmurs. “It will be easier, and you’ll be able to keep up if there is a chase.”

He’s right. I don’t like half-shifting on command—it reminds me too much of my mom and some of the worst parts of my childhood, as she tortured people who disappointed her. So I do as my gargoyle says, relaxing the human hold to let the bunny rise. My ears pop out, my nose goes sharp and twitchy, and every color in the world gets about ten percent more intense. The forest smells like a hundred different animals and my brain immediately files them all by threat level and snack potential.

It gets easier every time. Felix was right from the start about that, and I’m glad for it.

The three of us fan out. Aubrey leads, moving through the brush like a living tank, snapping branches and trampling undergrowth. Ren takes the right flank, almost invisible when he wants to be and silent as a ghost. I stick to the middle, my feet barely making a sound even in sneakers, with my senses wide open. Now and then, I catch sight of glowing animal eyes or the flash of a tail in the bracken, but nothing big enough to matter.

Hunting is… weird when you’re part-prey. The bunny brain wants to run, but the rest of me knows what it’s like to tear and bite and feed. My body is faster than my thoughts; the minute I see something move—a dark streak low to the ground—I’m gone, ears back and blood singing in my veins. The woods blur past, all cold air and leaf mold and the slap of my feet against frozen dirt.