Page 78 of Her Rabid Beasts

“Aurelia.” Her voice is a quiet, husky purr. “I want to tell you how much of a joy it is to see you again.” She smiles at me, brilliant white teeth flashing.

She appears to be in her fifties, and it’s been seven years since I saw her last, but her beauty hasn’t faded at all. If anything, her crimson hair appears brighter, her wise, siren eyes have even more depth, and her red-lipped smile is kinder. The flash of a memory reminds me that she wore a white pantsuit when she came to see me in my cavern. Today, she wears black. There is a gravity to her presence I can’t explain; something the mythic orders definitely share. It’s as if the majestic fire that defines her kind pulses around her in a wave of not heat, but energy. She contains it under skin, making her glow from the inside.

Quite suddenly, I don’t feel like I’m just a plebian student here. My posture straightens.

“The joy is mine, Headmistress.”

She smiles and something clenches in my chest. “Please come in, Aurelia.”

I start when I see that, behind her, Lyle rises from one of the two chairs in front of her ancient black desk.

“Oh, don’t worry about him,” she coos. “He’ll behave.”

I shake myself and turn back to her.

“I’m really glad I could meet you again, too,” I manage to croak out. “I always wondered, if… you knew about me… that day.”

She closes the door and strides around to her desk, not sitting down but perching on the side of it.

Lyle sits down and I take the seat next to him, trying to ignore his general aura of menace and ice and wondering why he has to be here and craving his presence all the same.

I feel his eyes burning on the side of my head as Lady Celeste speaks with a knowing smile. “I did know that day,” she confirms. “And your father has hounded me ever since. Unfortunately, he got two names from me at the time.” She gives me a sympathetic look. “But I was shaken from what I’d seen when I took your hand. Four faces were clear to me.”

I’m shaken by this because my father outright lied to me. That day, which is seared in my memory, he stormed out of her office with cold anger oozing from every pore, telling me he found nothing.

But he was given two names. And I can guess which two.

But…fourfaces were clear to her?

My brows shoot up. “And the fifth?”

“Covered in shadow; the prophecy was quite literal about that.”

I exhale slowly. So my fifth is going to be a problem after all.

But she also takes a deep breath, and from this confident, striking woman, that worries me.

“Aurelia, I want to ask you something very serious,” she says, golden eyes boring into mine and holding me there. “I want you to consider it carefully. I’ve been able to buy you some time to stay your sentence, however, these things have a time limit. The Council will want a reason for the injunction. They’ll want a very good one.”

Dread winds its way like an anaconda around my body, squeezing tight. This room suddenly feels very small. Some part of me knew this was coming.

I swallow through a thick throat. “What are you suggesting?”

Those golden eyes flick to Lyle and I turn to him.

The lion says carefully, “We believe, Miss Aquinas, that it will be in your best interests to reveal that you are a Boneweaver.”

Old, black-wreathed terror grips my heart.

“No!” The words are out of my mouth on pure instinct. I’m gripping my armrests hard enough to bruise. Panic lashes through me and the wound on my stomach pulses a low, steady throb. The sudden urge to shift into my eagle form rises up—and I slam my anima back down.

Celeste says, “Aurelia, your father instilled a great fear in you?—”

“It will do nothing but put a target on my back!” Wings rustle in my head and I shove the feathers back down. “Every beast with an agenda will come for me.”

Henry croons softly in my ear and I grab him from my shoulder to hold him with shaking hands.

“But it will also stop your execution.” Lyle’s words are a knife cutting through my terror. Focusing me.

---