Page 13 of Her Feral Beasts

After Aurelia’s vanilla cake and strawberries scent, of course. A little sweet, a little tart, just like her.

Thinking of her instantly makes me rage, and I feel the chains groan under the strain of suppressing my power. My animus keens for her like a lost puppy and I growl under my breath, telling it to shut up.

The urge to serve her is at war with my hatred. She says she didn’t try to kill us, and fine, alright, but she still refuses to acknowledge us as her mates. I can no longer see her mating mark—a skull with five marks on the side of her neck, matching to every member of our mating group—but I’m sure as fuck going to find out why.

No one has the power to mask the celestial mating bond. Literally no one.

All six of us share a unique mating mark imprinted on the sides of our necks by the stars themselves. Only members of your group can see that mark, and beasts spend lifetimes hunting for the other members of their soul-group. Those beasts can then pool their powers. It was our Goddess-given right to be together.

And she didn’t want to.

That alone makes her dangerous. A regina has power over her mates, whether we want her to or not, and we can’t have someone existing in the world with that much leverage over us.

A roar sounds outside and I know they’ll have their hands full with the new intake. This academy is made to rehabilitate feral and rabid adult shifters under the age of twenty-five. They never even bothered sending me an invite, and I was quite offended by that.

But what happens when you put a group of feral beasts-turned-human in one school? Ha! I’m sure Lyle has been fucking around with his success statistics because the entire system is rubbish. I’ve been toactualbeast prison and seen first hand the dangerous shifters this school couldn’t fix.

A tiny part of me worries about Aurelia being put in here with us. Animus Academy was traditionally made for the male beast spirit we call the animus, as we are more volatile than the female beast spirit we call the anima. When they started taking in animas, they never even bothered to change the name. But importantly, the ratio is something like five males to one female in this place, and she is a beautiful, stunning, physicallyperfectgirl.

Anunclaimedbeautiful, perfect girl.

Aurelia reminds me of Princess Jasmine only with blue eyes and a power that makes me feel like lightning around her.

It’s a shame we have to kill her.

But she’ll get attention from every cock in the place, which is a different problem.

I’ve worked myself up enough thinking about this so that by the time Reuben slams open the doors again, I’m a growling, snarling mess.

“Quiet, pup,” he chuckles. “You’ll be allowed out once we get inside.”

I haven’t been called a pup since I got shoved into my first fighting cage at three years old and it sends me feral.

But the chains work well and I only get a groan out of the metal as they wheel me out. I get a good view of the pretty cast iron and gold gates of the prison-school. Even through my spit hood, I can see the gold glinting in the sun…until I’m wheeled around and get to see the pure carnival of fun that awaits me inside.

The receiving bay at Animus Academy is part zoo, part jailhouse.

When I was little, Scythe told me all about the academy (threatenedme with it, more like). The main building itself is over a hundred and fifty years old, dating back to the mid-1800s when our kind first arrived in this country during the gold rush. While the core building is an ancient gothic monstrosity that reminds me of a cross between a dragon’s lair and a witches’ castle, they kept updating the place with the latest technology, extending it one wing at a time until it became a huge complex built to keep the budding crims inside.

There’s a line of students going through metal detectors, manned by no less than twelve burly security beasts, most of them with automatic weapons or dart rifles. Two of them are breaking up a fight, but I can’t tell what it’s about—likely an animus who didn’t like another animus’ scent. A feeling of nostalgia takes me, because federal prison is similar, except the beasts are older and meaner…and there aren’t pretty animas around toreallyfuck us up.

Once the prisoners get through the security check, they go into medical-veterinary where the medics will check them for fleas, scabies, mites and other parasites our kind tend to pick up when we go a little feral.

There are a couple of nervous parents waiting just beyond a steel bar, trying to see if their kids made it through okay.Theirkids will be the tamer, petty crime sort. They’ll complete their three-year program and go back to a loving home to get a regular job, find their mating group and live happily ever after.

The rest of us criminals don’t get that. It’s lucky I have Scythe, otherwise I’d probably be locked up in the rabid cages like the ones I can see snarling and spitting in the receiving bay.

Six of the thick metal cages on wheels hold shifted beasts. Two scarred tigers, two wolves, a python and a hyena. The tigers have been darted and lie snoring at the bottom of their cages, but the others are staring each other down.

Put us ferals and rabids all together and what do you get? Bedlam.

Suddenly, I can’t wait.

The entire bay goes silent as our fleet of guards wheel us into a line beside the sliding glass doors leading to the medical wing. Scythe just walks right through and the two security bears at the doors let him.

Bernie and Ernie work for us and are loyal to all ends. I call them the Forklift Twins because though they’re not all that smart, to be on the end of one of their punches is the end of the line for you. I’ve had Ernie lift the front of a semi once and he didn’t even break a sweat as I slid a full-grown lion underneath the tires.

A few metres from me is the queue of beasts in their human forms, around thirty males and five females. They’ve either been escorted here, or attended as instructed by the council, and are currently eyeing me and my brothers as if we’re made of explosives.

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