She tilted her head. “Cara was only guessing. She might have been off base.”
I swallowed. “What if I can’t do anything useful?”
“From what Cara described, you did a good job on that feral Dire. It’s just a matter of figuring out how you did it.”
I gritted my teeth. “I was pretty angry when I did that. Did that trigger something?”
“Might have. But if it’s there, we should be able to figure out how to tap into it.”
The “if” in that twisted my gut. But then her eyes drifted past me to the wall behind us. “You certainly have a way with animals,” she noted.
I followed her glance. Against the white stone, clung a small group of the lizard critters that Zach had lifted. Each had six legs, and when I looked toward them, they expanded a little crest around their heads, as if to make them appear larger. I counted nine.
“Maybe they are sunning themselves?” I theorized.
“They’re only on that one bit of wall,” she pointed out. “Closest to you. And check out that tree.”
Birds twittered from within the leaves. The branches were moving with them. “That’s not because of me,” I protested.
“They’ve been arriving for the entire time we sat there.” She laughed. “Pretty sure it was you. I’ve never attracted anything more than a fifty-foot Dragon.”
My teeth ground together. “Great. Animals like me.”
Dani shrugged. “From what Cara said, your talents are just developing. Who knows where they might lead.”
Attracting lizards and birds didn’t sound very useful to me. Dani headed back inside as the other students started to gather on the front steps.
Time to run.
Matt swung up to me, sporting a darkening bruise along his jaw. I reached out to him, but he flinched away.
“Leave off, Angel. I’m good.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Blimey.” Disgust dripped from his voice. “That bush pig said something, and we had another blue. Until Cody stopped it, anyway.”
I blinked. Bush pig? “Aaron?”
His mouth twisted. “Yeah.”
“He’s good at being a bush pig.”
Matt offered his lopsided smile, but his brows remained low over his eyes. “Yeah, I should have endured.”
“What did he say?”
When he evaded my gaze, it offered a clue as to the topic that had ignited the argument. “I can fight my own battles, Matt.”
“He’s a right bogan, he is.”
“Is that worse than a bush pig?”
His eyes lit up. “Not really.”
Darius and Aaron stalked past us down the stairs. The alpha’s gaze slid from Matt to me, and held, glowing bronze, before they moved away.
“Bush pigs tend to run in mobs,” Matt muttered to me.
