Of Wolf and Peace (Providence Paranormal College Book 3) Read online

  Of Wolf and Peace

  Providence Paranormal College Book Three

  D.R. Perry

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2016 D.R. Perry

  Cover by Fantasy Book Design

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

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  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  Version 2.0 May, 2021

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-64971-699-6

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64971-700-9

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Academy Isn’t

  The Academy Isn’t

  Connect with the Author

  Other LMBPN Publishing Books

  Chapter One

  Josh

  “Get up, Josh.” The voice was loud, intense, and familiar. But I couldn’t place it, not even after opening my eyes. The room was pitch black.

  “Fine.” I sat up as fast as I could, swinging and hoping my fist would make contact with whoever wanted to drag me out of bed at zero dark thirty in the morning. No luck.

  “Out the window.” Some invisible force pushed the middle of my back, propelling me out of bed. Magic? At least I wore pajamas a week into February. I still couldn’t place the voice. Male, for sure.

  “Light.” If I saw who it was, maybe I could put up a fight.

  “No. Get out of here right now.” The voice had lowered to a near whisper, but all the intensity was still there. Someone I knew from school?

  “Clothes.” The hair on the back of my neck stood up. The rest of the house should have been dead silent at this hour. Instead, a whole slew of people stomped around the living room, the kitchen, the parlor. It was worse than the night our parents went to Block Island and Derek threw a party. This didn’t sound like a bunch of 18-year-olds trying to get their illegal drink on, though.

  “No time.” The voice was on the other side of the room now, in the shadows near the closet.

  “I’ll go if you fess up to this later, man.” I reached under the bed and grabbed the strap of my bug-out bag. After that, I stepped into my boots, not bothering to lace them.

  “Fine. The window.” I heard soft footfalls in the corner, then tumblers in a lock and a door opening. But my closet didn’t have a lock. Heavy footsteps on the stairs killed the urge to investigate.

  My room had a wannabe balcony, but I didn’t use that. I’d need more than just stucco to get three stories down. I went to the smaller window, jerking on the shade to get it to snap up. It fell on my head instead. I pressed my lips closed, not daring to shout the string of epithets that had only gotten more colorful since I’d started at PPC.

  Once I’d flipped the latch on the window, I wriggled out. The trellis had held my weight the last time I’d tried this, but I’d been fifteen and at least twenty pounds lighter back then. The top held up, but once I got to the second floor, it gave out. I thought of Tony Gitano the cat shifter as I fell to the ground, not remotely on my feet but relatively unharmed. I’d landed in the roses, all bare branches and thorns—the opposite of a comfortable landing. The cuts and scratches on my arms and face would heal in a few minutes. It was good to be a shifter.

  I looked up. No one was at the window. The light went on upstairs in my room, along with shouts of surprise and barked orders to find me. I took off across the back lawn as fast as I could on two legs, and that was pretty damn fast. I’d won all the shifter-designated sprints they had in Track and Field back in High School.

  The wall at the back of our property was too tall to hop without shifting. The last thing I wanted to do was turn into a wolf in the middle of Providence. It’d make me easier to track, I’d lose all my stuff, and I’d have no idea when I’d be able to come back here. I hoped my parents were just doing a drill or something, but this could also be mutiny. They’d made a few unpopular decisions, and I hadn’t helped their image lately. I turned right to beat feet toward the old garden gate. It was covered with ivy and I’d have to crawl through, but I should make it. I’d gained only twenty pounds since I was fifteen, not fifty.

  The tiny gate still didn’t have a lock, but the latch was on the inside of the wall. No one outside could reach it. My sister Beth always called it the Alice gate because it reminded her of something out of one of Lewis Carrol’s books. I looked back at the house. Her room was lit up like a Christmas Tree. They’d gotten her, then. No way she could have put on her prosthetic in time to bug out unless whoever had warned me went to her first. Derek’s windows were dark. He’d been missing since 2008.

  I wriggled through the Alice gate, dragging the bag behind me. Once through, it clanged shut like a mouth full of metal teeth. No going back now. I looked at the sky, to find not even a trace of dawn. Time to visit Henry Baxter, then. He was my Beta though an unconventional one. Henry was a vampire, and wolf shifters’d had nothing to do with them since the early 1990s. I’d thought it was time to change that. My parents couldn’t outright say they agreed even though I knew they did. I went down the street as fast as I could without attracting attention, doubling back so I didn’t walk past the house.

  My family estate was on the Upper East Side of Providence, a swanky neighborhood. Henry lived in a basement apartment most of the way down College Hill on the Lower East Side. It had just been renovated after a freaky Seelie hunting hound called a Spite tore a hole in the wall trying to get at him. We’d had trouble with a mind-controlled Summoner over Winter Break. Yeah, Extrahuman society was a bitch, but we dealt with it, my family especially. Mom and Dad did police work, and I’d be expected to follow in their footsteps.

