1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Thorsen hit the mat with so much force that I heard the air leaving his lungs. Before Sidnee could complete the exercise and cuff him, he rolled away and staggered to his feet.

I met her gaze and deliberately widened my eyes. She was pulling her punches too much; she could easily have subdued him. We were supposed to be hiding that we were supernat, but nobody had said anything about being incompetent.

Sidnee grimaced and gave me a fraction of a nod, but before she could rectify her error the instructor pulled her aside. His expression was patient as he explained once again that she was supposed to cuff the suspect when he was down.

I wondered whether Sidnee was simply toying with the other recruit as a way to get in as many throws as she could under the guise of ineptitude. Theodore Thorsen was an unmitigated asshole. Young, blond and muscular, he wasn’t bad looking – if you didn’t look too closely at his soul – but his ego was bigger than his admittedly impressive biceps.

Since Day One at the academy, Thorsen had seemed to have Sidnee and me in his sights. I wasn’t sure what his problem was, apart from the fact that we had the audacity to be women, but he didn’t seem to have the same issue with any of the other females on the course.

Early in the program Thorsen had made a massive effort to mix and mingle with everyone, but Sidnee and me had been the obvious exceptions; he’d treated us like pariahs. Whilst the others had received well-meaning advice, a helping hand and friendly smiles from him, Sidnee and I got hard glowers.

In the beginning he’d kept them off his face in front of the other recruits and the instructors, but as time passed it was like he’d given up on the mask of civility. We had stopped trying to play nice too, and by this point in our training the gloves were well and truly off on both sides.

Thorsen’s face was flushed with anger as his friends teased him for being thrown by a five-foot-two dot of a woman. He was the human equivalent of a Russian doll – totally full of himself – and being beaten like this was eating him alive. Thanks to his overwhelming ignorance of what we were, he had no idea that we had more up our sleeves than sinew and muscle.

When Sidnee looked my way again, I gave her a wide grin and a thumbs up. Knock him dead! She nodded then focused as the instructor called for the two of them to engage again.

They circled more cautiously this time – at least on Thorsen’s part. Previously he’d tried to blast right at her, thinking he could overpower her with his sheer size and his big-dick energy. Now he knew better and he didn’t like it one bit. Men like him wrapped their ignorance around themselves like a cocooning glove; if someone ever told him that he wasn’t God’s gift, he’d probably faint.

I watched closely. Had he learned his lesson? I doubted it. The irritating thing was that if he actually used his brains rather than his brawn, he could probably take Sid down because she was still second-guessing herself too much. Her uncertainty was clear in her eyes: she was battling imposter syndrome big time. If Thorsen was smart – which at times he did seem to be – he could use that hesitation against her.

I watched his jaw clench and his fist bunch. Fuck, he was actually going to go at her with a closed fist, which was totally against the rules. How the hot-headed fool was still on the course, I had no idea.

The tension in the room rocketed; clearly I wasn’t the only one who’d spotted the fist. I looked around to see if the instructor, Sergeant Blake, would intervene but he was talking to one of the other recruits and his back was turned to the bout he’d started. Real smart.

My floppy heart gave a beat. Even with Sidnee’s supernat strength and healing, if Thorsen hit her with a closed fist he’d send her flying and possibly knock her out for real: physics could be a real bitch. I wanted to yell out a warning her, but I didn’t want to break her concentration and make the whole situation ten times worse.

My fists clenched. Should I intercede? Whilst it was my turn to hesitate, Sidnee spotted the fist coming at her and jumped back at the last second so that Thorsen swung wide, and his hand whistled through the air instead. Sidnee’s eyes went black as rage swamped her.

Oh shit – she was on the verge of shifting and that was a major no-no! I looked around for a water source and yep, every single recruit had a water bottle with them. Of course they did. There was more than enough water to call to Sidnee’s mer instincts, instincts that were telling her to hulk-smash.

‘Take a deep breath,’ I yelled and her black gaze flicked to me. I pantomimed deep breathing and gave a sigh of relief as she copied me. Her eyes leeched from black to her usual warm brown. Thank fuck for that.

Naturally Thorsen took advantage of her calming exercises to try and hit her again, but now she was focused on him. There wasn’t a hint of her sunny nature on her face; she was on it. I relaxed and let a smile curve my lips as I watched the show.

Sidnee danced around Thorsen for a minute or two. He was obviously mortified that she was still on her feet – his face was as red as a Brit’s after a week abroad in Ibiza. His hair had flopped over his forehead, where it clung to the sweat beading there. Sexy. By contrast, Sidnee still looked fresh; with her long dark hair tied back in a low ponytail, she was as cool as a sea cucumber.

