Chapter 13
Julie
Close to the Flame
Tony Morales
Rebecca Harlow – one of the most powerful Air Quatura and, therefore, among the higher-ranking Council members – had walked into the halls of the university and caused an uproar among the students by announcing her intentions and her future role as co-director alongside Director Alarik Copeland.
No one here wanted stricter safety rules, an improved surveillance system through cameras, or the uniforms that had been abolished ten years ago by Director Copeland.
Amara had warned Grace and me this morning and I had expected anything, but not the living embodiment of Dolores Umbridge, who had immediately taken down the green, white, and black flags with the more modern Vanderwood logo – the one with the single wolf’s head – and replaced them with new ones with the old logo – the one with the two wolves and the dagger.
Her justification: “Sports should not define university life, but tradition and order should.”
Of course, the Vanderwood athletes who had decorated their jerseys with this modern logo didn’t like it at all, and when a member of the basketball team tried to take the banners down from the poles, Harlow banned the Vanderwood Athletics logo entirely.
In addition, there was a new parking plan for the huge campus that obviously separated the Copelands from us, as well as the DeLoughreys, and at the same time included VIP parking for professors and exceptional students.
She seemed to forget that the best students slept in the King Rooms and most of the professors lived on campus anyway in the renovated residential park of dense woods and Tudor-style houses.
Half the rules this woman wanted to enforce were about the Copelands and something inside me told me they wouldn’t put up with it for long. This was their territory. We were the intruders.
“Maybe things will get better now,” Grace had said to me after the English seminar as if the Senseque were a plague.
I wandered absent-mindedly through the west wing of the main building and took one of the side corridors, observing the precious stone snakes on the pillars, as I often did.
Between all the chaos, my little problems seemed unimportant, but as soon as I thought again about how I had pushed Erik back just to protect him from me, my heart tightened painfully and made my fingers shimmer.
That was Erik’s last message. And I could only guess how much frustration was hidden behind those words.
I wished he was angry with me, wished he would block me, insult me, but Erik had never been like that. It was like he didn’t know revenge, not like all the other people in this town did.
“She’s finally going to clean this place up,” an all too familiar voice hissed from beside me, and I looked over my shoulder at Amber, who was talking to Kelly.
“But I don’t want to wear a uniform,” Kelly replied with an expressive face.
Amber rolled her eyes and the two of them came closer to me.
“Kelly, do you realize that this should be the least of our worries?” Amber snorted, tossing her shoulder-length, dark brown hair over her right shoulder. “She’ll put the Copelands in their place.”
When they spotted me, both girls fell silent. I had a hard time interpreting their looks, but I knew there was fear in their eyes. And I knew what image they had of me in their heads. The image of the girl who unintentionally attacked the Councils with sharp massive ice shards and couldn’t control her dangerous, strange magic.
“What are you staring at, ice girl?” Amber hissed and I pressed my lips together.
Ice girl. Was that the name the Quatura next to Vivienna always whispered to each other? I wonder what kind of rumors they had already spread about me. And how long it would take them to forget what had happened that night of the ceremony?
“While we’re on the subject, Julie...” Amber continued, seeming to regain her old courage. “This internship is mine.” She forced herself to smile dismissively. “Just so you don’t get any ideas.” Then she hastily pulled Kelly past me, toward the seminar room. “But whatever. The professor doesn’t like you anyway.”
I stopped abruptly.
I had successfully suppressed Mr. Suspicious, which was no great accomplishment considering all the mess in my life. But now I remembered that I had wanted to switch seminars and stay away from this crazy human professor.
I forced myself to keep walking, even though the queasy feeling in my stomach was getting bigger and bigger, and I didn’t know how I could face him now without feeling completely at his mercy.
I sped up even more, but I overlooked the side corridor from which something was coming toward me. Or rather... someone.
Howling
RY X
The person I collided with hit me with such force that I lost my balance, grabbed onto whoever it was out of reflex and pulled his body to the ground, while loose sheets of paper whirled through the air around us.
I was lucky that I landed softly on top of him.
However, all it took was that stupidly good smelling citrus note to make me jerk my head up and stare into the peridot-green eyes beneath me.
The soft daylight fell through one of the gothic windows next to us, shining directly into his eyes so that I could make out every little detail of the fibers of his irises weaving around his pupils like multidimensional spindles.
It only took one blink of his full eyelashes and my heart stopped beating completely.
Inadvertently, my hands clawed tighter into the gray vest beneath me, and immediately I felt the warmth of the man’s chest against which I was lying pressed. Memories of Erik’s warmth flashed through my mind.
Inevitably, my gaze slid to the vein on his temple, the champagne blond strands hanging down his forehead, the light stubble on his evenly shaved chin and finally to his slightly parted lips.
He had been holding his breath, staring just like me, and caught my gaze again.
“Julie...” he uttered hoarsely, as if he had forgotten for a few seconds that he had threatened me the other day, completely unsettling me.
However, I somehow managed to push myself away from him.
