Page 17 of Cleo

We shopped for clothes and shoes until my feet hurt and my temples pounded from all the noise. Humans were so damned noisy. I hadn’t realized that from the movies. But they slammed things down and stomped their feet. Snapped. Clapped. High-fived as Ava called it.

Then there were the clothes they wanted to buy me.

“It shows my…” I pointed to my breasts in the tank tops that the girls had picked out. Sure, I thought I looked great in them, but I had never showed off my…assets before. Date night excepted.

“Just some cleavage. You look hot. Now try on the jeans. They will fit you like a glove. They are my favorite brand.” I thought Kiki loved clothes more than anything. She was eyeing a pair of black leather pants like they were her fated mate.

“They’re so tight,” I complained until I got a look at myself in the mirror again. With the shirt, I looked like, well, one of the girls from the movies. “Oh boy.”

Minx bounced on her toes. “Oh boy is right. Those three guys who have been eyeing you are going to die when they see you in this.”

I choked on my words. “Die?”

“Faint maybe. They are going to lose their minds.” Ava got the attention of the sales lady. “Can we get one pair in every color in that size, please.”

“That’s too much,” I argued. “Plus, those guys are still getting over how you made me look on our date. They said I always look beautiful, and I may be naive, but I’ve seen ogling on TV.

Ava shrugged. “Not enough, if you ask me. We have nine mates between us and maybe twelve soon.” She winked andI didn’t have to look in the mirror to know I was blushing furiously.

“They haven’t said anything about being my mates,” I said as we gathered all my stuff and headed to the checkout counter. Ava handed the woman some kind of card, and she pressed it to a machine with a cord and, just like that, they claimed everything was paid for. The girls explained the card and the reader and banks while we walked to what they called the food court. The smells made my mouth water.

“Every place has a different kind of food,” Kiki said, leaning her chin on my shoulder. “How about we get a little of each, and you can taste them and decide what you like.”

“Sure. That sounds great.”

By the time we got back to the academy, I’d had Chinese food, overly sweet, sticky chicken that I thought I wouldn’t like, but grew on me. Something called gyros that were meat and bread and vegetables. The flavors were bursting, and I loved that dish the most. There were some deep-fried things I didn’t enjoy at all. They left a weird film on the roof of my mouth.

“Tomorrow, wear the teal shirt and the dark jeans,” Ava said before they left me in my dorm room. They’d purchased me a whole wardrobe along with shoes and a new bag for school and everything that went under those clothes.

Even some fancy journals.

I owed them everything, though if I said it out loud, they would’ve argued me to the death.

“Wait,” I called out as they turned around to leave. “Thank you. Really. I know we just met but you’re the best sisters a girl could ask for.”

Chapter Seventeen

One of the nicest features of the library at school was the private cubicles where a student could settle in and study uninterrupted. In my continuing quest to prove I deserved a full scholarship, I took advantage of these spaces most afternoons. Many of the students seemed unimpressed with all the information we were given, but I soaked it up like a sponge. Poor Angie with her limited knowledge had done her best, and without her I’d be an illiterate person. Unfortunately, I was years behind everyone in my classes, and there would be tests coming up soon.

My solution to my ignorance was to take what I was being taught and delve deeper into it in the library where volumes contained all the knowledge I needed. At first, it had been rough because libraries were new to me too. Sometimes, I probably seemed like I had been raised under a rock somewhere instead of on the side of a mountain. But so far, my instructors and professors had shown great patience. I just didn’t think it would be endless, and so I needed to catch up as quickly as possible.

And in doing so, I discovered something about myself. I loved to learn. Although at first, I was struggling to find things to enhance the classroom lectures, after a while, I was following rabbit trails on general interest as well.

So much of what I was learning clashed with what my father had proclaimed to be reality. He spoke of himself and of me as if we were unique in every way. And, more than unique, better than the rest. It was such a lie. My father wasn’t even the only original shifter or even the oldest. There were some who were even known to be still hanging around and others who, while still alive, dwelled on other planes.

I didn’t see a way to contact any of them—and I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea. If Father was not welcome among them, perhaps neither was I. But I was curious, fascinated, and wanted to learn everything.

Also, I was hunting for evidence of others like me. Multi-natured. So far, every book I’d come across was about werewolves, which made sense on one level. It was the name of the school as well as the nature of most of the students and the largest percentage of the staff. But shouldn’t an institution like this be prepared to help students expand their minds? Most of them grew up in packs or at least around other wolves, but my understanding of a college or academy or any kind of school was that it worked that way. Human students in books and on TV were learning about other countries and cultures and religions even. What the library showed me had me considering some of my classes.

Sure, they might call it “shifter history” or “shifter culture,” but a look at the class synopsis reflected a singular emphasis on wolf shifters. Sure, there might be one lecture about all the rest, but how was that fair? Human schools had the whole world in their texts but not us. Were there academies just for all the other types of animals, and did they only learn about themselves?

When Father declared himself the original shifter, he did so knowing he had the ability to shift to any animal in this world and, for all I knew, others as well. I had never tried to change to anything without success, and I’d always assumed I was limited only by my awareness of the existence of an animal.

I assumed my sisters were only wolves, although I’d never asked. If I did, they’d wonder why. But I had begun to think the reason Father kept me was genetics. My similarity to him. For all we knew, he might have a dozen more children out there, just not in the registry.

The more I thought about these things, the more distracted I grew from my reading until I finally pushed the heavy volume entitledShifters of the Pastaway from me. As with most of what I’d found, it was all about wolves with only a mention or two of others.

I blew out a breath of frustration.

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