A week later, she’s eating out of my gloved hands and letting me stroke her.
I can finally get to the other bits of taking care of her—brushing her tangled mane of slimy seaweed, cleaning the scales on her tail, and scraping the barnacles that try to cling to her front hooves.
She likes me now. She nibbles affectionately at my clothes and noses into my pockets for treats. I bring Cleaver in one day when our professor is occupied with another monster problem, and they play together.
Cleaver leaps into the lake and swims around, and Aurora swims protective circles around him. When I put food on the shore they eat together. I even bring a swimsuit and get into the cool water. Aurora lets me ride on her back, shooting through the water at dizzying speeds. It feels like I’m riding a living jet-ski.
She noses at my cuts and bruises from the fresh torture that is PW. Piers, Owen, and Bennett have picked up where they left off, but with a vengeance. Every day I’m pushed, shoved, sometimes locked in classrooms. I’ve gotten really good at hiding injuries and shoving my way out of doors that have heavy objects pushed in front of them.
But the worst comes in late January.
I’ve done my best to avoid them outside of PW, but they aren’t the only ones acting weird. Sawyer has been both possessive and reclusive. It’s been hard to get him to hang out the way we once did, and when he does come out of his room to spend time with Erin and I, he’s always sitting too close to me and asking weird questions about Piers and the other boys.
It’s gotten to the point that I’ve started avoiding him, too.
One morning, I slip on my gloves and wrinkle my nose. There’s a weird, funky smell coming off them. If Erin, Sawyer, and I weren’t already late to class thanks to another one of Sawyers weird interrogation sessions over lunch, I’d stop and go look for another pair. It started out alright. For a minute, when Sawyer sat down to join us for the first time in weeks, I thought everything was finally back to normal.
But then he started asking about Piers again, and it got weird fast. He was asking about all the time we spent in the library, and from the way he kept going on about the privacy curtains in those study rooms, I’m pretty sure he thinks we were screwing behind his back the whole time.
Jealousy is not a good look on him. Little does he know, if he’s just acted normal when he got back, we might still be able to … erm … be together. Just not together. It’s complicated, but I do have feelings for Sawyer. I just haven’t had much time to explore them what with school, the torturing starting back up again, and his sudden weirdness.
“I should wash these,” I mutter, stepping into Aurora’s chamber in the Menagerie. She’s splashing excitedly near the shore when I enter.
“Hey, girl!” I say happily, and she whinnies back. “It’s scale-cleaning time again.” I gather the usual supplies for cleaning Aurora’s tail. As I approach, though, something’s wrong. She’s flaring her nostrils and jerking her head back. I set the bucket down. “Aurora? What’s up?”
She whinnies, shaking her head. Water droplets fly from her mane. I reach for her, hoping to pet her and calm her down.
“It’s me,” I say, still trying to be soothing.
She rears back from my hand—and clamps down on it. Pain sears through my palm as her fangs break through the material of my gloves and into my flesh. She jerks her head back again, tearing the glove off my hand and taking some of my skin with it.
I scream in pain and stumble back onto the grass. My hand throbs. Blood is running down my palm in rivulets. I throw off my other glove and lay on my side, clutching my hand to my stomach. Tears leak from my eyes. The pain is inte
nse; worse than anything I’ve felt before.
I feel a nudge on my back. Aurora is looking at me with concern. Behind her are the shreds of my glove.
Even from here, they still reek. I knew I should have cleaned them first.
“It was the smell, wasn’t it?” I ask her.
She leans down and begins gently licking at my hand. I peer over my shoulder at her. She’s dragged her fishlike tail out of the water to groom me. For the first time, maybe ever, she’s completely on the shore. I roll over on my back. She keeps licking my hand.
Kelpie’s aren’t exactly venomous, but they have wicked bacteria in their mouths. I know if I don’t treat this cut—and soon—it’ll likely become infected. If anyone finds out it was her, she’ll be put down for sure. We’re monster hunters, after all, and we don’t abide vicious monsters where we live.
I stare at Aurora’s sad eyes as she apologetically licks my hand, and I know I can’t let that happen to her. This was an accident. It wasn’t her fault.
As much as I want to hide the injury, I do have to tell someone. I can’t bandage it on my own.
I slip out of class early, before anyone can spot me, and take the long way back to the dorms so I don’t run into anyone who might try to look at me too closely. I barely make it to the dorm before I hear the rush of footsteps in the hall, signaling the last of classes just got out.
I’m light-headed and woozy. It must have taken me longer to get here than I thought, and there’s a lot more blood in the towel than I expected when I unwrap my hand to give it a good look.
At that exact moment, Erin bursts into the room with a huge grin on her face. She’s just started to say something about how her giant bat just preened her for the first time when she cuts herself off with a shriek.
“Avery, your hand!” Erin gasps, and lurches towards me.
“Not so loud,” I say, my head still throbbing. “Where’s the first-aid kit?”