  I walked down Rochambeau Street, the most direct and often used way to get down to the Lower East Side. The more well-traveled my route, the better. It’d be easier to hide my trail. As I turned down the cross-street that would take me to Henry’s place, a stream of intricately gorgeous music flowed from the first-floor window of a familiar triple-decker house. I turned around to see the light on, warmly incandescent and inviting. Usually, I didn’t like violins, too squeaky, but whoever was playing managed to eliminate that particular sound from the mix.

  I stepped forward, feeling a strong need to go and listen more closely. I didn’t stop to think about why anyone in their right mind would give a masterwork solo violin performance on Rochambeau Street at who knows when in the morning. It smacked of compulsion, something you do in a dream or see in a horror movie, the kind where you yell at the screen about how dumb the guy walking toward the mo
nster is, then roll your eyes and sit back to wait for him to die gruesomely. Yup, I was doing the future dead guy shuffle.

  “Josh? What are you doing out at this hour?” I hadn’t known my eyes were sore until I saw Nox Phillips. The sight of her snapped me right out of whatever weird trance the music had put me in. “Are those pajamas?” She blinked, almost as though she’d been enthralled by the music, too. I thought of something else that got people killed in horror movies.

  “Um, yeah.” I took a deep breath, trying to keep from blushing. The Kelpie was just about the most gorgeous girl I’d ever laid eyes on, tall and lean with dark hair and deep blue eyes. Unfortunately, dating any type of Changeling or Faerie was absolutely forbidden, even the shifters. Packs couldn’t take sides in the conflict between the Unseelie Goblin King and the Seelie Sidhe Queen.

  The pit of my stomach sank as I realized Nox had majorly crossed the Queen and I’d been standing right there while she’d done it. Maybe the home invasion had more to do with me than I’d originally thought. At least I could ignore the fiddler now. “Had to bug out. Something nuts is going down at my house. Was on the way to find Henry.”

  “He’s out of town until tomorrow, remember? Went to Vermont with Maddie for the weekend.” Nox shook her head a little more vigorously than most people do when indicating the negative. Was she shaking off the music’s effects, too?

  “Crap on a crap cracker.” I ran my hand over the top of my head, hoping it’d stand up in a less bed-head kind of way. “I got nowhere to go, and I need to figure out what happened, why people are chasing me.”

  “Why not come back to campus, then?” She put one hand on my shoulder. “Wait for the rest of Tinfoil Hat to wake up and talk to them about it. Whoever’s looking for you wouldn’t think to check the Nocturnal Lounge.”

  “Good idea.” Tinfoil Hat was the temporary pack I’d made during the Summoner situation. It was a motley crew but still had mostly shifters as members. “Lead on.”

  I walked, trying not to brush against Nox when the sidewalk narrowed halfway to campus. It wouldn’t be right to give her the wrong idea. Then again, I wasn’t even sure whether she thought of me that way. Kelpies were Unseelie magical horse shifters, freshwater versions of the Seelie seal shifter Selkies. They could be inscrutable, especially while wearing the magical pelt that gives them their powers. Some of them had magic or psychic powers as well. I had no idea whether Nox did or not.

  “Hey, Nox. I just remembered you never said whether you had any magic or whatever before the Kelpie thing.”

  “No, I didn’t.” She pulled out her phone, tapping out a text message.

  “So? Dish.” I put my hands on my hips before realizing how ridiculous that looked while walking uphill in pajamas and combat boots.

  She just laughed. We turned up Angell Street, heading toward Thayer Street and the old trolley tunnel. The entrance to the Nocturnal Lounge was in there, with a secret knock to open the hidden door. They ran the place like they thought it was the Bat Cave or something. Maybe there were actual bats or bat shifters or even Batman, and I just didn’t know. I’d only been in there once, right after a Grim had wrecked it in more of that Summoner business. When the door opened, and we went up the stairs, I knew this time would be different from the last. I heard music and smelled pizza. My stomach growled almost as viciously as I could while shifted.

  Henry’s usual study and work spot in the mezzanine was empty, of course. Sometimes, Tony was up there, but not now. The vampire band Night Creatures practiced on the bottom floor, blasting out riffs behind Lane belting out Of Wolf and Man by Metallica. A mixed crowd of Unseelie Changelings, vampires, and nocturnal shifters stood or sat, listening. I finally saw a familiar face and headed down the stairs. Nox followed. She’d have to keep an eye on me because only the night people could be in here without an escort.

  I headed straight for the counter at the side of the room, grabbing the last slice of pizza before Fred Redford could. The Redcap Changeling frowned at my hand, then grinned when he saw who it belonged to. He didn’t bother trying to talk over the band, just picked up the Leaning Tower of Pizza he’d already taken off the tray to get out of the way of the Skeleton Crew. Ghostly hands that only Psychic Mediums and Death Magi could see removed the empty box. They’d replace it with another one in the not too distant future. Ghost employees unlived all over the PPC campus. According to the Psychic Mediums that was a good thing. It kept them busy until they could move on and was one of the reasons fewer hauntings happened on College Hill than most other areas of a city as old as Providence.

