My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 145: Everything Was Finally Calm Till My Mole Started Pointing At Something Under The School

Morning came and Soren was still holding the name Dani had left in the room the night before, unsaid, tucked behind the teeth where it did the least damage to keep.

He carried it down the hall to the small kitchen and put it away for now.

Maren had commandeered the burner again.

She’d been sneaking down there for a week, ever since the festival grid put her on the demonstration floor, saying the ovens were better than the dorm plate.

The ovens were better.

That wasn’t why she went.

She went because cooking calmed the fox down. Nobody in the pack said that out loud.

◆◆◆◆

Selah was on the floor next to Soren’s chair, back against his knee, drilling the trace on her fingers in and out.

Down to nothing. Up to full.

Down to nothing. Up.

She’d been at it for days.

She was building endurance for the display and she was doing it in the room where Soren could see her do it, which was as close as Selah came to asking to be watched.

Grimm was under the table with her chin on Soren’s foot.

Her shut eyes twitched in the small way they twitched when she was tracking something in her sleep, and her body was a warm weight against his ankle, and every so often her ear rotated toward the door and rotated back.

Dani was in the corner with the terminal, but her back was to it.

She was watching Maren cook and pretending she wasn’t.

Selah tilted her head back against Soren’s knee.

"Your leg’s warm," she said.

"That’s a low bar."

"Not for me."

He put his hand on top of her head without looking down.

Her hair was cold at the roots and warmer at the ends, and his palm went a little numb on the crown of her head.

She closed her eyes for a second and went back to drilling.

Then Maren set a plate down between Soren and Dani, hard enough that the fork on it jumped.

"Eat."

"I’m eating," Soren said.

"Eat faster. I made it for everybody, which means Dani has to eat too."

Dani looked at the plate the same as a person looks at a math problem she hasn’t decided to solve yet.

"I ate," Dani said.

"You ate crackers."

"Those are food."

"Those are not food." Maren pointed the tongs at her. "Sit."

Dani sat.

You didn’t argue with Maren when she was standing in a kitchen holding tongs.

It was a rule they’d all learned separately in the fall and none of them had ever talked about.

◆◆◆◆

Maren returned to the makeshift kitchen she set up in Soren’s room after the harassment in the dining hall became unbearable.

She came back a minute later with something on a wooden spoon and pushed the spoon at Soren’s mouth without asking.

"Taste."

"Maren."

"Taste! It needs salt or it doesn’t and I want a second opinion that isn’t Dani because she thinks crackers are food."

Soren opened his mouth and let her feed him off the spoon.

Selah watched from against his knee, not moving her head, only her eyes.

"Salt," Soren said.

"How much?"

"A pinch not a handful. You always want to do a handful."

"That was one time."

"That was three times."

Maren went back to the burner muttering and Selah tilted her head back against Soren’s knee half an inch further, small and settled, the trace on her fingers running slower now.

Grimm shifted under the table and pushed her jaw harder into Soren’s foot.

He reached down without looking and rubbed the spot behind her ear where the fur went soft.

Her back leg gave one small kick against the leg of the chair and stopped.

"She’s dreaming about running again," Selah said.

"She dreams about running most nights."

"She used to dream about hunting, It’s different when it’s running."

Soren left his hand where it was.

Dani had picked up her fork.

She was chewing slowly, in the specific pace of a person who was going to admit later that the food was good and did not want to admit it yet.

Maren caught her doing it in the reflection off the kettle and did not turn around, but the corner of her mouth moved.

◆◆◆◆

The first pylon hit outside and the walls took the shock in a single low thud that carried through the floor into the bones of the table.

Nobody in the room reacted, because construction had been on the schedule all week.

The committee had posted the festival grounds work order alongside the role grid, and every morning something new was being driven into a yard somewhere on the property.

The east yard was today’s.

The second one hit and Mona went rigid on the counter.

She’d been asleep in the fruit bowl.

Maren had picked her up out of the bowl three times that morning and put her on the counter three times, and Mona had gone back into the bowl three times, and the fourth attempt had stuck only because Maren had put the bowl on top of a cabinet.

The pylon hit and Mona wasn’t asleep anymore.

◆◆◆◆

Soren saw it before Dani did, which was rare.

The mole’s small body had gone hunting-still, not sleep-still, the still of an animal that had heard a sound its body was built to hear before its head had caught up.

Her cold patch showed through her fur.

Today the wrong place on her back had a direction.

Selah stopped drilling.

Dani’s hand was already on her handheld.

Mona jumped off the counter.

She couldn’t jump well.

She basically fell in a controlled direction, and she hit the floor and shoved her blunt face into the seam between two tiles and started digging.

"She’s on the linoleum," Maren said. "Mona baby, that’s a floor."

Mona did not care that it was a floor.

She scraped at it, three or four hard scrapes, and the tile gave up and she was through it into the concrete under, and then she was through the concrete, which was new.

Soren had not previously known Mona could go through concrete when she felt like it.

She dug a shallow hole. Not deep but wide enough for her whole body.

Then she stopped and put her face down in it and held.

Her nose pointed down and slightly east.

She did not move.

◆◆◆◆

Soren was on his feet before he’d finished processing why.

"What is she doing?" Selah asked.

She was up too. The trace on her fingers was at full without her thinking about it, cold coming off her hands in visible drift.

"She’s pointing at something."

"At what?"

"Whatever’s under the east yard. She’s got a direction now."

Dani crouched next to the hole with her handheld out.

"Her patch has never had a direction before," she said. "Not on any log I’ve kept. It reacts to presence, not vector."

"It’s never had a vector because whatever was down there was too far down for it to bother giving her one."

Soren crouched on her other side. "Something moved or something’s closer. Or both."

The next pylon hit outside.

Mona flinched under it but she didn’t move her nose.

She held her direction through the impact, and in the seconds after the impact she made a small sound in the back of her throat.

Not augh.

Something else.

It was one syllable and it wasn’t in a language Soren knew.

It was the front of a word, cut off before the word finished.

It was gone before it finished.

Soren looked at Selah.

Selah looked at Dani.

Dani had her handheld up and her face said she’d caught it but she wasn’t sure she’d caught what she’d caught, which was the same thing everyone in the room was thinking at once.

"Did she just," Maren started.

"I don’t know," Soren said.

He knew what he had felt though.

For half a second when the not-augh came out of the mole’s throat, a small tug had passed through his own bond frequency, low, on a channel he did not have.

Not Yara, Selah, Maren, Dani, nor Joan.

Something that was and was not Mona, using the wire her bond ran on, from a direction his instruments could not measure.

He did not say it out loud.

Some things you did not name in a room where four other people were already trying to decide whether they had heard what they had heard.

◆◆◆◆

Mona’s nose was still down.

Still pointing east.

Her small side was rising and falling in the shallow hole and she was making no other sound. Nothing above her head dinged.

Nothing in Soren’s own inbox lit up. The system did not comment on Mona.

The pylons kept going outside.

She held her direction...