My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 172: The Semester Ended, Troy Bought the Coffee And I Dreamed About...

The academy let the year go in the only language institutions have for letting go, which is paperwork.

Term-end postings.

Housing renewals.

A closure notice for the festival grounds that read, in its entirety, pending structural review, which was a committee’s way of writing there is a god in the floor.

Class Z read their renewals at breakfast.

All of them.

Same room, same roster, plus a registry rider Dani had drafted herself confirming her attachment, plus the east-yard custody clause with Soren’s terms printed clean.

Maren passed the packet around the table twice because she liked watching everyone touch the proof.

"They renewed the charity class," she said, tail moving. "In writing. With clauses."

"They renewed the response asset," Dani said.

"They renewed us." Maren stole the packet back. "Let me have the version where we won."

"You can both have your versions," Soren said. "Sign the real one."

◆◆◆◆

The last week of term ran domestic, and Soren let it.

Selah rebuilt her frost ferns on the window each morning and pretended she wasn’t competing with yesterday’s.

Mona discovered the market district’s cheese stall through three layers of tinted lens and a blanket hood, and the stall discovered its best customer.

Joan cooked twice, which she did four times a year, and both times the kitchen filled with people who had somewhere else to be and stayed anyway.

Yara took the evenings.

She’d been taking them all season, the walk after dinner, her arm through his and this week she took them differently, her attention going out past the buildings to some middle distance he couldn’t range, and twice she stopped walking entirely.

"You’re counting something," Soren said, on the third walk.

"Days," Yara said.

"Until what?"

She looked at him and then she smiled and it was her usual smile with something underneath it he had no shelf for.

"Until next year," she said. "I like the years better when they’re ahead of me."

◆◆◆◆

Troy came by on the last day of term with two coffees and no agenda, which was itself the agenda.

They sat on the steps of the sealed festival hall like two men supervising a building that no longer needed anyone, and Troy handed one cup over and Soren looked at it.

"This is bad cart coffee."

"It’s tradition now. You said if there’s an after, I’m buying." Troy drank his own without flinching, which took training. "This is the after."

They drank the bad coffee.

Below the steps, the campus moved through its last afternoon, trunks and carts and students shouting term-end promises they’d keep for a month.

The two of them watched it with the particular quiet of people who’d spent the year on the other side of the glass from all of it.

"Rankings post reset over the break," Troy said. "Evaluations first week back. You’re up for one."

"I know."

"C to B in one year, if it lands. Do you know what my family did to make my B happen on schedule?" He shook his head slowly. "Tutors don’t cover it. There were consultants."

"And I did it with a charity class and a grave."

"You did it with help." Troy said it plain, no envy left in it. "The evaluation board won’t know how to score you. You’re a class of one."

"Then they’ll learn."

Troy raised the terrible coffee an inch.

"To the board learning," he said, and they touched cups, and that was the whole ceremony, and it was enough, and neither of them ever mentioned it again, which was the point of it.

◆◆◆◆

The last night of the year, the pack ended up in one room without anyone deciding it.

It happened by the usual unspoken procedure.

Maren claimed the bed’s foot on the grounds of her own body heat being a public service.

Mona tunneled under the blanket and surfaced against Soren’s chest with a satisfied "augh."

Selah took her side with a slate she read four lines of, and Dani sat in the doorway with her tea, on shift by choice.

Joan stood at the window a while and then, this once, pulled the chair closer before she sat in it.

Yara arrived last, out of the shadow by the wall , and lay down along his right side.

"Year one," Maren said, to the ceiling, drowsy. "We survived year one."

"We won year one," Dani said from the door.

"We were renewed," Selah said, "with clauses," and the room laughed low, and one by one the breathing around Soren went long and even until he was the last one awake in a pile of everything the year had built.

◆◆◆◆

Soren dreamed for the second time since he’d arrived in this world.

A year of nights in this body and every one of them had been dreamless, lights out, lights on, and he’d never once wondered about it.

The dream was the summoning room.

The circle on the floor.

The dark past the circle’s edge.

The place he’d opened his eyes into on the first night of this life, rebuilt exact, down to the cold of the stone under him, except this time he wasn’t lying in the circle.

This time he was standing outside it, in the dark, where the voice had been.

The voice that had brought him.

It didn’t threaten.

It arranged itself, close and vast at once, the whole dark leaning in with a warmth worse than menace, and it said one word.

"Soon."

◆◆◆◆

He woke at gray dawn with the word still in the room.

The pile slept on around him, warm and heavy.

Under the bed, where the wolf should have been, and Yara was still stretched along his right side instead, red eyes already open, already on him.

"You were dreaming," she said.

"Since the last time I dreamed about you."

"I know," said Yara, softly, and did not ask what it was about.

"It felt different," Soren said. "like a warning."

Yara did not pull away. She moved her hand to his arm and held it there.

"It was just a dream," she said. "Dreams do not dictate the future."

Soren let out a breath, looked at her and saw the truth in her eyes.

"You are right," he said.

"I know," said Yara.