Flying Blind (Camren)

Flying Blind Ch. 02

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Two weeks later . . .

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Lauren had been pissed for all of practice. Professor Reichert had actually gone out of town for the weeks before school started, so she hadn't been able to tell him what had happened, and her complaints to the local Changeling Council had been met with red tape and "Well, we'll see what the Reptile King says when he gets back." She had almost broken down and called her mother for help, but then she'd kicked herself. Literally. She wanted to break out of her mother's shadow, so she'd see this through on her own. The people she had talked to didn't seem surprised, so she guessed they'd already heard from Camila. She hadn't seen hide nor hair of the blind bitch of the west since the incident.
So Lauren had taken out her aggression on the other side of the practice squad. She'd pancaked two girls, spiked one ball so hard it bounced off the lumber and cracked a window, and people were so scared of the shots she was throwing that no one would set to her . . . even in setting drills. The coach decided that she "needed a nap" and sent her home. Napping was the furthest thing from her mind. Her coach had told her to call the campus dorm escort service so someone could walk her home. That suggestion lasted as far as the locker room before being summarily dismissed. She WANTED the perp who had taken the horse shifter to show up. She was itching for a fight.
'I can be way too much like Mom,' she thought. It amused her to think of that same woman puttering around a kitchen at her five-star restaurant holding a knife that she wasn't supposed to stab anyone with. There was a wild and primal world just below the horizon on normal humans' reality, and sometimes wars were made there. The last one had been a huge uprising of insect shifters in South America, led by a maniacal Queen who thought the human race had blown its shot at running the planet. Shutting them down had been costly, but a coalition of the warriors of the different animal families had gotten the job done. Clara Jauregui had taken time off from being a wife, mother, and restaurant entrepreneur to general the effort.
"I guess I should get back into weapons classes at some point," she told herself as she started a jog across campus. Her father had actually convinced her to take some time off before getting too involved in the warrior culture and had finally made her mother relent. Her father, a well-off architect in his own right, was less enthusiastic about Lauren getting caught up in changeling politics. She didn't blame him. He was pure human with a Noah Strain that never manifested itself, and he had almost lost his wife to that world. He was the calm to her mother's storm. Maybe she should call him? He was the thinker in the family. He had encouraged her ridiculous reading habit and desire to become a writer herself.
There was only another week until class started and she was already getting nervous. The English classes were going to be cake, but Physics and Intro to Calculus were daunting. The campus still had a quiet hush to it, and no progress had been made in finding the perp who had kidnapped the horse shifter, or how they had gotten her and her cage onto campus without anyone seeing. Lauren made it a point to go visit the girl, as she had refused to withdraw from her classes. No way was she letting whoever it was stop her from her life. Lauren admired that.
She got back to her dorm without incident and crashed onto her bed. The dorm rooms at FCU were actually pretty large, with the semi-secret reason being that shifters needed their space. So there was a good amount of room between her and Dinah, who was sitting in front of her trendy little MacBook making sure that her Facebook page was up to spec.
"You're back early."
"My coach thinks I have anger management issues and sent me home."
Dinah turned around. "You ran home? Alone? Are you nuts?"
"Duh."
"Well . . . go shower. You smell like my Aunt Paula."
"Is she hot?"
"She's my Aunt."
"So?" Lauren grinned and got up, peeling off her clothes and hook-shooting them into the laundry hamper. It was empty, since Dinah had called in her "servant for a day" winnings and made Lauren clean everything in the apartment before giving her a foot rub and watching the most god-awful chick flick while feeding her popcorn. Someday, Lauren would have her revenge.