“I’m sorry, I...” I managed to say as I got to my feet, but interrupted myself.
I didn’t want to apologize to him. He had run into me. He was my enemy. A person who knew about some of my magic.
Adrenaline shot through my body, but I didn’t know what to do.
I stared at him like an idiot as he propped both hands on the ground behind him to get to his feet without taking his eyes off me.
Warmth came into my cheeks as I discovered the chaos of parchment sheets, written protocols and loose pieces of paper around us.
I immediately bent down to pick some of them up, just like the last time I’d messed up his work.
“Leave it,” Professor Tiberius murmured. I looked up and reminded myself not to let him out of my sight. “Go inside…”
Unsteadily, I straightened up with some protocols in my hands and stared at him, unsure of what to do next.
His jaw was working hard and as I felt more heat in my cheeks, I noticed his gaze traveling across my face.
I unintentionally pinched my lips together as the heat threatened to travel all over my body, but somehow managed to give him the protocols before turning away and storming past him toward the seminar room.
Office Talk
Christopher Tyng
Once in the room, Amber spotted me and looked at me like I was a leper, but I just walked past her and sat down next to David.
I tried not to look at the door, but as Professor Tiberius rushed through the seminar room and placed his disorganized papers on his desk, something inside me forced me to look at him.
His straight hair was still a mess, his vest rumpled where I’d clawed into it, and his shirt slightly out of place underneath.
“Your heartbeat, Quatura.” I looked at David as if he were a ghost. “Did he do something?”
His gaze moved from me to Mr. Suspicious.
“No...” I barely managed to get out, trying to regulate my breathing. “I’m just late...”
A bad lie, but David didn’t say anything else, just continued to stare ahead at the professor, who rolled up his sleeves as usual, looking at one of the protocols in front of him. Only his working cheekbones made me doubt that he was really concentrating on the documents’ details.
“Good morning,” he mumbled absent-mindedly, tidied up the loose documents on his desk and began to pass them around the rows. “Your performances could be better, but I have faith that with a little more dedication in the lab sessions, each of you will pass this seminar.”
He avoided eye contact with my fellow students and simply handed out some of the protocols.
I started my laptop, hoping to somehow distract myself from this strange incident. Something like this could only happen to me...
“Um...” Kelly spoke up. “You gave me Julie’s protocol.”
I looked up, shocked that my name had been mentioned and that the whole seminar room was now looking at me.
But I was only able to stare at the professor, who was looking grimly at the document in Kelly’s hands.
“Pass it to her, please.”
With these words, he placed the full stack of protocols on Penny Bexley’s desk, who went through it with irritation, pulled out a protocol and passed the rest to the back.
“There’s something strange about him.” David laughed quietly beside me, while I reached far too hastily for the document that Kelly handed me, not without looking at me as if she was just as afraid of me as she was of a Senseque.
I looked absent-mindedly over the protocol.
Ninety-nine percent.
What?
I looked for my mistake, but all I found was a scribbled-over number in the chemical formula that I couldn’t decipher myself.
Was he serious? This wasn’t a mistake; it was an ink stain. Not even my own…
And then I noticed the spidery writing he used to write his numbers in the margin. It looked familiar to me... Maybe because I already knew it from his documents, which I always spread out on the floor for him? Or maybe I just wasn’t quite present yet.
“Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that the application period for the internship at the DLSC starts today.” I looked up at Mr. Suspicious, who seemed less distracted than a few seconds ago. “I’ll give you extra credits on a decent application to boost your semester grades.”
You’re Loved & I’m Hated
Christopher Tyng
This lesson had passed agonizingly slowly. I had managed to stare at the screen of my laptop and not look up once, even when the professor had touched on risky topics. And when the bell had finally rung, I had hurriedly packed up my things and vowed to sign out of this seminar just as quickly.
However, I couldn’t stop my gaze from gliding to the front of the room once more, where I spotted Amber hanging over the professor’s desk and pushing a folder toward him.
For a moment, I couldn’t help but stare, until I realized that it must be her application for the position at the DLSC.
Feeling caught, I turned away, my cheeks warming again, and hurried out of the seminar room, down one of the side corridors toward the main corridor of the west wing. But just before one of the large passageways, I stopped in the middle of the crowd.
My gaze slid to the staircase that led up to the second floor of the main building. I knew that if one took these stairs and turned left into the first corridor at the top, one would end up at the private offices of the professors of the Faculty of Natural Sciences.
The tingling in my fingers this time was not of supernatural origin. It was curiosity.
No, Julie. You’re going to sign yourself out of this seminar and keep your distance from this guy.
This man was one of many fanatics who had made it their mission to uncover magic, but sooner or later he would blow his cover and a Quatura would take away his memories.
Deep down, I knew that wasn’t true. This man was a potential threat to the Circle. Even if he couldn’t work magic, he obviously had enough knowledge of alchemy. Maybe Salma wasn’t the only thing he knew about?
