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I spun on my heel to shout at him, but he was gone.

“Dammit!” I exclaimed. I rushed after him, but he was nowhere in sight. I caught no scent of him, nor the sound of his heartbeat. Standing in front of the double doors, desperately searching the exterior of the building for him, I confirmed he was, indeed, gone. I let out another expletive only to find a human professor staring at me with wide eyes. He clutched his briefcase to his chest, frozen in place, as if afraid movement would set me off. I tried my hardest to rein in my temper—oh how I tried—but that bloody full moon must’ve still been wreaking havoc on my body. It would explain my strange short-circuiting back in the corridor.

“What are you staring at?” I hissed at the professor.

He shook his head furiously, and everything inside me wanted to shout at him, to shove him, to throttle him. I needed my distance. I needed to up the dosage on my fucking injections. Before I could say anything condemning, I zipped away from the man and everyone else.

7

WHAT ARE HER MOTIVES?

SYLVAN

I had to see her again. I needed answers. I’d caught the panic in her eyes the moment she saw I held the pages with her alchemical notes. A vampire researching Lobofebris, a disease that only affected lycans. It made no sense.

I took to a secluded area in a covered pathway spanning the large courtyard. The quad was surrounded on all four sides by buildings similar in appearance to the main university building. A fountain large enough to be a pool flowed nearby, and I tried to narrow my senses on the sound as I paced back and forth in the covered pathway, but my thoughts were stronger.

It was no surprise to me that a vampire made me angry, the hatred between our kinds was practically welded into our existence. Attraction, on the other hand, was not. It had whacked me over the head the moment I pinned her to that wall. A gnarled concoction of scents had obliterated every logical thought, and for a heartbeat, I’d felt so drawn to her it was dizzying.

Aura Nygaard was a vampire, I reminded myself. An ill-tempered, wickedly beautiful vampire. Her pale skin was flawless, her lips plump and pink, and eyes intriguingly, scarily red as blood, yet flecked with gold. That strange mixture of black and white hair, as if it couldn’t decide on the color, was captivating, and her wild tresses left me itching to run my fingers through them. To tug and see if she liked it.

What the hells was wrong with me?

I took a few cooling breaths to seize my control. To stop acting like some sex-deprived lycan around an omega in Heat. I was just … translating my anger strangely. That was all.

It didn’t help that I knew what she looked like beneath the modest dress.

Gods, I needed to dunk my face in cold water. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to settle down, but I needed answers about those symbols in her notes.

I didn’t know anything about alchemy except for what the symbols looked like. But given that the notes were on Lobofebris, and Aura had two bite marks … I grappled with my mind to put the clues together. Had she been bitten by a shifter with Lobofebris? Even if she had been, vampires didn’t contract the disease, only a treatable infection as a nasty side effect.

Is it possible she wanted to cure whoever had bitten her? Unlikely.

I leaned against the cool brick of the tunnel and massaged my head. The fountain at the center of the courtyard was becoming more inviting.

Closing my eyes, I scrubbed my hand down my face. The night before had been a sleepless one, and I probably just needed some rest. Maybe I’d pay another visit to the university before I left the next day.

8

OVERHEATED

AURA

Unfortunately for me, Guo Shan was busy at work when I stepped into the alchemy workshop. At the sound of my arrival, he lifted his head, silky brown hair hanging over his protective goggles as steam misted from a beaker he’d pulled from a burner. My body was flushed, heart still simultaneously clenching and pounding, but I forced a smile to reciprocate the spellcaster’s.

“Good morning, Shan,” I said, my voice betraying my words.

“Are you sure?” he asked. He tugged off his gloves and stepped aside to remove his goggles as well.

“I’ll be fine.” Even if just a glance from him made me feel like ripping his pretty head from his shoulders. I blamed that damn beta.

“I’ll be getting out of your hair soon,” he said. “I know I’m here early. I just couldn’t get much sleep last night. There was an animal attack in my village, and people are claiming it was a lycan.”

Dread gripped me. I bit my tongue, fangs digging into the tender tissue as I made my way to the bench and set my briefcase down. “Oh?” I asked. “And do you think it was?”

“The injuries fit, I suppose,” he said. I briefly met his gaze. His body was tense, but confusion clouded his scent. “But I’m not sure. It could’ve been a bear or a wildcat.”

I made a noncommittal sound while my memories dripped with crimson. My thoughts turned over, giving way to my mysterious naked appearance in Sublune Creek. No. That was ridiculous. My gem hadn’t failed me thus far, I didn’t fully shift.