Page 2 of The First Year

“What are the symptoms of a shifter being bitten by a vamp in the middle of a fight?”

The woman wearing scrubs unraveling at the corners of the pockets planted her fists on her ample hips. “Are you feeling the need to bite my neck? Are you hungry for blood?”

“No. I’m hungry for a damned cheeseburger.” I was tired of her shit and stupid questions. I tried to sit up, but a wave of powerful dizziness put a stop to my movement. “Oh. My head.”

The nurse or healer, whatever she was, put the back of her hand on my forehead and stabilized me, grabbing my arm. “You are warm.”

“I just shifted back. It’s almost summer. That doesn’t mean anything.”

She shook her head. “It does. What’s your name?”

“Roxy,” I answered.

“Roxy, you’ve been bitten by a vampire. We don’t know what happens next. We have little research on shifters who have been infected. You’re young. They’ll send you to Summer Ridge, and you’ll be fine.”

Summer Ridge. No fucking way. “The school where the pack rejects go? I’m fine. I can just go back to Urban Academy. I’m fine.” I’d been a student there before being sent to do battle for the summer or maybe forever. Nobody had actually given me an end date.

Maybe if I said it enough times, it would make it true but something had changed.

“Urban Academy? You were a student there?”

Apparently when I was offered up for recruitment, my aunt hadn’t bothered to share that bit of information. “I am.”

An alpha came over, wearing a stern expression. When he opened his mouth, my life would be turned upside down. My stomach sank. “What’s your name?” He had a clipboard. It was never good when they had a clipboard.

“Roxy. Roxy Swifthunt.”

“Roxy, you’ve been bitten. The council’s orders are clear. All bitten persons between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five are to be transported directly to Summer Ridge.”

I scoffed. “Summer Ridge, my ass. Don’t you mean Marked Blood? It’s the Marked Blood Academy. No use in happying that shit up.”

“Call it what you will, female. You’ll be put on the next bus immediately.”

If I ever found the vamp who bit me, if he wasn’t ash, I would kill him myself. Maybe I already had. In the heat of battle, I didn’t always know.

Chapter Two

Roxy

If I was the type of girl who had a lot of friends, I would be pissed that I didn’t get to say goodbye. As it was, no one from Urban Academy would miss me. Maybe the librarian. She was nice.

She probably would think I’d died in the war, if the school even knew where I had gone.

A part of me did.

“Only a few more minutes,” the rent-a-cop said from the safety of the front seat. Once they knew I wasn’t going to turn into a vampire or whatever they thought might happen, the council put me into a car with a metal grate separating the driver from the back-seat passenger. Even that didn’t stop the fox-shifter driver from looking terrified and green at the gills. I was an anomaly to them. They didn’t know what I might become and, worse, how they would contain me once I evolved. If I evolved.

Other than the bit of fever and achy bones, I felt fine.

Both of those symptoms could be attributed to anything. But the scar on my neck told them all they wanted to know. Vampires are not neat nibblers like in the movies; they were more likely to shred flesh, and I was lucky it was not much worse. Most who were bitten did not survive, dying from both the blood lost to their thirst and what spilled out onto the ground.

“Oh, goody,” I groaned. “So excited for my first day. Are you going to take a picture of me by the gates?”

His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, but he looked away quickly. “Do I have to? Did I miss those instructions?”

Goddess. “It was a joke.”

“Oh.” He laughed a little bit too long—too loud. His nerves were showing. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t know what I might turn into either. “Here we are. Summer Ridge.”

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