Rogue - Curse of the Hybrids Book 1

Chapters 11-15

Chapter 11

Honey

Tuesday was her first ever lab class in a real laboratory. She was so excited she didn't even realize what was missing until she'd pulled her notebook and her pen out of her backpack and looked around.

There were no wolves.

There was no tell-tell hint of magic.

Every. Single. Student. Was human. Even the teaching assistant was human.

The girl at the next bench gave her a friendly little wave.

Honey waved back. The girl scooted over to sit beside her.

Sadly, she and Evie didn't get to blow anything up. The entire lab was about lab safety.

On the plus side, she got to wear a lab coat.

Wednesday morning she had planned to sleep in ten extra minutes, but she was again awake before her alarm went off. Two hours of volleyball the night before hadn't been enough to tire her out. She really liked playing with witches though. They were always sending her curve balls, literally and figuratively.

She showed up to practice ten minutes early and started jogging. Green-headband guy started doing the same thing a few minutes later but he was way behind her. They were waiting at opposite sides on the same row of the metal bleachers when most of the others arrived. Brayton looked a lot better this time. He even had enough energy to climb to the very top of the bleachers.

"Okay children," Captain Young said condescendingly. "Today we're going to see how combat-ready you are. You all should have had some self-defense classes throughout high school, so let's see how well you learned. But first, two miles in under 16. Go."

She decided to take it slow so she would have plenty of energy left for fighting, but today it seemed like everyone wanted to go fast and she was in the way. After the third person pushed her, she decided to just run her hardest. There was no way she was going to end up a turtle.

Her mom wasn't the fastest, but they had run in the occasional race. As long as she kept her speed above 4.83 minutes per mile - a safe twenty seconds longer than the women's world record pace for a 5K - she could run as fast as she wanted even if humans were around. Here, she suddenly realized, she didn't have to worry about the humans. She could break the record if she wanted and no one would think anything of it.

She'd already lost a little time, but she could see how fast she could finish and then have something to beat. She took off. She easily passed the people who had shoved her and was soon one person behind the lead. The lead, oddly a big, beefy guy - it was normally the small skinny guys who were the fast runners - did a double take as she pulled ahead of him. He lasted about half a mile, then fell behind. She crossed the line and for once, had to bend over to catch her breath.

A pair of well-worn sneakers appeared in front of her. "Honey, that was supposed to be a warm-up run," Captain Young scolded.

She grinned up at him. "I'm warm. What was my time?"

"Ten minutes, one second."

"I thought I'd done better than that. I'll do better next time."

"Uh-huh. Why don't you go for a short cool-down run while we wait for everyone to finish. A SLOW cool-down run."

"Yes, Sir."

The number of turtles was quite a bit smaller than Monday.

After they'd done fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups, Captain Young split them into groups based on their packs.