Page 18 of Cleo

“What’s wrong, Cleo?” Pax’s smooth voice rolled over me. “Don’t you like the book?”

“It’s not that. I just feel like this place is so much about wolves and forgets that there are other kinds of shifters.”

“What? Why do you think that’s the case?” He sat down next to me, though, and listened while I explained what I’d been observing. Really listened without interrupting or mansplaining or defending the school. At the end, he didn’t deny my feelings or say I was jumping to conclusions. Just nodded and said, “I never noticed that.” He tugged the book I’d been reading over and opened it to the table of contents. “Huh…”

“This is typical.”

“Are you trying to find something about a particular animal? Your wolf is magnificent.”

I didn’t have a good response to that without revealing everything I wasn’t ready to explain. Maybe Father wasn’t the only original, but he and I might be the only ones who could shift to multiple animals. If I couldn’t even learn a thing about a fox shifter, what were the odds of finding a pamphlet even about people like me?

“Cleo?”

“What? Oh, sorry. I’m just interested in all kinds of shifters, aren’t you?”

“If not, I should be.” He sat in the chair next to mine. “You’re really something, thinking outside the box. Growing up, we didn’t really get to know anyone outside our pack and for sure not outside the animal species. The few here who aren’t100 percent wolf are mostly staff, and they don’t hang out with students.

“Are there schools for other animals or maybe even some who have two kinds of animals, I mean for parents?”

“Other animals yes, but I think mostly people go to the school for the type of other nature they actually inherited.”

“Oh, so if they have a fox and lion, but they turn to a fox, they would go to a fox school?”

He shrugged. “If there was one…I really don’t know. You’re making me think.”

It was a start.

He went on. “And speaking of animals, I actually tracked you down here for a reason.”

“Yeah? To talk about animals.” I could show him a few.

“Sort of. Jude and Miles and I are taking a little field trip on Saturday evening to a park with hiking trails not too far from here. Would you like to come?”

Chapter Eighteen

Pax and the other guys were asking me to go somewhere again.

“Tell me more about this park. Don’t the humans freak out when a bunch of wolves run all over the place among them?” Parks on the shows I’d seen were tame greenspaces filled with children’s playgrounds, picnic tables, and similar features. Add a few shifter wolves to the mix, and you had a horror movie with crowds of people scooping up their children and racing away, screaming, trampling one another in their rush to escape.

He chuckled. “I guess they would, if they were there, but the gates officially close at sundown, so as long as we go after that, there will be nobody there to frighten.”

“Don’t hoodlums and drug dealers go to parks after they close?” My education was very small-screen oriented.

“In some, yes, but this is a wilderness park with trails and it’s far enough from the city center that there are few issues like that. We just have to be aware of our surroundings.”

A second date. But I still had such a big secret to keep.

All week, the date was in the back of my mind, along with a plan to go out for coffee with my sisters on Saturday morning. For a girl who’d never had a social life before, and only one friend, having two engagements in one day was heady stuff. I got up extra early and washed and dried my hair, put on a little mascara and eye liner as well as lip gloss, and an outfit I hoped would say,I go out for coffee all the time with friends and relatives.

Meeting up with the girls in the foyer, they all hugged me and complimented my jeans and baby tee…which of course they had bought me. Along with just about everything I owned. One day I would repay them.

“The place we’re going is just down the block on the first floor of a bank building,” Minx said. “I think you’ll like it.”

They all looked beautiful, in casual clothes similar to mine. “How do you all get away from your mates on a Saturday morning?”

Kiki giggled. “Oh, we spend so much time together, I’m sure they didn’t mind a break.”

But Ava scoffed. “Tell her the truth. We bought them tickets to a football game a while back, so they won’t be home until this evening. We’ve got the whole day ahead of us. No need to rush back at all.”

---