Her jaw set as she feinted towards him, acting as if she was going to sweep his leg out from under him and take him down. He hastily countered by throwing out an arm to knock her back, but she dodged and jogged back before he could strike her.

As she grinned at him, you could almost see the steam coming from his ears. Instead of pausing and thinking, he charged her again, straight and fast like a raging bull but without the huge swinging bollocks. Like last time, Sidnee grabbed his extended arm; using his momentum against him, she twisted her hips to send him tumbling to the mat. This time she flipped him onto his washboard abs and cuffed him in seconds. To my trained eye she’d used a little of her supernat strength, but only a smidge so that it looked like a standard takedown. Smart.

I clapped loudly and most of the other recruits joined in. Only Thorsen was silent as he all but ate the mat and frothed at his own incompetence.

Sergeant Blake came over, uncuffed him and helped him to his feet. Blake was tall and lithe, in his early forties, and he always radiated an air of calm competence. I liked him a lot; he knew the value of positive reinforcement, unlike another of the instructors, Wilson, who would rather be pissed on than give a word of praise.

‘Great work, Fletcher,’ Blake said to Sidnee. She preened a little under his approving gaze – she was such a teacher’s pet – but I couldn’t throw stones because I was the same. After years of being starved of positive reinforcement from my parents, praise from the teachers gave me nearly as much of a thrill as an orgasm. Yes, I had issues.

Blake spent a few minutes running through what Thorsen had done wrong, including highlighting the danger we’d get into if we bowed to our emotions in the field. Thorsen’s scowl deepened: nice guy, well-rounded, clearly open to criticism.

The sergeant ended the lecture with his personal motto, ‘Keep a level head,’ and we all groaned a little. We’d heard the phrase roughly sixty-billion times since we’d been at the academy. Apparently keeping your cool was important. Well, who knew? Obviously not Theodore Thorsen.

Blake’s other tried-and-trusted phrase was, ‘Trust your gut.’ Now that I already knew how to do.

Once class was over, Thorsen made a point of barging into my shoulder. He had the maturity of a tempestuous goat; he would headbutt you then act like you were the problem. He glared at me. ‘You and your little friend better watch yourself, you rodent bitch,’ he sneered under his breath.

That was a first; I’d been called all kinds of bunny-adjacent names but this was my first ‘rodent’. Maybe he did have two brain cells to rub together after all.

I flashed him a grin and batted my eyelashes. ‘Why don’t you say that louder? Are you afraid the little girl who handed you your arse might hear you?’

He couldn’t do anything to me, and he knew it. The academy would throw you out on your ear for lying, cheating, stealing or abusing another recruit. Thorsen had been pushing almost all those boundaries since we’d arrived nine weeks earlier though he hadn’t crossed the line – yet.

He’d flirted pretty hard with Margilene the first week. She’d reported him when he hadn't seemed inclined to listen to her polite instruction to ‘buzz off’, and he’d been warned about curtailing his unwanted advances. He didn’t need to add violence against another recruit to his already blemished record and I didn’t want to blemish mine, so I took the high road, ignored him and walked out.

We had fifteen minutes before we had to be back in the classroom and I wanted to text Connor. Thinking of my beau helped scrub the incident from my brain; Thorsen had to be in my physical presence sometimes, but he didn’t get any real estate in my mind.

Since we had a break, Sidnee and I hurried to the dorm room we shared with Margi. It was no coincidence that she was also a supernat, a witch. Margi was from the Deep South but she’d moved up from the lower forty-eight for a man. Once she was in Alaska the man had dumped her. What an asshat.

Other than Sidnee, Margi and me, there were only three other women in the academy and no female instructors. The other three women were all ped and slept in the next dorm over from us. The supernat men had also been segregated into one dorm on the other side of the break room. Separating the peds and supernats made it much easier for us to sneak out for our secret extra lessons that were focused on all things supernatural.

Each dorm was set up for four people but having only three of us in the small space was much nicer. The bathrooms were only designed for two – two sinks, two showers, two toilets – so someone always had to wait. Sometimes we only had fifteen minutes each to shower. Homesickness was already wracking me and I dreamed of a twenty-minute shower or maybe even a bath! Heaven.

I didn’t want to waste my break today in the bathroom; I needed contact with the outside world more than I needed to be clean. instead, I threw myself on my bed and reached into my footlocker for my phone.

There were three text messages waiting for me. Crap: what was wrong now?