Chapter 20
Quentin
Criminal Investigation Files
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“Good morning,” I said, clearing my throat and putting on the smile I’d been trained to wear so well as a child, before looking at the innocent faces of my experiments and an inner satisfaction spread through me.
Sitting in front of me was molecular biology course number three, the one in which I had sorted all the supernatural inhabitants of Blairville who were attending molecular biology. None of them knew that each of them was a guinea pig, an essential piece of the puzzle in an elaborate experiment.
“I’m glad so many of you applied for the internship at the DLSC.”
Of course, I didn’t care in the slightest who had applied for the free spots, because it was already a foregone conclusion that David DeLoughrey would get one place and the incompetent Quatura girl next to Amber Smith would get the other.
The two of them would give me what I needed without ever knowing what I’d taken from them. And even though I feared David would be harder to outsmart, I knew neither of them stood a chance against me.
I rolled up my sleeves, leaned against the massive lab table of the seminar room, and tried to ignore the greedy looks of the human girls I unfortunately had been obliged to include in this seminar.
None of them seemed to be interested in molecular biology, but if I had let the class consist of just the Ruisangor, the Senseque and the three Quatura girls, someone would have taken notice sooner or later.
It was enough that I had to play the crazy human professor on the internet as well as in this seminar room just so I could get on with my private research without causing too much of a stir and of course it would have been wiser to vanish completely from the radar, but my approach had its advantages.
“Please, put your laptops away. All you need is a piece of paper and a pen,” I continued, looking at the students’ tense expressions. “Today you’re going to create a protocol plan for the experiment we talked about in the last lesson.”
Everyone obeyed, and I walked around my desk to the file containing my research papers. Until today, I had used the time the course was working to go through my own research documents and check for errors, but today the new surveillance system was in place, so three hours ago I had had to watch as two janitors installed a camera in this room.
To blame was Professor Rebecca Harlow, sent by the goddamn Councils.
Just the thought of that scum made my blood boil.
I would destroy them all. Without exception and without mercy. But I had to wait patiently. Because even if I didn’t follow all of my boss’s instructions, he was the one who had the resources to carry out the overthrow of the Councils.
I was pursuing my own plans, but nobody needed to know about that. Including those stupid cameras.
I suppressed the urge to look up at the ceiling, pushed the binder aside, and sat down to open one of the folders containing the protocols of the other seminars.
Instead of sighing because I was wasting my time here, I focused on the chemical formulas in front of me.
Of course, I would have preferred to focus entirely on the work at DLSC, as well as on my own little experiments. I had to keep the two experiments separate, because although the DLSC gave me space and resources to work with, they didn’t grant me full access to everything I needed there. Also, my boss was monitoring me, just like the DUIO was doing with the research project.
I had spent a research year at DLSC after my field trip to the Mediterranean before officially starting this semester as a professor here. And now it was as if I was interweaving two parts of my life. One was the academic side, the university where I had already spent half of my life, and then the research, the project, the big thing that would change everything in this town.
The DLSC was plan A. And if that didn’t work out, I still had my job as a professor at Vanderwood: plan B.
And so it was that I had come to see Vanderwood as a retreat rather than an annoying alibi. This university was a goldmine for what I was looking for, a place full of fascinating architecture, buried history, and I felt like that wasn’t all there was to it.
I didn’t like listening to my gut, because it was feelings, not facts, that guided me at times like this. Things that hadn’t gotten me far in life. On the contrary.
Almost by reflex, my fingers moved to the golden ring on my right hand and began to play with it, and inside I fought the urge to give the ring control over my feelings.
I was a fool.
An arm lifted in the corner of my eye and I looked up, grateful for the distraction, and nodded to Amber.
“How much time do we have, Professor?”
I didn’t let on that I didn’t like that title at all, especially coming from her, even though this goddamn title was one of the few things in my life I didn’t have to lie about. But with these girls in the room and the ones who were annoyingly stalking me all over campus, it always sounded like they were flirting. And the last thing I was here for was to be a sex object for some spoiled girl’s daddy issues.
“Forty-five minutes, Amber,” I answered her tersely, returning Amber’s smile with inner distaste.
This girl had put the most effort into the application phase so far, and since I wasn’t blind, I knew what her goals were. She was no better than all the other hormone-driven girls in this course who made me feel like I’d landed on an episode of The Bachelor . To make matters worse, it didn’t stop when I left the seminar room. They were everywhere, and over the last few years I had needed to develop tactics to protect my privacy from these nasty little stalkers.
The worst were those girls on the football field who knew no limits and would accidentally wander into the men’s showers or slip their letters under my office door because my mailbox, which existed for study-related exchanges only, was already full.