  Nox grabbed cups and a bottle of root beer, following Fred and me back to the mezzanine. I’d known Fred since preschool. Even though we never went to each other's house after school or anything, we ran in lots of the same circles. I wasn’t allowed to call him a friend but knew we would have been if my parents didn’t run the two most important packs in the city. Mom headed the Extrahuman Task Force for the city police and Dad ran PPC Campus Police. The only way they’d need to be more impartial was if they worked for the DA.

  We sat at Henry’s table. It was quieter there when the Night Creatures practiced. We could actually hear each other talk in that corner. I let Fred eat half of his pizza first, then explained how I’d been dragged out of bed and ended up here. He chewed thoughtfully for a few moments. I sat waiting for his reaction, sipping root beer and wishing it had a shot of Jägermeister in it. No one could bust me for drinking. The gap year I’d taken before starting at PPC meant I was twenty-one in my sophomore year.

  “Sounds like a mutiny. Better lie low and stay out of it.” Fred adjusted the red Paw Sox cap he always wore, then chomped down another slice of pizza with eerily perfect teeth. “Worst that can happen is your folks get busted down from Alpha and have to run as part of the regular pack for a while, right?”

  “Not exactly.” I sighed into my root beer. “Thing is, they could get kicked out altogether depending on whether whoever did this gives them a fair challenge.”

  “That’s nuts. It’s not like they killed someone, right?” Fred brushed his hands over the now empty plate. I wondered where he’d put it all. He was about the same size as most bear shifters, but without the metabolism drain of shifting, I couldn’t imagine how he used all those calories.

  “No. No killing since before they took over, during an assignment at the Boston Internment.” I put my hands flat on the table in front of me.

  “It sounds more like a raid than a mutiny” I heard a plastic crack from Nox’s direction, punctuating her statement. She held a brown paper bag over my cup and tilted it. “Shh. Don’t tell or everyone will want some.”

  As she repeated the process over Fred’s cup and then her own, I smelled rum. It wasn’t Jaeger, but it’d do. I tried not to smile too much, just topped us all off with more root beer. I sipped, my shoulders instantly relaxing. My mind cleared too, letting me think more about what she’d said. A raid? There sure had been enough people in the house for that.

  “Maybe you’re right, Nox. It was like a raid, like the ATF or the FBI came in. Except it wasn’t those agencies. I didn’t smell flash-bangs or guns.” I took another sip of the oddly satisfying drink.

  “Anyone in your parents’ pack have connections to those?” Fred gulped down half his spiked root beer.

  “No. Not that I know of.” I shrugged. “Everyone’s police of some kind, but no Federal anything. This is Rhode Island, after all.”

  “Yeah, local focus.” Nox chewed on her lower lip. “Not so easy to deal with some iffier elements if they think RICO’s watching.”

  “Huh. You sound like my dad.” Fred grimaced around another mouthful of pizza. He swallowed that before continuing. “And everyone knows he used to be connected a million ways from Sunday.”

  “Yeah. Gives my folks a nice headache because there’s nothing to balance that out on the other side of things if you catch my drift.” I knew better than to say the word Seelie out loud in the Nocturnal Lounge.


  “Hey, we can’t help it if we’re better at that kind of thing than they are, in this neck of the woods.” Fred held his hands out palms up, then frowned down at his empty plate. “They’re too hidebound for anything but high society, and around here Hertha Harcourt has that element locked down.”

  “Dragon shifters don’t let go of anything once they’ve got their hooks in. Tenacious.” Nox seemed to look everywhere but at me. Neither of us was about to tell Fred how the dragon lady’s son and heir was in my pack. “The whole Faerie population’s unbalanced lately. Unseelies deal with change way better than they do.”

  I had to keep quiet while I swallowed my anger. Blaine Harcourt was one of the smartest people I knew, but still vying for Omega in Tinfoil Hat. He’d figured out that some disruptive element was messing with PPC and maybe all the Extrahumans in Providence months ago. He’d also decided to try to make Nox his latest conquest. She was a big girl and could make her own decisions, but nothing said I had to be happy about it. Blaine was a playboy and would stay that way until his mother told him who to marry. Some guys might have been okay with that, knowing he’d move along once he was done with her. I wasn’t. Nox deserved better than to be treated like a toy. But I had no right to complain. It wasn’t like I could offer her anything myself. Forbidden relationships were forbidden.

  Fred glanced back and forth between us like he watched a tennis match, or maybe Forrest Gump playing ping pong. Probably the ping pong. I sighed, then kicked back all my rum and root beer. Nox didn’t look at me, but she gave me a refill. I drank that, too, straight. I saw her take a shot directly from the bottle out of the corner of my eye.