Chapter 8

8

Another semester and another hour every day spent in the company of Professor Hoarfrost, the History of Faerie teacher who hated me like it was his job.

I also wasn’t sure what I’d done to earn his intense brand of dislike but nothing I’d said until now had lessened it, and if it continued, the feeling would be mutual. I saw the way his loathing of me had intensified since last semester, when I’d tried to answer his questions and he’d chosen to pick Persephone instead, glowing at her correct answers and giving her extra points.

His intense dislike was clear in the way Hoarfrost stared me down when I took my seat. Hair the color of fog trailed below his shoulders, eyes of the exact same color boring into me, his lips pursed. If he could have frozen me into a statue, he would have. He had on a pair of pressed brown pants beneath his black academy robes, but the dark colors did nothing to detract from his icy eyes and pale skin.

“Attention! All right everyone, take your seats. This isn’t the time for you to lounge around acting foolish.” His pursed lips drew together further until they nearly went inside his body. “I realize everyone is excited about finding out their innate power. Use the enthusiasm for your lesson today. I don’t want to hear another peep out of any of you unless you’re answering a question when I call on you. Do you understand?”

Though I had little patience to listen to Hoarfrost drone about fae history, I set my chin on my palm and struggled to pay attention to his lecture.

I’d rather hang on his every word until they blurred together than risk him taking points away from me for no good reason.

“Continuing from our lectures last semester on Faerie politics, I’d like to speak today about the Elf and Fae Treaty of 1887,” he began. He tapped his fingers on the blackboard and text scrolled out without him having to write it. A fundamental teacher trick. “The two factions had warred over dominion of Faerie since time immemorial. Wars were fought and blood was spilled. The Elves claimed that the land where the king’s castle was erected belonged initially to one of their tribes. The Fae claim differently, of course. Only in 1760 did a tentative truce come into play thanks to the efforts of Splinterus the Just.”

I sat up straight, and before I had a chance to think about the repercussions, blurted out “It was 1762, sir.”

Oh no, I shouldn’t have said anything. Definitely should not have said that.

Hoarfrost turned glacial cold eyes at me and tried to freeze my heart with a blink. “Excuse me, Miss Alderidge?”

I shrank down in my seat under the weight of his stare. “It was 1762, sir,” I repeated softly. I’d literally read the book for this semester three times over Christmas break. I was sure he’d gotten the date wrong.

But I still shouldn’t have called him out on it. I realized my mistake immediately.

Too late to turn it around now.

The weight of my fellow students’ gazes dropped on me but I maintained eye contact with Hoarfrost. There was a muscle tic in his jaw but otherwise he gave no indication of his ire. At least, no more than his usual hard feelings toward me.

“Stay after class,” he barked out at last. “I’d like to speak to you alone.” Showing me his back as he returned to the board.

I felt like I’d put my head on the chopping block on purpose and now waited for the guillotine blade to plummet. Yeah, my fault entirely. I needed to manifest a zipper so I could keep my lips closed.

The rest of the time ticked by slower than any in my life, and I’d once been forced through a dinner with my bloodthirsty fated mate groping me while my uncle smiled proudly at the match he’d arranged. I’d thought nothing could compare to that atrocity.

Hoarfrost’s lecture gave the experience a run for its money in sheer, growing terror.

Reluctantly I lingered at my desk as the rest of the class emptied out the door at the sound of the bell. I would have given my left leg to go with them and escape what would surely be a one-sided explosion to end all explosions.

“Miss Alderidge…” Hoarfrost intoned once we were alone.

And I finally realized his initial dislike of me was nothing compared to how he felt now. Pure rage shone along every inch of his face and body. Shoulders hunched, jaw locked, he nearly spat, “How dare you call out my error in front of the class!”

What could I say to defend myself? I scrambled to find something. Anything. My hands tightened on the strap of my backpack until my knuckles turned white. “I’m sorry, sir. I just read the book during break and I realized you had the date wrong. I should have raised my hand.”

At least my voice didn’t shake.

Hoarfrost leaned against his desk, one leg bent and the other locked to keep him in position. If anyone happened to walk by and didn’t see his eyes, they’d think this a regular teacher–student meeting. They wouldn’t feel the fury rolling off of him.

But I sure did.

“If you have an issue with the way I lecture, then you ask to meet with me privately,” he said through gritted teeth. “You never correct me. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Or do I need to put it in writing for it to get through to you?”

Did I? I took a deep breath. “Professor Hoarfrost, if the information you’re giving out is incorrect, then isn’t it my duty to inform you?”

Yet another wrong thing to say. I was batting zero today. I realized it immediately when it felt like an arctic blast of pure cold speared through me, and I was surprised the ends of my hair didn’t freeze.

Hoarfrost pointed a meaty finger at my face and I noticed the tips of his ears now burning a bright red. “Your mouth is going to get you into trouble, miss. Your mouth and your bad attitude. You’ve been a blight in my class since the first day you arrived and I will not stand for it any longer.”

