Of Wings and Wolves (2 page)

Then he was gone.

Summer’s bones melted. She sat down on the bench outside the bathroom with her empty cup, a fistful of damp paper towels, and the strange sensation of hollowness. Life resumed as the administrative assistants went back to work and the instructors headed out to the quad with everyone else.

The interviews
. She had forgotten completely.

Summer shot to her feet, refilled the cup, and rushed off to find her brother.

“What do you mean, the
interviews have been called off? They haven’t even seen you yet!”

“Adamson Industries didn’t interview anyone,” Abram said, vibrating with tension as he paced through the foyer. His footsteps rang out sharply on the ceramic floor.

It had taken several minutes for Summer to track down Abram, but not because the quad was crammed. The crowd had been dispersing by the time she got back, and she ended up having to follow Abram’s scent trail to the library, which was no more crowded than it usually was around midterms. Everyone had left as soon as they heard that Mr. Adamson was gone.

Summer gaped at her brother, at the library, at the disappointed candidates continuing to disperse. “So the internship was canceled?”

“Someone said that they already picked a student outside of the interviewing process.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

He drank the water she had brought for him, crushed the cup, and spiked it in the trash. “Believe it.” Abram ripped open the top button of his suit. “So much for getting a new art department. And the scholarship.”

The unfairness of it all choked Summer. She clenched her fists and tried to control her anger. “How could someone
do
that? You’ve prepared for weeks! Doesn’t this Adamson guy even care about how many people he’s disappointing?”

Abram shouldered his bag. “When you’re that rich, I guess you don’t have to care about anyone but yourself.”

Summer had reserved three hours
of dedicated server time so that she could compile her midterm project, but she didn’t feel like sitting in a cold computer room anymore. It wasn’t just because of the beautiful day. Abram’s disappointment had left a hard, sick knot clenched in her gut, and all she wanted now was grass beneath her feet, the wind in her fur, and solitude.

She headed for the computer sciences building, but she barely noticed where she was going. She couldn’t get the god in Hanlon Hall out of her mind.

He had been wearing an awfully expensive suit. Could that have been Mr. Adamson? Did the accident offend him so badly that he decided to cancel the interviews entirely?

No, it couldn’t have been him. Her mental image of the reclusive CEO involved gray hair, jowls, and wrinkles. Not a man barely any older than Summer’s twenty years, who smelled like the element of fire trapped in a flawless body.

The interviews must have been canceled for some other reason.

Instead of going inside the computer room, she ducked under the trees and rounded the building. She made sure that nobody was watching before she jumped onto a chain-link fence and climbed behind the building.

The facilities department had protected the solar batteries behind a gate so that they were only accessible from the boiler room—or by one determined woman who was very good at climbing. The seclusion made it the perfect place for Summer to hide her clothes when she wasn’t using them.

She reached between the metal casings of the batteries, where she hid an empty backpack for storage. Keeping her ears perked for the sound of approaching footsteps, she unbuttoned the front of the dress and kicked off her sandals. She had been enjoying the warm day in a cotton one-piece that would tear easily in a rush, and as her fingers moved over the buttons, Summer found herself thinking about that god again.

It had been a pathetically long time since Summer went on a date—or even found herself attracted to someone, for that matter. But he didn’t look like the kind of man who dated. With that much heat and intensity, he could only consume, utterly and completely.

Why didn’t he smell human?

She shook her head to clear it of all those wild thoughts and continued to strip.

Summer had opened the dress all the way to the hem and started sliding it off of her shoulders when she heard the voices.

“Are you sure she went this way?”

“Positive.”

“But there isn’t anywhere to go over here…”

Her heart leaped into her throat at the sound of the two men talking. They were close.

She lifted her head and sniffed the air. She could learn a lot about people by their smells, and these guys reeked of hair gel, expensive fabric, and cologne. The sticky musk clung to her throat. Neither of them were the man she had splashed in Hanlon Hall.

And judging by the sound of their movements, they were only a few steps away from coming around the fence and seeing Summer crouched half-naked behind the solar batteries.

