Page 15 of Creatures of Chaos

I’m only starting to unpack my lunch when Ensley plops down next to me, her tray loaded with fresh fruits, vegetables, and nuts. She scowls at my chicken sandwich but doesn’t say anything. She’s a hardcore vegetarian—most fae are—and even though she’s given up the fight to get me to stop eating meat, she still turns her nose up at my dietary choices.

Becks sits down next to her a few seconds later with a double cheeseburger and meatball sub on his tray.

“Hey, Locklyn,” he says with a nod. “How was your weekend?”

“Boring,” I say, but when I glance over at him I immediately know something is wrong. He’s smiling, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. I know him well enough to recognize when he’s stressed.

“Seriously, Becks?” Eyeing his tray with disgust, Ensley gets up and moves to the empty seat on the other side of me. “Yuck,” she says, and then pinches her nose. “I can still smell that minced flesh from here.”

Becks laughs and picks up his sub. “This school is filled with meat eaters. I’m sure it’s not just my food you’re smelling.” He takes a big bite and chews.

“You know you don’t actually need to eat a living being in order to live. You can get all the nutrients you need from other foods—foods that don’t require murdering something.”

Becks finishes his bite and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Come on, Ensley. I’m a natural predator. They’d take away my dragon card if I stopped eating meat.”

Ensley rolls her eyes. “Or you could stand up for something and actually change something about our world.”

I know Becks has zero motivation to change what he eats. This isn’t the first argument he and Ensley have gotten into about it. I’m pretty sure he secretly chooses to eat hamburgers and steaks in front of her just to set her off.

Becks shrugs. “Dad got over it for Mom,” he reminds her, which only makes her madder.

I let my gaze drift over the courtyard as Becks and Ensley continue to argue over his lunch.

A group of fae are using their magic to make oranges grow from one of the fruit trees in the center of the rectangular space. A small food fight has broken out at a table to the left, and I catch Ms. Teller, my literary teacher, making a beeline across the courtyard to stop them. I smile, thinking of the food fight the shifters started last week. It ended when a couple of otter shifters accidentally doused a vampire at the table next to them with a cupful of red soda.

As I continue to scan, I catch Talon sitting on a table on the opposite side of the courtyard, his butt on the wood surface and his feet planted on a chair instead of the floor. There’s a ring of admirers around him. Mostly female.

The smile slips from my face.

I can’t believe I thought for even a second that it would be hard for him to adjust to a new school.

“So what are we thinking now?” Ensley asks as she follows my line of sight over to Talon and his groupies. I hadn’t even noticed they’d stopped arguing. “Dragon shifter?”

Becks glances over at Talon and then shakes his head. “He wasn’t at the council meeting with his uncle on Friday. If Talon was a dragon shifter, he would have been there.”

Just because his uncle is a dragon shifter doesn’t mean he is as well. It’s not uncommon for creatures to marry outside their species or sub-species—my parents are a prime example of that, as are Becks’ and Ensley’s—and when that happens their biological children only inherit one of the creature traits. Or in my case, neither. It’s rare, but occasionally a recessive gene from an ancestor flares and the child turns out to be a completely different species than even both parents. So if one of Talon’s parents isn’t a dragon shifter, he could be a different type of shifter, or even a fae or vampire.

I narrow my eyes at Talon as he throws his head back and laughs at something Vesper says, their interaction making me even more annoyed that I couldn’t keep him out of my thoughts all weekend. Not to mention I feel silly for handing my phone over to him so easily. I played into his hands as willingly as Vesper is right now, and having anything in common with that vapid vampire makes me feel a certain type of way.

“I’m sticking with snake shifter until proven otherwise.”

I noticed later in the weekend that Talon put himself in my phone as, Not-A-Snake-Shifter-Talon. I thought it was kind of funny at the time, but now it just irritates me. I need to get off the subject of Talon. Between his visit and my unnerving obsession over Shadow Striker, I’ve already wasted enough brain space on him.

“How was the council meeting, by the way?” I ask Becks, more to change the subject than anything else. Only dragon shifters are allowed to attend their meetings, but from whatBecks has told us about their weekly gatherings, they sound incredibly boring.

A dark shadow seems to cross Becks’ face. “Fine,” he says, but he won’t meet my gaze.

I open my mouth to question him about it when a sheet of lime green paper is slapped on the table in front of us and I jerk.

“What do you think, Becks?” Leo says as he grins down at us. “You gonna step up and show everyone at this school why you’re such a big deal?”

I lift my lip in a silent snarl and lean away from Leo. He falls into the small minority of students who choose to bully me rather than ignore me. I hate him. As far as I’m concerned, the only thing he’s good for is reminding me why I’m thankful I’m invisible to most of the kids in our school.

Becks barely looks at the green sheet of paper. “What are you talking about?” he asks, shooting Leo a glare the hyena shifter is ignorant to. No one would ever accuse Leo of being the sharpest.

I lean forward to see the paper. There’s not much on the sheet besides printed blood splatters with a series of numbers that look like they could be coordinates, and what might be an emblem or insignia—a circle divided into four sections with a smaller ring in the middle and a cross going through the central ring. Each of the sections has a symbol in it, but I don’t care enough to study it.

“What, you haven’t heard?” Leo says in mock surprise. “The word is Chaos is starting up in a week. The prize is supposed to be something of epic proportions. There are whispers it’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before. Nothing mundane like cash or a new ride. Something really valuable. Something powerful.”

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