CHAPTER 4

KATHERINE. I didn’t know what I had been expecting when they had said dining hall but it definitely wasn’t a buffet. I glanced around while holding my plate which I had yet to put food on and looking at the sea of faces, I was glad I met Lenore, Josie and Priyanka. It was good to have a buffer of familiarity. “Aren’t you hungry?” Lenore asked and I returned my attention to her. There was a small serving of pasta and roasted chicken on her plate. “Can I pile food on my plate?” I replied, wondering if there was some sort of unspoken rule about it since I couldn’t see anyone doing that. “Yeah.” I glanced at the table again and bit my bottom lip before proceeding to pile my plate with chicken, roast potatoes, and asparagus. I also grabbed a serving of meringue-covered pie and a bottle of water before the four of us made our way over to an empty table. After taking my seat, we began to talk about the courses we were studying while I tried hard to balance wanting to eat everything at once and trying to maintain some level of expected decorum. I forced myself to go slow. As the conversation switched to the club fair that was taking place this week, I overheard the girls at the table next to us talking about a guy named Blake and it took me a couple of seconds to figure out it was the ‘Blake’ Josie had mentioned. They sounded like they really adored him and I couldn’t help but wonder if he and the other two were in the dining hall right now. I lifted my gaze to look around the hall despite never having seen the trio before, but instead of seeing the boys with post-it notes that had their names on their foreheads, I saw Poppy Dawson instead. Her platinum blonde hair swayed from side to side as she shook her head while laughing at something someone at her table said and I immediately dropped my gaze to my plate. I then subtly brushed my hair to the side to cover my face so she wouldn’t see me if she decided to look in this direction. ‘Wait, why the fuck am I hiding? I didn’t do anything wrong.’ I frowned at my reaction before sitting upright once more and joining the club fair conversation my friends were having. Minutes later, it was decided that one of the clubs I’d be joining along with Priyanka was the scavenger hunt club while Lenore and Josie would be joining the swim club. We finished our dinner uneventfully and dropped our plates at the assigned space before making our way out of the dining hall. Lenore and I ended up splitting from Josie and Priyanka to go get my textbooks from the general library while they went back to Stavenger Hall without us. “Do you have your ID with you?” Lenore asked as we headed into the magnificent building that was the library and I absent-mindedly nodded as I took in the building’s interior. The library was as immaculate as the outer grounds. The tiled floor beneath my feet depicted the school insignia in silver and purple, a BU on top of two wolves stretching out their spine. Mahogany shelves lined the walls, interspaced by stained glass, and from where I stood, I could see the next two floors. Then above me on the ceiling was a mural of werewolves in all states, from human to wolf forms to stages in between, and they all managed to look beautiful and graceful. “Whoa,” I breathed and Lenore smiled at my expression before glancing at the huge help desk off to the side. No one was behind it though and she glanced around the fairly empty library. “How about you take a look around while I find a librarian?” I nodded before she walked away and I proceeded to spend the next couple of minutes wandering through the library. The second floor had more people than the first did but they were all engrossed in studying at their cubicles so I quickly made my way through there and to the History section of the library. The sweet smell of old books hit me as I walked into it and after glancing through shelves that were filled with the old but well-cared-for books, a stone table in the corner of the room caught my attention. On it were some old documents, papers and an open bottle of ink placed in a circular groove in it and I crouched down to get a closer look at the words that had been carved into the side of the table. “A WEREWOLF’S LIFE IS MEASURED IN FULL MOONS,” were the words and a sad smile crept onto my face because my dad used to say that. He had been a history major and he and my mom had actually met each other at Blackwood University. When I was young, he used to tell me about werewolf history – especially our family’s history – and folklore. I loved listening to folklore more than history and made him tell them to me as bedtime stories but my mom ended up putting an end to that because some of them gave me nightmares. I smiled at the memory before tears gathered in my eyes as I remembered that I wouldn’t be seeing them for a very long time. They had died in a car accident, or so the pack’s council says. A drunken truck driver traveling on the wrong side of the highway plowed into their car as they drove home and their bodies hadn’t been able to heal fast enough. I blinked the tears away and rose to my full height once more but in the process, I ended up knocking the bottle of ink onto the documents. I gasped. “Oh my God… Oh my God.” I watched the black ink spread across the pages without knowing what to do and as panic began to set in, I began to use my hands to wipe the ink off the pages. It only dawned on me that I was doing something stupid and not saving the documents moments later moments later and as I racked my brain for what to do next, a young man walked out of the aisle between the two bookshelves on my left. I paused. He was easily the most gorgeous guy I’d ever seen. He was tall and olive-complexioned with sooty brows, dangerously lush lips, and a strong jawline while his dark curtain of hair framed his face. His features were ‘so’ perfect that they looked carved and everything about him was jaw-dropping… literally. He stared ahead for a moment before his deep ocean-blue eyes landed on me and I snapped my mouth shut as I stared at them. Dazzling eyes… Gorgeous eyes. He drew his brows together slightly, confused by my presence, and when his gaze dropped to the table, the way his expression morphed into a frown was like watching water hit a scalding hot pavement. “What the fuck?” He did ‘not’ sound happy. He marched towards me and yanked my hand away from a document just as my brain finished rebooting. ‘Oh my God… Are these his?’ His grip on my hand tightened as he stared at the documents, answering my question, and a fresh swell of panic rose in me. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to,” I said in a rush before his head jerked up and my heart slammed against my chest when I saw that his eyes were no longer blue. They were red. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”