Page 8 of Poet & Protector

“Yeah, I’m getting that.”

I took a sip of Coke and settled back in my chair, finally starting to relax.

That was when I saw him. Neville Durand.

He was in the younger Bane pack led by Ren Laroche. We were both sophomores. Unlike everyone else in the Bunker, Neville was someone I’d run into on a regular basis. As in every day. We had classes together.

He was at the far end of the room, leaning against the bar and talking to Caleb. A bottle of beer dangled from his fingers. He looked so at ease. How long had he been coming here?

As if he sensed someone watching him, Neville turned his head and looked in my direction. Our eyes met. He immediately looked away and continued his conversation.

Rude. Though I don’t know what else I expected. We weren’t friends; if anything, we were the opposite. Still, the fact that he recognized me and refused to acknowledge my presence in the slightest got under my skin.

Ugh. I was annoyed that I cared at all. It didn’t matter. It would be easy enough treat him the way he’d decided to treat me and pretend he didn’t exist. Yeah, ignoring Neville was definitely for the best, but for some reason I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at him again and wondering why it felt so wrong.

Three

The Mountain School

September

Monday morning

MASON

Ms. Castillo pressed a key on her laptop and the pairs for our collaborative poetry project appeared on the giant screen at the front of the classroom. When I saw my partner’s name, I swallowed a groan. I shouldn’t have been surprised. There were only four Guardians in the upper class Creative Writing elective. Bryn, Fey, and I were Nightshades. The other wolf was a Bane. Neville Durand.

Our teachers knew better than to mix Keepers, Guardians, and humans. It wasn’t a surprise I’d be partnered with another wolf. The other two Nightshades, Bryn and Fey, had been paired up, which meant I got Neville.

I cast a panicked glance at Bryn and Fey. Bryn shot me a sympathetic smile, while Fey shrugged and stuck out her tongue. They’d already pushed their desks together.

Some packmates I had.

Neville hadn’t bothered to move, which meant he expected me to come to him.

Whatever.

I walked over to the empty desk next to his. He watched me take a seat with his usual expression of calm disinterest, not even deigning to greet me. Neville looked the same as he did every day. He had thick, dark brown hair, long enough to be roguish, framing his prominent cheek bones and then layered to taper toward the nape of his neck. His narrow face had an angular jaw and chin, and full lips that were often frowning.

Clothing-wise, he rarely diverged from a dark t-shirt and jeans. Black leather boots. A charcoal gray Irish flat cap on his head. While the rest of his outfit wasn’t in any way remarkable, the hat intrigued me. Neville struck me as the kind of guy who’d have several piercings and tattoos if Guardians were allowed to decorate our bodies. We weren’t. I suspected Neville’s cap was a hint at a more subversive style he favored but couldn’t adopt.

It probably wasn’t fair for me to criticize the predictability of his wardrobe. I wore different iterations of the same ensemble most days: a button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up my forearms, paired with a tailored vest, jeans, and chukka boots, lace-up dress boots, oxfords, loafers, or sneakers, depending on my mood. The colors and fabrics of the shirts and vests varied. The jeans came in different washes and levels of distress.

No point in denying I was kind of a clothes hound.

“Hey, Neville,” I said.

“Mason.” He had a low, soft voice.

I’d never been this close to him. His scent was interesting. A wolf’s scent tended to reflect their most innate qualities. Neville’s had a lot of layers; I got paper, ink, a mix of wood and varnish, something like steel, and river stones. It was an appealing but complicated combination I couldn’t quite make sense of. But then, Neville himself didn’t make a lot of sense as far as I was concerned, so it kind of followed.

An awkward silence took over until I took the initiative to break it.

“So…”

He just looked at me.

“I guess we’re writing a poem together…and a process paper about how we wrote the poem.”