Instead of shrinking this time, I stood my ground. A blight? Hell no. He couldn’t insult me. Especially when I hadn’t done anything wrong besides speak out of turn. “I didn’t realize you had such a hard time being corrected. I don’t think it’s fair for you to get mad at me when you’re the one giving out wrong information to your class.”

Was he…threatened by me, for some reason?

My wolf said yes. The rest of me begged me to stop talking before I dug my grave deeper.

“You listen to me—”

“Then talk to me like an adult instead of like a petulant teenager,” I interrupted. “I’m the teenager here, not you.”

The rest of him turned red to match his ears and I did cower then. I cowered when he seemed to grow ten feet, sucking up the rest of the air in the room. Could I make it to the door before he went postal?

The answer: No.

“You will never make it into Faerie!” This came out in an explosion of sound. “I won’t allow it. Mark my words. Mark them well, Miss Alderidge. No more skating by with me. I am going to make sure you pay for what you’ve said here today.”

I didn’t want to listen to any more. Without waiting for him to finish, I bolted from the room and as far away from Hoarfrost and his threats as I could get, eyes and throat burning.

I’d have to go back to his class in a few days. I dreaded it already.

You will never make it into Faerie! I won’t allow it.

Could he really make good on that threat?

I brushed at my suddenly wet eyes and wondered why I felt the need to open my big, fat mouth. Keep your head down and don’t stand out. You made a mess of this one.

No kidding.

* * *

That evening on my way to the library to study, I stopped by Melia’s room. My insides continued to quake as I closed the door behind me, leaning against it and trying to hold myself together.

Not happening, but I deserved points for trying. The moment she turned to me, however, my lower lip trembled and everything wanted to spill out. I needed to focus on the important things first. And a teacher’s venomous threats were not important.

Then again I’d been known to lie to myself before.

“You look like someone pumped you full of firecrackers and they’re starting to go off,” she said by way of greeting.

She was holed up at her desk beneath the window, the glass panes showing a sky full of stars and slight curls of frost along the edges. Her fingers clicked away at a keyboard and I wondered if she was getting a head start on homework or just writing for fun. With Melia, I never knew.

“I have to talk to someone,” I said on a long exhale. “I’m going out of my mind. There is a lot going on right now.” I let my bag drop.

She stopped typing. “What’s the matter?”

I placed a hand over the test slip in my pocket and pushed all thoughts of Hoarfrost aside. I’d reexamine my feelings on him later. Alone. “Okay. Well. You know the first-years had our innate power test today.”

Melia turned around to face me, a wide and excited grin stretching her face. “Girl! Yes! I wanted to ask you about the results. How did it go?”

I had made the decision to trust her implicitly last semester, when she watched my potion fail, the spell broken, and my shifter side exposed. Melia knew the true story of my past and its crazy twists and turns.

I could trust her with this newest twist, surely.

I brought the test strip out and showed it to her, crossing the room to hand it over. “I tested for cognitive manipulation. But…there’s another symbol. On the back of the paper. It didn’t show up right away but now it’s clear.”

I had to give Melia credit. She didn’t blink. She didn’t look skeptical or try to immediately tell me it was a mistake. No finding an excuse for the second symbol.

She simply held out a hand. “Let me see. I might be able to help you figure it out.”

Giving her the strip, I watched her face shift from one expression to another. Surprise and confusion, then a gleam of interest. Melia loved nothing more than an adventure, a problem needing to be solved. She excelled at logic puzzles.

“Leaves told the assembly it was impossible for us to manifest more than one innate power,” I said. My fingers twitched and I looped them together to keep them still.

“Impossible, no,” Melia said with her lips pursed. She turned the paper over and ran her thumb over both symbols. “Extremely rare and unprecedented, maybe, but not impossible. You know what? I think I’ve seen this one before. The blue one. I’m not sure I can place it, though.”

I straightened, eyes wide and blinking. “What? Really? You have?”

Both symbols were still visible on the paper, red on front and blue on the back. Melia worried the inside of her cheek and stared, unblinking.

“I’m trying to remember where… Come on.” She handed the strip back to me and jumped up from the desk. “We’re going to the library. We’ve got some research to do.”

I groaned. “Can’t we research from the inner sanctum? I’m a mess.”

“Nope, and nope. There’s a book I need to look at and I can’t very well read it from this room, can I, now?” Melia stretched her arms over her head, lamplight bringing out the gold in her burnished hair. I’d kill for hair like hers, I thought, tugging at my limp and lackluster auburn strands. She looked like she’d been dipped in gold from head to toe, from her dusky skin to her honeyed eyes.

I followed behind her, struggling to keep up with her long legs, her long strides. Melia on a mission. There was no stopping her.

“I know I read something about this symbol during my powers test,” she murmured over her shoulder to me. “Because I wanted to know more than what was in the stupid literature they gave me on tactile manipulation. I pretty much checked out every book I could find on innate powers from the library and requested more, things they didn’t have. Librarian Mustardseed really hated me. She seemed to take my quest for knowledge as a personal insult. Something about our library being so expansive I didn’t need to look outside for info, blah blah.”

