Page 71 of Moody as a Minotaur

Tammy didn’t bother answering Fin. “Put the damn thing on. Not everyone gets invited. You don’t want to waste this chance. It’ll change your life.”

Fin bit his lip as he flashed a look at Parker. “You’re still coming?”

Parker nodded without checking with me. It was like he knew I would have said no.

“Okay.” Fin pulled the sack over his head with shaking hands.

Parker and some of the other young people did the same. Fuck. We were really doing this.

“I’ve heard about these tunnels,” Finley was saying to Parker. His voice wasn’t muffled by the bag, so that was good. “Decades ago, students used them to get from building to building in the winter. But now access is restricted to most of them. I’ve heard there’s a whole group of students who sneak in to search the tunnels for forgotten rooms and shit.”

Finley kept talking, but I tuned him out. I figured he was rambling to calm his nerves, not because he had anything important to say. I understood the impulse. I swallowed hard and tugged the hood over my face. The fabric reeked of perfume, probably to hide any smells along our route from us. But you’d only do that if you thought there were shifters in the group.

Dread slithered over me as my heart raced in my chest. This had to be one of the most foolish things I’d ever done in my life. At least if they were taking this much trouble to hide their route from us, they must be planning to keep us alive.

I hoped.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel like we were cattle being led off to the slaughterhouse.

“Good,” Tammy said.

I sucked in a deep breath. As I released it, I centered myself. I tugged gently on my minotaur’s magic. We thrived in mazes. We had an unerring sense of direction and always knew where we were in the world. Thatknowledge was always there, whether I was shifted or not, but I figured a bit of extra focus wouldn’t hurt. I suspected it’d be important in the minutes to come.

Tammy might think that the scented hood would protect anyone from knowing where she was taking us, but she was wrong. Once I was at this meeting space, I’d be able to find it again. Anytime I wanted.

So maybe it was good that Parker and I had come today. No one else would have been able to do that.

“Okay. We’ll just be a minute longer as we get everyone sorted, and then we’ll get a move on,” Tammy said.

A hand slipped in mine before anyone else approached us. I knew it was Parker’s as soon as our skin touched. I couldn’t explain it, it just was.

“Levi? I’ve got you in one hand and Fin in the other,” Parker whispered. He’d been practicing how quietly he could speak and still have me hear him. We’d figured out my hearing was a hell of a lot better than his. I’d always been told supes had better senses, but now I knew for sure. I squeezed his hand to let him know I’d heard him.

People were shuffling around us. The faint scrape of their shoes on the concrete suggested a few more people had joined us, but I couldn’t be sure.

“I saw the live feed of everyone coming in. There are a bunch of new faces. Who are these people?” someone whispered harshly.

I didn’t recognize the voice. It wasn’t one that belonged to any of the people we’d met before our faces were covered. Given how quietly they’d spoken, I couldn’t tell whether they were male or female, but my intuitiontold me it was an older man. Which meant it was someone new.

And why had he been watching us come in? That sounded ominous.

Someone stood in front of me for a moment before stepping in front of Parker, and then Fin. They didn’t touch us, and I couldn’t make out what they were doing. Somewhere to my right, someone protested being told to move, saying they wanted to stay with their boyfriend. Soothing words were said. Things quieted again. I waited for someone to grab my other hand, but no one did.

“Okay,” Tammy said. “Let’s go.”

Then we were moving.

“They checked each of you with an amulet of some kind,”Nelson said through the earpiece, which had been enhanced with magic. He’d promised the gadget would work anywhere, and the deeper we went into the bowels of the university campus, the more I prayed he was right.“The amulet uses magic. When it reacted to someone, that person was separated from the others. Not sure what it was testing. It didn’t react to Levi. I’m following the guy who brought it. Shout if something comes up.”

Shit. We were on our own.

Since I was at the back of the line, I could hear when part of the group went in a different direction. That happened twice. I didn’t know what it meant, but our original group of twelve initiates was now a group of eight. One person was leading us down the hallway, while someone else had approached us from behind and was whispering heatedly with Tammy.

“This is a bad idea,” an unfamiliar male voice said.Their whispering was probably soft enough that the humans couldn’t pick up the words, but I wasn’t human. “He’s pissed there are unfamiliar faces in the group.”

“It’s fine,” Tammy argued. She was speaking just as softly. “These ones are exactly who we need. We need new recruits. There were too many reports of preternatural activities going on this past summer. We couldn’t keep up with them all. We need to build our numbers.”

“Slow and steady,” the stranger agreed, “but not like this.”