Chapter 2 Tobias

I couldn't avoid the stares. If I'd drawn attention and parted crowds before, now I felt like a recovered plague victim who might still be contagious.

I'd nearly died in that alleyway—shredded with lead pellets from a crazy high-tech vampire cannon—trying to protect my friends. And though I'd been completely healed of all injuries, I could still feel the individual holes each pellet created when they blasted into my skin.

Or at least the ghost of them.

With my heightened dragon senses, I had felt every single one.

"Tobias?" Caesar snapped me from my thoughts, and I looked up to see every eye in Shifter History was on me.

Again. I hated it. I hated that everyone was staring at me like I'd miraculously risen from the dead. Sure, I had just woken up in the hospital wing this morning and been allowed back to my regular routine now that I was completely healed, but it wasn't like being healed by a harpy was so strange in the shifter world.

Get over it, people.

I stared back at Caesar, waiting for him to say whatever it was that made him call me out.

"Do you know the answer?" Caesar prompted.

"Hmm?" Answer? Had I been asked a question?

Caesar smiled. He was gracious enough not to reprimand me for not paying attention, or bring up the fact that I had never been caught unprepared to answer a question in all my time at the Dome.

I shifted in my seat. "C—could you repeat the question?" I asked, trying to hide my injured pride.

"February. 1899. What major event happened in the continental United States?"

I looked down at my desk as if the answer was written there, but my tablet wasn't even open.

"Let's look it up," Caesar said to the rest of the class, moving his focus away from me.

Returning to my usual student behavior, I opened my tablet and pulled up a search tab in the digital Shifter History textbook.

"Yes, Siobhan," Caesar called on a student who'd raised her hand.

"There were record-breaking cold temperatures," she said. "Every state in the nation reached temperatures as low as zero degrees Fahrenheit."

"Thank you, Siobhan," Caesar said, walking around the classroom as he spoke. "And what was the event called? Randall?"

"The Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899," Randall said, reading his laptop screen .

"Thank you, Randall. What else do we know about The Great Arctic Outbreak?"

I raised my hand, determined to regain my status as a student who cared not only about my studies and grades but also about learning shifter history.

"Yes, Tobias," Caesar said, stopping in the aisle of desks two rows over.

But the director's expression was slightly different from how he'd looked at all the other students. It was a minuscule flick of his muscles, but I caught it even from where I sat and was thrown right back into that alley, lying bleeding and dying as Caesar stood over me with an intensified version of that same look.

The look that said he didn't know if I would make it. The look that filled my chest with dread because it advertised the seriousness of the attack.

The look I'd also seen on Arya that night.

Once again, the memory of that kiss as I lay half-conscious flooded my thoughts. I couldn't stop thinking about it. It was all I could think about during my brief windows of consciousness over the past few days. Even when the lead in my system threw me into delirium, it replayed in my mind.

Part of me wondered if I'd dreamed the kiss, if it had actually happened, or if it was just something my brain had conjured up as I lay dying. But it had to be real. The clarity of that moment was real. And the way Arya looked at me when she didn't know I was watching proved that it happened.

I should talk to her about it. I'd told myself a hundred times to talk to her about it. When she visited me in the hospital wing, I pretended to be sleeping to avoid that conversation, but I needed to bring it up. I couldn't keep avoiding it .

But with the school on lockdown and the fact that I should've been able to protect Arya from the vampires—and failed—I couldn't bring myself to do it. I couldn't have a conversation that might demand answers, not when I couldn't even own up to a single one myself.

"Tobias?" Caesar asked, snapping me to attention again. This time, Caesar's tone held a note of worry. "Did your screen freeze?" he asked, offering me an easy out.

I didn't answer the last comment, letting my classmates believe my tablet was to blame and not my daydreaming about kissing a certain girl.

"In some states, that winter still holds the record for lowest temperature, even after over a hundred years."

Caesar held his chin with one hand. "Anything else?" he asked, then turned to the rest of the class, inviting anyone to answer.

I continued to skim but couldn't find anything out of the ordinary about the very cold weather. But then my analytic brain finally kicked in.

"This is Shifter History ," I said, turning the entire class's attention back to me—this time in a way I didn't mind. "Was it caused by a shifter?"

Caesar smiled in the way he always did whenever he realized one of his students—usually me—was doing some critical thinking and not reciting from the text. He held his hands up as if to illustrate.

"Why would we be discussing the weather of 1899 in Shifter History unless it had something to do with..." he paused for effect, " Shifter History ?"

The entire class recited the last part with him in clumsy unison .

"Exactly!"

Caesar walked back to the front of the room and projected some black-and-white images that were probably taken that winter. Next to them, an image of the United States was projected in blue.

"Meteorologists say it began in Canada," Caesar said, pointing above the map. "And it swept from the northwest here in Oregon and Washington and spread across the rest of the country." He looked back at the class. "But it was not a natural event. What type of shifter could cause such drastic weather change?"

