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It was as she turned to walk away that she stopped and pronounced the chilling prophesy that made her eyes roll back in her head. The scary one about the beast and the noble warrior that made no more sense to me today than it had back then.
I’d put the bottle inside my coat and bid her a hasty good evening. I turned again to leave but heard a slight noise behind me. When I turned around to look, she had disappeared, leaving only a big, black raven on the path, pecking at the ground. I was amazed and went quickly back to the road and my aunt’s carriage, practically bent over to the ground, feeling my way along in the dark.
Someone slid onto the bar stool next to me, and I was startled from my memories. I turned to see another rookie, and fellow refugee, a young beta whose last name was Anders. And I was using the term “refugee” advisedly—it meant someone who has been forced to leave a place in order to escape persecution, or natural disaster. And that was exactly why we were both here tonight and not at our barracks. Our persecutors had chased us from it.
Only a half hour before, Anders had come running into my room in a panic to tell me that he’d heard strong rumors of a room inspection in less than an hour. Unable to bear the disaster that would occur when his trainer, Alpha Brandon, got a good look at his locker, Anders had pleaded with me to go out somewhere with him. We hadn’t left the fort much at all before this except to buy food or an occasional book we never had time to read from the stalls that had sprung up outside the fort. Since there wasn’t enough time to try cleaning my locker anyway, I had agreed to meet him at the tavern, and then I’d quickly fled.
It was only a temporary reprieve, but we both thought it might give the Alphas a chance to calm down before we saw them again. Anders had told me, eyes wide with horror, that he truly thought Alpha Brandon would snap earlier that morning and do away with him. He said he’d probably be found years from now, his mutilated body stuffed inside a drainpipe near the fort. Of course, I thought he was being a bit of a drama queen and exaggerating things—but not by much.
I hadn’t met him before training started, but I had long stopped thinking of him as anything but a comrade in arms in this ordeal we were both going through. Anders’ trainer was the gorgeous Brandon, and he treated Anders almost as shamefully as Alpha Wyatt did me.
On this rare bit of time off on a Saturday night, we had decided to meet here to drown our sorrows and commiserate with each other. Anders shoved an ale over to me and gave me a brave smile. “We who are about to die, et cetera, et cetera…” he said holding up his mug for a toast.
I smiled at him and bumped his mug with mine.
“Maybe it was only a nasty rumor. Maybe they didn’t even do an inspection or open our lockers.” It was flimsy, I knew, but all I had to offer him.
“No such luck. Busting me is what Alpha Brandon lives for. He told me just today that he didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it. I think he really wants to fail me.” His eyes filled with tears. “I have to prove him wrong. I just have to. I can’t go back home to cleaning the scullery and mopping floors.”
Anders had worked in service jobs before joining the army, in a huge manor home, doing the jobs too hard for the maids to tackle.Jobs like cleaning, hauling water, carrying coal for fires, and a myriad of other duties were all in his purview. He rose before dawn from his room in a top floor garret with tiny windows, black with soot and worked long after his employers had gone to bed. Being sent back there was the worst fate he could imagine.
“Look,” I said with a confidence I truly didn’t feel, “Alpha Brandon is just giving you a hard time. He’s trying to toughen you up. Alpha Wyatt does the same thing to me all the time. Did you hear about what he did to me in training today?”
He nodded. “I heard. That was brutal. But at least he doesn’t call you an imbecile, like Brandon calls me.”
“Right. Because being called stupid is so much better.”
I pushed my floppy curls off my face and sighed. Wyatt had threatened to shave my head the week before if I didn’t stop.
“Personally, I admire the guts it takes for you to get onto the mats with a big brute like Alpha Wyatt.” His brown eyes twinkled a little as he grinned at me.
He sighed in one of his lightning-fast changes of mood and said wistfully, “Do you think they really hate us as much as they seem to?”
“Absolutely, they do. Why would you even think otherwise?”
“Well, it’s just that sometimes—well, occasionally—my Alpha has been almost…decent to me. Like today, just after he got a letter from his cousin, the Lord Regent Lexington of Morovia.”
“Totally temporary.”
He laughed and nodded, taking another long swig of his ale. Just then the bartender leaned over the bar and tipped his head toward two attractive and buxom women at the end of the bar. “The ladies down there would like to buy you two another round.”
Anders blushed again. “What do you think? It would be rude to turn them down, wouldn’t it?”
I tipped my mug to them. “It would. Come on, let’s go down and talk to them. Just for a bit—we have to get back to the barracks soon, but it’ll be nice to be normal for a change.”
We picked up our glasses, moved down to the other end of the bar and began chatting with the women, who were both attractive, in my opinion. They certainly seemed to find both of us that way. After suffering degradation and despair at the hands of our trainers for the past few weeks, it felt wonderful to be admired, even if it was just for a little while.
A man with a fiddle and another one with some wooden spoons sat down by the fire to play a lively tune, and one of the girls, whose name was either Martha or Matilda—I hadn’t quite caught it—got up and wanted to dance, so I let her pull me out onto the tiny dance floor. I was aware of Anders and the other woman coming with us. The two ales I’d had, after such a long abstinence, had gotten to me a little, and I closed my eyes and swayed along to the sound of the fiddle.
Then I heard Anders make a sound that was halfway between a horrified gasp and a surprised yelp. He was staring at the door and had gone deathly pale. Before I could turn my head to see what was coming up behind me, I felt a heavy hand clamp down on my shoulder. A harsh, familiar voice growled in his ear. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Vandercliff? I’ve been looking all over for you.”
I dropped my arms, pushing the girl away from me in a panic and whirling to face my Alpha. “Alpha Wyatt. What are you doing here?”
“What amIdoing here?”
“Hey!” the girl I’d been dancing with yelled and tried to push her way aggressively back between us. I flinched, afraid my Alpha might actually kill her. Betas, male or female, didn’t push Alphas around as a general rule—not if they wanted to live to tell the tale. But Wyatt simply shook his head and said something in her ear. He pulled a small coin from his pocket and pressed it into her palm, and she turned away with a swirl of her long skirts and a little wave.
My mouth fell open, but before I could react, Wyatt took my arm without another word and escorted me to the exit. I cast one wild glance over my shoulder for my friend and saw him with his feet dangling at least a foot off the floor. Alpha Brandon had a fistful of his shirt in his hands and had pulled him up to dangle inches from the floor. Brandon was talking to him in gruff, mean tones, and Anders was nodding his head up and down like a puppet.