She had never gotten dressed so quickly in her life.

By the time the men passed the brick wall, Summer was casually leaning against the back of the building—
outside
the fence—with her dress buttoned the wrong way and her chest heaving.

She tried to look like their approach surprised her, and also like she hadn’t just launched herself over an eight foot fence with her super-strong thigh muscles. “Hello, there,” Summer said, flipping her thick hair over her shoulder in an extra-casual gesture. “I was just…leaning.”
Leaning? Brilliant, Gresham
.

The men exchanged looks. They both wore gray suits, like they should have been in an office talking about quarterly reports or yelling at vendors over the phone. One was red-haired; one was brunette. They were otherwise indistinguishable from each other. If you’ve seen one yes man in a two thousand dollar suit, you’ve seen them all, and Summer had already run into these two anyway. They had been with the hot guy outside the bathroom.

“What’s your name?” asked the brunette.

“Summer,” she said. “Summer Gresham.”

The first man leaned over to the second to whisper, “It’s definitely the one he wanted.” Summer probably wasn’t meant to hear it, and a normal person wouldn’t have. But she wasn’t exactly normal.

“Can I help you guys with something?” she asked.

The redhead stepped forward and shoved a manila envelope into her hands.

“You’re the new intern at Adamson Industries,” he said. “Congratulations.”

two

The instructions in the envelope
were simple: Arrive at a certain address on Saturday morning at eight o’clock. Dress professionally. Do not bring a cell phone.

Summer stared at the last instruction for a long time.

Mr. Adamson was just paranoid about corporate espionage…right? It wasn’t like he was some creepy eccentric that planned to kidnap her or anything. Rich guys didn’t need to kidnap girls when they could just buy them.

Or, if he looked like Mr. Adamson, he could just glance at a girl and have her devoted to him for the rest of her life.

Summer was stretched out on a blanket to enjoy the unseasonable warmth, and she rolled over onto her stomach so that her back could get sunlight, too. Her skin was naturally a light shade of brown, so she didn’t need the tan; she just liked to be outside with the sun, the breeze, and the squirrels in the trees.

Sir Lumpy agreed, and was happy to take up half of her blanket with his massive feline body. At Summer’s motion, he stood, stretched, and rubbed his nose on her chin. He was drooling again—now that he was eighteen years old, he was
always
drooling—and his affection left her skin feeling slimy.

Her kitty was the only animal that wasn’t terrified of her, so Summer let him drool on her all that he wanted. She suspected that he just didn’t realize he should be afraid of her, like all of the wild animals in the area. His frowning mouth, wrinkled nose, and buggy eyes supported her theory that there might be something off about her cat, and his habit of running face-first into closed doors and occasionally licking walls didn’t help. The only reason that he hadn’t been eaten by something while wandering around the forest was that no predatory animal dared come within ten kilometers of the Gresham cottage.

Abram had said that Sir Lumpy was dumb and ugly. Once. Summer had put him in a chokehold until he took it back. As far as she was concerned, Sir Lumpy was lord and master of the forest, her noble white knight, and the only friend Summer had that didn’t share blood with her.

She scratched her cat under the collar. “You wouldn’t let creepy Mr. Adamson abduct me, would you?”

He responded by walking in front of her face and tickling her nose with his tail. He must have been chasing sexy lady cats through the bushes again because his fur was filled with burrs. Summer picked out several before he strutted out of arm’s reach.

“You should give up,” she told him as he flopped onto his side again, spreading his black belly fluff across her blanket. “Those girls aren’t good enough for you anyway.”

Sir Lumpy responded by vigorously washing his arm with a black-spotted tongue.

Propped up on her elbows, Summer flipped through the internship packet one more time. The first page had the instructions. Pages two through six were a history of Adamson Industries and their investments into education. The last ten pages were a detailed questionnaire that demanded far too much information of Summer, including a family medical history.

“What kind of internship is this supposed to be, exactly?” she asked Sir Lumpy, who had found her pen and was chewing on the cap.

