Page 64 of A Dusk Of Stars

Gods.

He really did need to put that much distance between us to safely shift. It’s easily the largest animal I’ve ever seen, its fur a deep, burning red, its muscles stiff but visible underneath and its lush tail wagging languidly.

Instantly, my wolf rises to the surface, silent as usual, but more focused than ever. She seems tolovethe look of him.

Still, it startles me a little — making me shove my animal down — when it gets closer, staring into my eyes for one long moment before taking a series of quick, deep whiffs of me, its nose as big as my head.

I wait, closing my eyes so as not to imagine the maw closing around my neck. I sense it circle me a few times, never stopping with the sniffing.

Then it does.

I feel a soft nudge against my stomach.

I open my eyes, finding the fox bowing its head, offering its neck to me. With surprisingly little hesitation, I kick my heels off, grab onto its fur and throw my leg over, getting comfortable.

The next thing I know, its muscles are tensing up and I’m being lifted off the ground, my stomach doing a flip even before the animal breaks into a sprint, headed straight for the Lycan Forest.

Leaning forward and grabbing on more tightly, I feel the wolf inside me rise to the surface again.

It’s intoxicating, watching the gardens disappear in a blur and darting into the forest with all the scents, sounds and sights around me — the soft shifting of pine needles covering the ground, the age-old trees whizzing past me, the blood pumping through the scurrying animals’ veins.

Before I know it, there’s the north stretch of the Wall appearing through the trees before us — ancient and covered in moss — and it makes my stomach tighten with panic, for the brief second that I think we’ll be crashing straight into it.

Then we go up, up and onto the wall itself, my lungs filling with air and the expanse of the night sky exploding all around me.

Whenever I dare to look down, I see the Academy grounds from a perspective that’s been completely inaccessible to me before now. I want to inspect every last bit of it, but the next thing I know, we’ve made a full circle and the fox is jumping off the Wall and straight onto the barren top of Graf Hill.

Slowly, it comes to a full stop. Catching my breath, I get off and watch Bane shift back with a grin on his face, his skin covered in a thin sheen of sweat. He walks up to me, still smiling, undoing the top few buttons of his shirt and tugging it loose a little. I’m still a little breathless and under the impression of all that I’ve seen and felt, so I fail to stop my eyes from lingering on the delicious lines of his collarbone.

I return the smile, but I quickly turn my back to him and stroll over to the edge of the cliff, the view once again taking my breath away — the night sky above, the Wall all around and the grounds below, with the Towers and the forest and the shimmering lake.

“You know,” I say with a persistent smile on my face as I sense him come to stand next to me, “the only reason students ever come here is to mess with each other.”

“Mess with each other how?”

I shrug. “They’ll tie some poor freshman up and leave him overnight, pretending they’ll never come back for him. Stuff like that.”

He laughs. “That’s pretty tame.”

“I guess it is,” I reply, turning a little pensive. “Still, a shame, because it really is beautiful.”

I feel his eyes on my profile. “I don’t think ‘beautiful’ is a strong enough word.”

I turn to give his shoulder a shove with my fist. “Look at you, getting all sappy.”

His phone starts ringing, and it’s such an out-of-place sound that it makes me snap out of it.

He takes it out of his pocket, glances at the screen and puts it back.

“Go ahead,” I insist, “take it. It’s getting late anyway.” And I move to walk away, stopping midstep when I realize what I’m doing.

His eyes still catch the movement. He lets out a laugh. “Are you so eager to get away from me that you’re prepared to fling yourself off a cliff?”

I smile from ear to ear. “Maybe notthateager.”

“Come on, let’s go,” he says, his eyes wandering over to the grounds below us. “That lake, with all its shimmering, it needs to have rocks thrown into it.”

My eyebrows shoot up. “Needs to, really?”

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