I was glad that they hadn’t found out my address yet, because there was no way I wanted to be greeted by naked freshmen in my bed, as had been the case in my third year.
Once again, my fingers wandered to the gold ring that looked like it was made of two rings welded together.
There was only one woman for whom I would throw all my principles overboard, and this woman, of all people, no longer wanted to have anything to do with me.
The need to unlock my iPad and send her all the hundred messages I had suppressed until today made me grip the ring tighter until it became warm, and I could clearly feel my heart beating.
I didn’t know what to do, because every wrong message would be another stone thrown at the heavenly glass castle that housed the garden she had made a retreat for me.
I pressed my lips together and suppressed a dry laugh as I stared at the ring on my finger.
At that moment, this allegorical garden seemed to me like that of King Tantalus. Tantalus had been a mortal king who had tried to fool the gods and had therefore been cruelly punished by Zeus. He had been sentenced to stand in a garden with fruit and water floating right under his nose, but always out of reach.
Was this the punishment of the gods of Moenia for turning against them?
When I felt a stare on me, I looked up reflexively, and it only took a few seconds for my eyes to meet her aventurine-colored ones.
Love is a Bitch – Slowed
ImXgine, ONIBI
Like every time, something inside me tensed, and I didn’t just mean my jaw. My whole body went on alert, ready to make her forget everything I’d revealed without thinking twice.
It hadn’t been wise to let the feeling of power that shot through my veins after each injection guide me. Now I had a witness and, on top of that, she was one of those whose existence would soon be history.
She stared at me, as she always did, before looking back down at her table and placing the tip of the silver ballpoint pen on the page again, as if she hadn’t just been watching me. As she did, one of her platinum blonde strands fell into her face, and I immediately felt catapulted back to that evening with J.
Her hair had been just as light. White gold that I would have loved to claw my fingers into one more time.
I felt myself getting hard and took a deep breath.
This was definitely the wrong place to be thinking about this woman’s delicate body, the soft curves that would probably press perfectly against my body when I took her hard from behind and showed her what it meant to be worshiped by me.
Fuck.
Just the thought alone had been enough to make my cock so hard that it strained against my pants.
That was what the thought of her had done to me ever since the line between friendship and more than friendship had shifted between us, and she’d fucked me without restraint in my car. She had made me addicted to her, to her clever nature, her flattering humor, her hidden beauty and this divinely hot body that I hadn’t even begun to explore.
In the corner of my eye, I noticed something black scurrying past the window and a glance at the statue-adorned courtyard told me that another flock of ravens had settled in front of the window, as if they were looking for something. Just like in yesterday’s seminar lesson.
I noticed that the Blair girl was also looking out of the window whilst brushing the loose strand of hair behind her ear.
She must have followed my gaze, which reminded me that she had been watching me since the first lesson, as if she could read me, as if she knew what I was up to.
No matter how carefree, how invincible I played, I was always restless whenever she entered the room. And I hated it.
On top of that, it was damn hard to interpret the meaning of her looks. She knew how to hide her emotions as if she’d been trained to do so. What if she was a spy for the Councils?
I gritted my teeth and tried to banish my paranoia.
That girl there was what was called a vulnerability. She was an Air Quatura and, therefore, a candidate for a place within the Councils. And it was only a matter of time before she would use her knowledge against me, until she ignored my threats and I would regret not having given her the Salma immediately.
I had to come up with something to clear her memory. Quickly. Even if she was harmless – which I doubted – the thought of her breathing down my neck bothered me. It was driving me insane.
Only yesterday, she had bumped into me. I’d been running late and hadn’t expected her to walk past this passageway – of all places – but suddenly I’d felt her fingers on my upper body, and a few seconds later, she’d been on top of me.
I could only hope that she hadn’t noticed how hard I had become, because I still couldn’t believe it myself.
The only explanation for this physical reaction was that she had also reminded me of J yesterday.
But J was somewhere in Vancouver, probably studying philosophy, judging by how well she knew the texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates by now.
I had wanted to ask her, but I always felt hesitant when it came to her personal life. It wasn’t fair to her when she told me about her life and I could only give vague answers about my own. It was fine the way it was, and I was aware that I could never give this stunning human woman what she deserved.
Inwardly, I felt the unease I had been feeling since that night at the Halloween party, which seemed to be tightening more and more around my heart.
What if she sensed that I could never be the man for her that she deserved? What if the gods were on her side? Which I more than hoped…
She deserved the world. Something someone like me would never be able to give her.
But now I had damaged our friendship just because I had not been able to stand it in that damn car and had desperately needed to touch her.