No way was she going to give Adamson Industries her mother’s identification serial number. Summer didn’t even
have
a mother.

“Did you say something?” Abram asked, ambling out of the house with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He had traded out the suit for a tank top and shorts.

Summer wrinkled her nose at him as he selected a nearby tree and dropped the bag beside it. “Have you ever seen Mr. Adamson? Do you know what he looks like?”

Abram lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “He’s a recluse. I was surprised to hear he planned to show up for the interviews that didn’t even fucking happen.”

A sense of guilt crept over her. She flipped the packet over to conceal the Adamson Industries stationary. “But he’s young, right? Late twenties?”

“I don’t think so. He’s been CEO at least forty years.”

So maybe the guy in Hanlon Hall wasn’t Mr. Adamson after all. But then why would Summer have been singled out for the position? It seemed like he had recognized her, even though she was certain that they had never met before. She couldn’t have forgotten a face like that.

Abram grabbed a sturdy branch and began performing chin-ups with his feet hooked into the straps of the duffel bag, which was weighed down with something heavy. Probably cinder blocks again.

“What—are—you—reading?” he asked, punctuating each word with another flex of his arms to lift his head over the branch. Sir Lumpy decided he was much too dignified to be in the presence of such grunting and strutted his way toward the cottage.

She slid the papers back into the unmarked envelope. “Nothing. Just some stuff for my algorithms class.”

He grunted in acknowledgment, and Summer watched him exercise for a couple of minutes before the sight of his exertion became too tiring. Sir Lumpy was right. It was hard to relax properly when someone else was working so hard.

Summer grabbed her sunglasses, blanket, and the envelope, and followed her cat to the front door.

The Greshams lived in an ivy-covered cottage fifteen kilometers north of Marut University. It had been built from the ground up by Uncle Scott before he died, and his mark was still on everything: the horseshoe over the door, the greenhouse that Summer dutifully maintained around back, the bay window with a pentacle inset. Uncle Scott had been a witch, so he had breathed love and magic into the cottage, and it felt like the walls glowed with inner light. Summer had always thought that it looked like something out of a fairytale.

Grandma Gwyneth was gardening in the flower beds by the path, but at Summer’s approach, she sat up and pushed a loose gray hair off of her forehead. Her gloves and knees were covered in damp soil. “Got a second?” Gran asked.

“Sure.” Summer opened the front door long enough to let Sir Lumpy inside, since he was much too dignified to use the cat door, and then joined her grandma again. “What’s up?”

“Smell this.” Gran pushed a flowerpot into her hands. Three tiny green shoots protruded from the surface.

Summer sniffed. “Tomato plant.”

“And this other one?”

“Cabbage. The third one is summer squash.”

“Thanks, babe,” Gran said. “I brought these out to start hardening them off, but I forgot to label the pots when I planted the seeds. I must be going senile.”

Summer had to laugh at that. Gran was about as likely to go senile in the next decade as Abram. She looked exactly the same now as she did in Summer’s baby photos, and her mind hadn’t aged a day, either. Gran described herself as “permanently old,” but Summer preferred to think of her as timeless.

Regardless of what she wanted to call it, Gran was immortal. A fairytale grandmother for the fairytale cottage.

As she leaned over the flowerbeds, her thick gray braids swung over her shoulders and tickled the dirt. Summer pulled them over her back and knotted them loosely. There was an early spring blossom sticking out of the grass nearby, so Summer plucked it and put it in the center of the knot.

Gran had been working long and hard, but instead of smelling like sweat, as most people would have, she gave off the faint odor of homemade chamomile soap. The only other smell came from her necklace: a silver-coated animal skull with agate eyes that was haloed with the smell of mausoleums and graves.

There was nothing else in the world that smelled like Gran. The magic that kept her frozen in time was special.

But she wasn’t the first person that Summer had been around that day who smelled special.

“What would you say if I told you that I ran into a man that didn’t smell human?” Summer asked, curling her bare toes in the grass.