It had taken me a while to come to terms with most teachers and employees in the school being named after plants, especially with a name like Mustardseed. It helped how Melia told me the librarian had been named after a fairy in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“I love your memory,” I whispered in return as we entered the muted hush of the library. This time of the evening, no one bothered coming here.

“It certainly comes in handy. Now to find the thing on the shelves. I think finding it is going to be the tricky part. Hopefully no one has the book checked out.”

The library reminded me of a cathedral, with high ceilings and massive cases rising to meet them. In the right light, and with no one else using the tables, it resembled a tomb. But here I’d found my peace and, on the nights I studied with Mike, my sanctuary. Because it was better to enjoy the silence of a tomb than it was to listen to Persephone.

Melia led the way to a shelf in the rear of the massive space. Leather spines lined up like soldiers and she clucked her tongue, checking each one, before she eventually found the book she wanted.

“This is the one,” she crowed.

Somewhere from the dim recesses of the space came Mustardseed’s angry hiss to be quiet.

Yes, a good memory indeed. When I worked for my uncle at his law firm, his partners had to resort to writing notes on sticky paper and leaving them around for me. I’d gotten a little better with studying since being accepted at the academy but I was nowhere near Melia status.

She insisted this wasn’t the case, but I could almost swear she had a photographic memory.

“Okay, now to find the passage… Let’s go somewhere we won’t be disturbed. I don’t want anyone to overhear us. Not if we’re discussing covert information and we might get loud.” Melia clutched the tome to her chest and led the way toward the private study rooms. Being a fourth-year at the academy had its perks. Not only did she get her own room, but she had access to isolated study areas others did not.

She’d given me the code once. I, of course, promptly forgot the word. It was a wonder I remembered to change my clothes daily, to be honest.

Whispering the spell, Melia unlocked the door and ushered me inside. I immediately dropped my bag on the floor, my jacket along with it, candles magically lighting since the room was in use. The flames filled the space with a warm glow. It wasn’t a big room, large enough to accommodate a table and enough seats for six people. There were empty shelves lining the lower half of the walls and a window overlooking the rear lawn.

Melia placed the book on the long oak table and began to flip through to find the right chapter. “It’s in here somewhere.”

“I’m in awe you found the book in the first place. Tell me your secrets for a good memory. Is there something I can do to match yours? Or were you born this way?”

Melia didn’t look up but flashed me a warm grin. “I’d like to tell you it’s practice, but really my mind is like a vault. Things get stored in there and I can’t shake them loose. I guess it comes in handy for schoolwork. Anything else, I’m not sure about. I’ve retained nearly all the memories from my life and some of those I’d love to forget, girl, let me tell you. Let me tell you.”

She flipped pages, scanning as she went, and finally came to rest on a long paragraph and diagram toward the end of the book.

“Did you find it?” I asked, crowding closer.

“Yuppers. Here we go. Your symbol. I knew I’d seen it somewhere. Don’t worry, though,” she hastened to say, tapping the page. “This book hadn’t been checked out in a long time. I can tell from the stamps in the front. So the chance of someone not only finding your test strip but recognizing the symbol is astronomically low. Here, Tavi. Take a look at what it says.”

Bending down, I scrutinized the black-and-white text, comparing the drawing of the symbol to what I remembered on the paper. Two interlocking circles with an arrow-like shape through the center and a long straight line perpendicular underneath.

“It’s the symbol for transfiguration,” Melia continued over my shoulder.

“What does it mean? Transfiguration?” I asked.

I was already capable of shifting into a wolf. Well, not currently, because of the potion I took, though I felt my wolf prowling beneath the surface. Without fear of discovery.

Melia tapped the page again and we both took a seat, scooting closer until our arms bumped. “Transfiguration is extremely rare. Rarer even than cognitive manipulation. It means you’re capable of shirting into anything you want. Anything, Tavi. Not just a wolf. Anything at all. Sentient, non-sentient. If you see it, you can be it.” She shook her head, her lips rounded in a low whistle. “Damn!”

“So, like, I could be a…a…a candlestick,” I said, only partially joking.

But Melia wasn’t joking. “Yes. A candlestick. A mouse. A table. A car. A bird. If you can see it…you get what I mean?” She continued to tap the page, this time as a nervous gesture while her mind raced. “The catch is it’s something you have to have seen before. An image you can hold in your mind’s eye in detail. Now I remember why it stood out to me when I first read the text. You ready for this?”

My eyes blurred and I had stopped reading while she spoke. Now I glanced down at the page. “Hit me with it.”

“Only people with shifter blood can possess the power of transfiguration, Tavi.”

I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “Shifter blood?”

“Yes, exactly. It’s why the power is so rare, because half-fae, half-shifters are not supposed to exist. I mean, I even heard a rumor there are people out there actively working to wipe out shifter halflings.” She shook her head. “And even so, not all half-fae, half-shifters manifest the power of transfiguration. If anyone finds out about you having this power…”

Melia trailed off. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. I already knew. If someone found out, then they’d know my secret without a doubt. They’d know I was a shifter and didn’t belong here.

The cold knot in my stomach refused to go away and grew by the second.