I was a fool and deserved all the wrath of the gods.
As punishment, they had probably sent this annoying little witch after me, who was now sitting at her table, completely absorbed in the task and writing things down.
She seemed focused, which resulted in her biting her full lower lip until it reddened slightly, just like her cheeks did whenever she messed up my documents.
My cock was still throbbing against my pants.
I tried not to stare, looking away on purpose.
What was wrong with me that I hadn’t been in control of my body since that night? Just because that girl there also had blonde hair and her lips reminded me of how I had kissed J’s?
I was twenty-eight and no longer sixteen, for fuck’s sake.
Ashamed of myself, I took a deep breath and looked over at David, who rose from his seat and walked toward me. As always, the Ruisangor eyed me intensely before placing a paper on my desk.
“Already finished?” I asked, trying to sound impressed.
I was aware that this young man had remarkable intelligence. He had already studied physics and chemistry in Vancouver before joining the DeLoughrey clan in Blairville, which I had found out through painstaking research in the DLSC database.
David just nodded and returned to his seat, so my gaze automatically flitted to Julie.
I Want You Dead
Two Feet, Allie Cabal
She looked dainty, especially in the black skirt, white blouse and navy-blue sweater vest of the uniform, deceptively innocent with her elfin hair loose.
The Salma she had been carrying around had revealed her second side. Not that I hadn’t known what she was before.
She sat leaning back in her chair and I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows.
She was the best here in class, another fact that pissed me off immensely, which was why I’d made it my mission to work a mistake into every one of her protocols. I didn’t know what else to do to get her to finally switch courses. Thankfully, she was the only one in the seminar who had not applied for the position at the DLSC and if she really was as intelligent as she pretended to be in her written work, she would soon sign out of the seminar.
Smirking, I leaned back and held her concentrated gaze.
Was she trying to play with me? Make me nervous? Too bad she didn’t know who I was. What I was...
“Miss Blair, if you’ve already finished, you can hand it in,” I said, trying not to sound challenging. “Don’t be afraid to show off your fast pace to your fellow students.”
Even though there was little movement in her expression, her hand clutching the pen before she let it disappear under the table signaled to me how uncomfortable this situation was for her.
I couldn’t help but smirk as I watched the others turn to her.
Introverted students hated having their achievements exposed in front of the whole course. I had to know. After all, I had been one of them.
“What are you waiting for?”
Julie bit her lip and I stood up to circle my table. Julie rose as well and reached for her experiment plan.
As she walked toward me, a strange tingling sensation ran through me, but only for a split second, because then she was already standing a meter in front of me and held out the sheet of paper to me with her lips pressed together.
I smirked down at her, tried to hold her gaze with mine, to pierce into hers with my eyes to make it clear to her who had the upper hand here. And it helped that she was more than a head shorter than me.
Still, she managed to unsettle me with her staring aventurines, although I would never show her that.
Without breaking eye contact, I took the paper from her hand. And suddenly, her irises turned a barely noticeable... ice blue.
Confused, I fixed her eyes, which obviously unsettled her, and the color immediately disappeared from her irises. She wheeled around and left me with the sheet of paper.
I forced myself not to stare after her because some girls from the class were already watching me, so I wheeled around and walked around the table with Julie’s piece of paper. But before I could sit down, I looked at her again, searching her eyes for the blue.
Had I been wrong, and she was a Water Quatura, or had my paranoid mind just played a trick on me?
It had to be her mere presence. She brought my paranoia to a new high. I couldn’t stand it when she was here.
“Those who are finished can leave already,” I said loud and clear, whereupon the Senseque in the last row jumped up and handed in his obviously unfinished protocol plan to me.
Noah’s performance wasn’t very satisfactory, and every time he came to football training, he asked me to improve his performance, but it didn’t work that way for me. I didn’t want to risk my job.
He looked at me insistently, probably to remind me of the $2,000 offer, but I shook my head almost unnoticeably and snorted.
If he had known what I was, he would never have asked me for such a favor.
He left the room gruffly, followed by David, who kept an extra-large distance, which I couldn’t blame him for.
Senseque and Ruisangors hated each other to bits, and I was surprised that none of them had died in a fight yet, nor that an earth-shattering war had broken out in Blairville long ago. The director certainly didn’t seem to mind. And if he wouldn’t take care that this Quatura co-director disappeared, I would have to intervene there myself.
Julie grabbed her light gray leather backpack and hurried out of the room with her fists clenched.
Only now did something inside me relax, even if it didn’t solve my problems in the long term. I had to take care of this girl. Whatever that meant…