The Lycademy

"We are very proud to welcome you all in Woodland Academy. We hope that your stay here will be fruitful, educative and pleasant. As your Headmaster I'd like you to know that my doors are always open for any of you and all of your concerns are taken seriously. But let me warn you though, that all conflicts that your Packs may have amongst themselves outside those walls remains outside. It is strictly forbidden to fight, provoke or challenge other fellow students and I have high hopes that all of you will follow this simple rule. Now let me introduce to you all our faculty members… " I heard our headmaster talking but got bored. I put my AirPods in my ears and pressed play. 'Oh, where oh where can my baby be? The Lord took her away from me She's gone to heaven, so I got to be good So I can see my baby when I leave this world…' Good old school rock is exactly what I needed at this boring pep talk. Goddess, I f*****g love Pearl Jeam. I wouldn't mind if my Mate had a voice like Eddie Vedder. Speaking of Mates, that's exactly what I'm here for. Ok, ok let me explain. Our kind - the werewolf race- about forty years ago was on the verge of extinction. You probably heard stories that werewolves are immortal, but that's nowhere near the truth. I mean yes, we live longer and we age slower, but just as humans we also die from natural causes. Average length of our life is between 200 and 300 years. You see it was harder and harder to find your other half - a Mate, and without that other half it's nearly impossible to conceive a child. Believe me many of us tried. Some tired with she-wolves but only 5% of couples who are not fated to be together managed to bring a pup into the world. Some tried cross species breeding with humans, but it was like throwing a coin. You could either end up with a human child but slightly stronger or with a really weak wolf, and let's face it for the sake of our kind both options sucked. Conceiving children with others like witches, demons or vampires was tricky because like Forrest Gump said about chocolate boxes: you may never know what you'll get. It is impossible to know that werewolf genes would be dominant and hybrids with both sides equal was basically unheard-of. Our Elders tried different approaches to stop the declining population. For the last two hundred years we had Mating balls, but it was mostly for stronger and higher ranked wolves, so it wasn't as efficient as we needed. We also tried magical solutions. Few Packs used the services of sorceresses who cast guidance spells. However, these often confused the leads and their effectiveness was a joke. And that leads us to this - Woodland Academy or as students call it - Lycademy. Elders came up with an idea of a school. Most werewolves couples are no more than three years apart. It totally made sense to throw every werewolf into one place where they can meet each other and learn something by the way. So now every wolf in the age of 17 joins this private Academy for three years hoping to find their Mate. And you know what? Most of them do. Since Lycademy started working our population increased for almost a quarter, and I must say it's huge. It's like a Professor Xavier's school for gifted students but in this case we are gifted with an inner wolf, so maybe X-Wolves instead of X-Men would be more accurate. It isn't always rainbows and unicorns around here because putting every teenage dominant wolf into one house can cause some tensions but it's nothing that faculty can't handle and at the end of the day Academy creates many alliances that before never had the possibility to exist. I guess this school had more sense than just bringing Mates together. Oh yeah, when I say school you actually shouldn't imagine a normal high school building, nope it's rather like Hogwarts, but without brooms flying, that s**t must be freaking uncomfortable. Building is like this gigantic castle surrounded on one side by mountains and on the other by deep forest, perfect for our animal alter ego. I haven't seen yet whole building, but what I know from the brochure and from my older brother is that we have olympic size swimming pool, fully equipped gym, 10 acre training ground, library, many classrooms, a residential part capable of providing accommodation for 15 hundreds of students, 24/7 working kitchen, dining room and parking lot. It should be fun. Right now Lycademy hosts over thousand young werewolves, and believe me it's a lot of raging hormones. Normal human teenagers are insane but add to that heightened instinct and needs and you'll get what I'm talking about. Werewolves tend to get aggressive when they learn how to phase but are still too young to have full control over it. It's a constant inner struggle to keep the beast at bay. She-wolves are better with that as our lives aren't driven by testosterone, so it sucks to be a guy. My thoughts had been cut by my friend Martha who elbowed me in my ribs. That b***h! No I'm just messing, that girl is like a sister to me. "What?" - I whispered to her "Stop humming, principal is looking at us." I just rolled my eyes at her, because she frankly had no idea that I'm listening to David Guetta - Titanium now, and how can you not humm to this, huh? Oh right, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Veronica Cargarough but I prefer Nica. I'm a daughter of an Alpha Bart Cargarough of Crescent Moon Pack. I have two brothers, older Vincent who is actually a year above me in this lovely institution and younger Victor who is 14, and may I add is a spoiled brat. That makes me a middle child and only girl, so our father basically eats from my palm. Thank the Goddess that I'm not the eldest one and I don't have that stupid future Alpha pressure on me, cause let me tell you I'm not good at following the rules. But I guess you'll see along the way.