Page 15 of Her Psycho Beasts

Chapter 7

Aurelia

My animas and I text and video call incessantly over the next six days on our contraband phones. Raquel and Connor don’t have phones, but they’re always in the background of Stacey’s.

“Urgh, I need a distraction!” Stacey cries on our second day. “An extended lockdown should be illegal. I can’t deal with this. Can you ask Scythe again if he’s found anything out?”

“It’s only been forty-eight hours,” I groan, rolling onto my back on the bed Lyle and I share and petting Eugene on the head. “But I can’t stop thinking about anything else either.”

“Forty-eight hours of stinkin’ hotlionsex, I bet!” Connor screams at the top of his lungs, dancing vigorously over Stacey’s shoulder. “How’sthatfor distraction, Lady Boneweaver?”

Minnie snorts loudly as Raquel slaps a hand to their forehead from where they sit on Stacey’s desk, brushing the fur of the line of nimpins patiently sitting there.

“Could you say that any louder?” I groan, glancing at the door that leads to Scythe and Xander’s room. No one is there, of course; Scythe is doing whatever unethical activities he does during the day and Lyle is on the phone to the king of feline court, trying to do damage control.

No one is involving me in anything and I have so much energy to burn.

“Listen, guys,” I say, holding the phone above me as I lie on my back. “I have so many ideas to get Sabrina back right now, and each one is worse than the last. We just have to wait for Scythe.”

“Right,” chirps Minnie, and I can tell she’s trying to keep us in good spirits. “Yeti says exactly that as well. And are we gonna talk about the good news we heard on the news tonight?”

I take a deep breath as my stomach lurches.

“What news?” Connor exclaims.

It’s Raquel that says, “B-Blackwater Penitentiary was b-blown apart.”

There’s a beat of wide-eyed silence. “And,” Minnie says, smiling hopefully at me. “It’s been reported that a number of inmates escaped. It’s bedlam over there!” She waves her hands in the air like this is a good thing.

“Wait this is good?? Stacey asks worriedly. “Wasn’t Savage being taken there?”

“Think about it!” Minnie says. “What does Savage love more than Aurelia?”

“Uh…” Connor squints his eyes like he’s trying to think.

“Bombs,” I say quietly.

Stacey’s mouth drops open. “Oh Goddess! You don’t mean Savage did this?”

I shrug, because the truth is that we can’t be sure. There’s a good chance that itwashim. And nothing in my anima is telling me that he was mortally hurt.

“But other inmates have escaped too,” Connor says. “That’s probably not a good thing, right?”

“The Baku p-pack was one of th-them,” Raquel says, their lip piercing glinting in the sunset light coming through their dorm window.

We all go silent. Everyone knows about the notorious hyena pack that were jailed for murder a few years ago. In fact, after years of enmity, it had been my father that put them there. The fact that they just happened to be on the run now is…interesting

“The new deputy will have their work c-cut out for them,” Raquel says, clearly changing the subject. “Anyone got any idea who it is?”

“It’ll be announced the morning the lockdown ends,” Minnie says. “There was an email this morning. Everyone in the mated dorms is being really dramatic about it. Apparently, Lyle was the best deputy the school’s ever had.” She beams at me and I grin back.

Lyle hasn’t revealed anything to me about the new deputy, and Celeste hasn’t been in contact either. In fact, for the last forty-eight hours, Lyle and I had mostly been… Well, we’d been doing what a newly mated couple did. I now have another bite mark on the other side of my neck to match the first one, plus I am sore in places I didn’t know Icouldbe sore.

We’ve also been talking. And there’s nothing like pillow talk to get out the difficult stuff. Lyle had asked me how I’d known who Fredrick Ulman was, and it was then that I’d told him how serpents can get visions of their mates, both in the present and the past. I’d felt closer to him than ever before when I’d told him what I’d seen of his past and he tucked me under his chin so I couldn’t see his face. The tightness of his arms around my body told me everything I needed to know about how much it meant to him.

The remainder of the lockdown passes in much the same way. The animas and I video call at least twice a day, Lyle insists onfeeding and showering me, doting on me at every turn, when he’s not on the phone or on his laptop. Scythe barely interacts with me, working on his computer or on his phone and I can only hope some of that work has to do with Sabrina.

Six days is double the amount of time for any previous lockdown, and it’s sending the animuses a little more feral than usual. They’re all taking it out on the beasts who had sided with Titus, because they’d all figured out pretty quickly that Sabrina, who was much loved amongst males of all orders, had been taken by the Clawsons.

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