Page 74 of Her Psycho Beasts

Xander scoffs and collects a handful of bottles, teats, and joey milk. He stalks out the door with one hand cupped around the bulge that’s the joey and leaving only a singed scent behind him.

Chapter 35

Aurelia

Savage and Xander turn up to lunch wearing two patterned cotton slings around their necks that obviously have something small and round in them. The animas gasp and we flock around them. Minnie is the only one brave enough to look in Xander’s sling, and the rest of us swarm Savage. He takes out a tiny wombat and an even tinier bottle full of milk. Xander removes a tiny kangaroo joey from his and efficiently begins to feed it, throwing a burping cloth over his shoulder as if he’s done it many times before.

Minnie and I exchange raised brows because he looks so at ease handling the bottle. Savage, on the other hand, gets the rest of us cooing over him, but waves away our attempts to help.

“I have to do it myself,” he says seriously, tucking the squirming joey into the crook of his arm. I hand him the bottle of milk. “Otherwise I’ll get in trouble.”

“Like you care about getting in trouble.” Connor crosses his arms.

My wolf grins down at the wombat, greedily guzzling down his bottle at lightning speed. “Depends who’s holding the whip.” He glances coyly at me.

I swat him lightly on the shoulder before returning to my food.

Stacey and Raquel are sitting with Sabrina in the medical wing. We’d taken her up to the anima dorms, and she’d determinedly stomped her way up there, but the moment she’d gotten into her and Raquel’s shared room, she’d gone stiff. The Clawson’s had taken her from that room, wrestled her, and cut the end of her tail off.

It’s a wound that will take time to heal.

So instead, Lyle is in the process of moving Raquel, Connor and Stacey into the mating group dorms, which works well because the rooms are massive and won’t trigger her claustrophobia. Minnie is already there with Yeti and Marduk anyway, and Sabrina said she feels much safer with everyone around.

It’s a long day of classes after that, and I look for Scythe, my anima whining sappily for him, but he doesn’t attend. Xander comes to Self-Awareness class and sits at his regular table with a group of wolves and Yeti.

“What are you looking at?” he suddenly says rudely to me.

I startle becausehehadn’t even been looking at me, but straight ahead to where Minnie was writing the instructions for her group session. Today was the day of her presentation and she’d chosen colouring therapy as her project.

“I was just wondering what you were listening to today,” I say smoothly. “You seem like you’d be in the mood for opera. Something dramatic like that.”

“Ooh, like Phantom of the Opera?” Connor asks boldly. “I love that movie.”

“It could be a Buddhist prayer chant,” Stacey whisper-yells at me. “It’s good for anger management. My grandma used to listen to them all the time.”

“No,” I say, taking this very seriously as I consider our options. “It’s gotta be something with a real kick to it. Like?—”

The stapled colouring book set before me by Minnie just minutes ago, goes up in flames. We all cry out before Savage leans over and smartly slams his flat palm over it, snuffing it out.

“Savage!” I cry. “Are you burned?”

He turns over his palm, showing me a giant red welt.

I gasp, grabbing his wrist and immediately directing my healing power into the injured tissue.

Savage sighs wistfully, and when I glance at him, he’s propped up his head on a fist and is gazing at me with a goofy smile. “I knew you’d fix it for me, regina. Like you fixed my heart.”

Raquel and Connor snort with laughter while I hide the flush in my cheeks.

After I’m done, Minnie hands me a new colouring book and we begin our session. Savage takes to it with gusto, loudly declaring that Scythe really should be here because there was a whole page of sea creatures in the booklet. We all snigger as we watch Xander pick up a black pencil and angrily scribble over the page full of fairies and toadstools.

After class, Savage and I sit on the soft grass at the back of the school where we start on the spelling book specially made for wolves learning to write.

“I know most of my alphabet but miss some of the letters in the middle,” he says, concentrating on the tiny wombat in his arms that he’s dubbed ‘Toastie’, because he’d tried to grab the ham and cheese toastie Savage had been eating at lunch.

He holds Toastie on his back, with his private parts angled towards the grass. In one hand, he has a wet wipe and is tickling the joey to make him pee. He has to do this multiple times a day to simulate what its mother would do in the wild so he won’t pee in his pouch.

“Go on then,” I instruct. “Recite it out loud and then we’ll trace it in the— Argh!” I jump to the side, narrowly avoiding the stream of urine being shot at me.

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