I racked my brain, forcing myself to focus on the task at hand and not on the way Arya's hair fell around me in a dark curtain the moment before I pulled her down toward me in a kiss. But the only shifters I could think of who had any control over temperature were the ones who could manipulate fire—dragons like me and phoenixes. Ashlyn's firebird, racing after the vampires and screeching as she flew to rescue Arya, invaded my thoughts.

"Alicorn?" A small mao in the back ventured. I couldn't remember her name and was no longer invested in the history lesson, so I stared at my screen and hoped I wouldn't be called on again.

After class, I was the first one out of the room. I needed to find Arya. I needed to see her, speak with her. Without being too obvious, I scanned every hallway I walked into, hoping to catch sight of her and stage a run-in so I'd have an excuse to talk to her.

But I couldn't find her in any of the usual places. I begrudgingly attended the rest of my classes—giving them as much attention as I'd given Shifter History—and finally caught the rumors from some passing mers that Arya was busy with new training. Since finding out she was a chimera, she had a lot to learn about her new abilities and was kept busy with lessons to harness them .

Even as a dragon prince, the fact that she had more than one shifter nature was intimidating. How could I possibly measure up? But I shook it off.

I finally found her with Ashlyn and Niko in the dining hall having dinner. Her beautiful face lit up when she saw me. Seeing her was a balm to my frayed soul, relief spilling through me and alleviating the withdrawal symptoms of this damned imprint with which I was developing a toxic love-hate relationship.

She got up out of her chair as I approached, and when she happily put her arms around my shoulders in a blissfully tight hug, I savored every sensation of her presence. The smell of her hair as it brushed against my cheek. The warmth of her lithe body in my arms. The way her breasts pressed against my chest. Fuck!

"He's back," Niko called happily, patting my shoulder as I took a seat.

"How are you doing?" Ashlyn asked, then grimaced. "Oh, that was a stupid question."

I chuckled and shook my head. "No, it's fine. I'm doing pretty good." And as I glanced at Arya, I actually meant it.

After everyone finished eating, I pulled her away and offered to walk her back to the common room.

But words left me. I'd mulled over what I wanted to say throughout the day, but the weight of everything that had transpired between us since the night of the attack made it so I couldn't even form a sentence.

So we walked in awkward silence. I kept hoping she would break the ice. But since I'd been the one to seek her out, she probably assumed—as she should—that I wanted to talk to her about something specific.

And now I wasn't even speaking at all .

I silently growled at the floor in front of me, like it was the smooth polished blackness beneath my feet that left me so tongue-tied.

"I'm glad you're feeling better," she finally said when we reached the avian common room.

I couldn't tell if I heard a hint of annoyance in her voice or if it was in my imagination.

We walked into an unusually empty common room.

"Wanna watch a movie?" I asked. Finally my fucking mouth was working.

Almost like she'd planned for it, she yawned. "I'm actually very tired. All of my new training—"

"Of course," I cut her off and turned to walk her back out.

"Actually, I have a room here now," she said. "Since I'm part harpy, Caesar said it was okay. And since the mers kicked me out anyway..."

I stared at her. When she'd been in another wing of the Dome, things had been different. I could avoid her if I wanted. I could compartmentalize my life. But with her room this close?

I didn't know how I felt about things. Anything. More specifically, how I felt about that kiss.

"So… I'm going to go to bed," she said, breaking our stare and turning to walk down the hallway.

"Arya," I said, reaching out and grabbing her arm.

She hissed, recoiling from the accidental burn of my touch.

"Sorry," I muttered as I anxiously withdrew my steaming hand, embarrassed that my powers were a bit out of whack. Most likely from my recent trauma. Why it had to happen while Arya was near was infuriating .

She looked at me expectantly.

"Look," I said, my eyes finding the floor again. "About the night of the attack..."

From my peripheral, I saw that she stared at the ground, too. I snuck a glance at her and noticed a pink tint to her cheeks. I didn't know what I was trying to say or what would come out of my mouth next, so I just unleashed the words like a floodgate.

"I know that we went on that date as just friends, and then the vampires attacked, and they took you—" My voice caught. I cleared my throat and looked above her head, still not meeting her eyes. "And I should've been able to save you. I should've broken away and gone after you—"

"Stop," Arya said, silencing me with a flat hand raised. "It wasn't your fault, Tobias. There wasn't anything you could've done. And you were the one..." Now, she was the one trailing off.

"I just..." I stepped forward and reached up with my hand as if to brush the hair away from her face. But I dropped it without touching her.

Her hand twitched toward mine ever so slightly, like she wanted to grab it, but maybe she didn't want to get burned again and swung it back by her side.

"Goodnight, Tobias," she said, her eyes finally meeting mine.

I frowned but turned the gesture into a forced smile. "Goodnight, Arya."

And she walked off to her room, leaving me standing there like an idiot, trapped in an emotional prison of my own making.