I meant man in the strictest sense.
Sally was a banshee. Sam was a shifter, and sixty percent of the other students at St. Vincent’s hailed from one type of supernatural lineage or another. I was one hundred percent, Grade-A, USDA approved, all human baby.
I’m Cameron Dupree.
Chapter 2
I counted to thirty before I left the classroom. The last thing I wanted to do was put myself in a position to poke the bear. A quick check of the hallway showed it full of students moving to their next class. The retreating mass of Sam could be seen at the end of the hall with his arm around Sally. I breathed a sigh of relief and leaned against the wall next to the door. I had nowhere to be for the next hour.
“Cam!” a familiar voice yelled my name. I opened my eyes to see my best friend coming to my rescue a few minutes too late. “I heard you put the moves on Sally with Sam sitting right there,” he stated as he came to hover over me.
“Aw hell,” I cursed as the grapevine already twisted and distorted what really happened. That wasn’t going to put the big man in a better mood.
Speaking of big men, my best friend since freshman year was Jerome Whitepaw. At 6’3”, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, he was taller than my own 5’10” one-eighty-five; and, if you could believe it, he was the runt of the litter.
Literally . . . Jerome was a shifter, just like Sam, but at the same time different. He was what was conventionally known as a werewolf, lycan, chupacabra, and a few other names depending on the culture. To make matters more interesting, Jerome was the youngest son of the reigning alpha of the Whitepaw pack, which dominated most of the Great Lakes region. Being a friend of the clan gave me more cover than any other human at St. Vincent’s when it came to human-wolf relations. Jerome might be the runt, but his papa was the man in charge. Since things in a wolf pack tended to be solved under the might-makes-right principle; other bigger wolves tended to not fuck with me because Jerome said so.
It was mildly irritating to owe my survival to someone else, but Jerome was cool, if a bit odd; which was just fine with me. He practically vibrated with energy as he hustled up to me in his camouflage pants and Peace, Love, and Donuts t-shirt. He wore Walmart sandals under those old-school, knee-high, white gym socks – a fashion faux pa if there ever was one – and his sticker-covered backpack promoted everything from universal peace and harmony to support for 4:20. He was handsome in the preternatural way all supernatural creatures tended to be, with bronze skin, and long raven-black hair tied in a braid that fell below his shoulders. Perfectly white teeth grinned down at me as his eyes darted down the hall at Sam’s retreating back.
As a matter of principle, bears and wolves didn’t like each other; and that deep cultural dislike extended to fun-loving Jerome as well. There had been plenty of lives lost on both sides of a feud going back to before Columbus landed in the Caribbean. With lives measured in centuries, shifter grudges tended to last.
“I didn’t hit on Sally,” I began to defend myself, but was interrupted as a door smashed open and a cold wind blew down the hall.
The wind dislodged notices from the cork boards hanging next to all the classrooms; throwing homework assignments and request for study groups up toward the arched stone ceiling. Notes and notebooks went flying, and more than one skirt was tossed up to reveal everything from boy shorts to bare ass.
“Fuckin’ perv!” one of the bare-ass girls growled at the guy who walked through the doors.
It was a pervy mood, but I knew the guy who did it, and he was by no means the type to peek up women’s skirts. In fact, he rarely took his eyes off the tablet in his hands. He was one of my other close friends: Bradley Cunningham. While I might enjoy the view of a nice toned ass, Brad was all about dick; sucking, blowing, and ramming it in other dudes’ asses. So, the perv factor was an absolute zero, but that didn’t stop another blast of air from smacking him hard in the face.
It knocked off his glasses, and almost ripped the all-mighty tablet from his grip. “What the hell?” he yelled, and glared at the hallway.
You know how some gay guys have a certain accent, inflection, or effeminate way of speaking. Brad had that in spades, and he only emphasized it by putting his free hand on his cocked hip as he glared at his target.
“Sorry, Brad, I didn’t know it was you,” the girl who gave the air-powered slap blushed.
“That’s ok, honey,” Brad’s gaze softened, as did the bite in his honey-tongued southern accent.
Just like that the confrontation was over. If I had blown up women’s skirts there would have been an angry mob forming to castrate me on the spot, but Brad got away with it. They even apologized! “Gay guys get away with everything,” I griped.
Of course, I couldn’t blow up women’s skirts in the first place because I wasn’t an elemental mage. The magical discipline was exactly like it sounded. Human’s lucky enough to have a link to the natural world could manipulate the elements to their will. Usually, as was Brad’s case, they had skills in a single element. On some rare occasions, a person could control two, but anything above that was