“Dammit,” I pressed out quietly, looking around the throng for champagne blond hair, but spotting no one taller than most of the footballers here, so I finally stole my way up the sandstone-colored steps, my shaky hands on the stone snakes of the railing.
The hallways here were less crowded, as most students headed to either the lawn, the parking lot, the library, or the sports parks, as well as downtown for their big lunch break.
With a queasy feeling in my stomach, I took the first corridor to my left and walked right past my statistics professor, but she ignored me, which must be because she must never have noticed me in her seminars. A consequence of being advantageously overlooked among other people, as I was.
I went through the golden nameplates next to the wooden doors decorated with floral patterns, hoping to quickly find the name of my molecular biology professor, as the nervousness in my stomach rose, and my hands filled with a strange tingling sensation.
I looked down at my fingers and froze when I spotted the ice crystals trailing across my skin.
No, Julie. Come on... you can do this.
More panic flooded my veins and I felt the temperature drop around me.
I was a disaster.
Then I stopped, just staring at the sign next to the door in front of me.
Professor Quentin Tiberius.
Goddammit, had I even wanted to find his office?
A cold draft swept through the usually empty hallway and I looked around, then, without further hesitation and with regret growing in my chest, I put my hand on the handle and... pushed it down.
Of course, the door was locked. This wasn’t some professor who was probably hiding secret information about his research on supernatural things in there, it was Mr. Suspicious, who had made it clear to me that he could destroy me if he wanted to.
I doubted he expected me not to heed his warning. I was surprised at myself, but I couldn’t just forget everything that had happened last week. Someone had to make sure that the Quatura’s magic remained a secret.
I looked around one last time, then carefully moved my fingers in front of the lock, using my air magic to feel the resistance of the mechanism inside the lock and thereby feel its shape.
It was as if I was reading Braille. Something Vivienna’s mother, Amanda, who was now my aunt, had trained me to do before Vivienna and I had risen in rank from Novices to Discipuli. Although she had never let me and Vivienna use it on locks, it was important for moving objects and having full control over them.
Luckily for me, it worked without my control stone, probably because it was like riding a bike. Once you knew how to do it, you didn’t really unlearn it.
Click .
The sound echoed in the empty corridor.
A soft hiss sounded.
I jerked my head around and discovered something long, white and green, snaking elegantly, albeit hastily, across the floor. From one wall to the next until it disappeared into the side corridor.
What the...
Had an arm-length snake just crawled along there?
In the distance, I heard loud female laughter and footsteps that must have come from the steps.
The nervousness returned and with it my impatient glance to the right and left before I pressed the handle again, pulled the door open and pushed myself through the open gap in the door. I closed it behind me and locked it again. Then I looked around the office.
Hysteresis
Angus MacRae
I paused in amazement. Everything here seemed so... peaceful.
The sun’s rays shone through the glazed Gothic window, which offered a good view of one of the inner courtyards and the largest tower in Vanderwood. An elegant vintage lamp hung from the ceiling and the stone walls were covered with framed pieces of leather or parchment, decorated with script that I couldn’t decipher. There were also stuffed wooden bookshelves that were the same dark color as the chests of drawers containing ancient artifacts: Egyptian figures made of gold, framed papyrus scrolls, stone tablets, colorful albeit badly damaged ceramic vases, a strange-looking amulet made of... crystal fragments?
I resisted the urge to touch anything.
In fact, I already felt like I was invading a stranger’s privacy. As if I was the threat and not him. And somewhere, my gut feeling was right.
My eyes wandered to the massive desk in front of the window, a chair behind it. The desk itself was laden with paperwork, but everything was neatly organized. A small golden globe stood next to a black statue of a three-headed dog, beside it a golden hourglass that was still running.
He must have been here today.
I reminded myself how serious the situation was and that I wasn’t here to get a museum tour of Mr. Suspicious’ collection of antiques.
I didn’t know how much time I had and whether the professor would even come back here, but I didn’t want to push my luck, so I hurried around the desk and skimmed through the first few documents.
Protocols from various seminar groups, two books on Norse mythology, one on Greek mythology.
I paused and looked at the book with a picture of an Olympic temple. Erik and this man would certainly get along very well.
I bit my lip, because suddenly I felt as if the weight of the cell phone in my pocket was extremely heavy.
Crack. Crack. Crack .
I wheeled around, startled, and stared at the window pane where a raven was pecking at the glass with its massive beak.
I wondered if these birds all drank from the same water.
Shaking my head, I turned back to the desk and focused on the first drawer, the lock of which – it should be noted – I also had to pick.
If this went on, I wouldn’t be done tomorrow.
I pulled the drawer open and the first thing that caught my eye was an ID card sticking out from between countless empty ampoules.
I pulled out the pass and discovered the DLSC’s script logo, underneath a profile photo of the professor with his short hair falling from the sides onto his forehead and his face looking even more angular.
It wasn’t fair that this asshole was so good-looking and intelligent enough to become a professor so young. Couldn’t he at least be old and ugly?
Professor Quentin Tiberius, 28, Department of Molecular Biology 38A
Click .
I wheeled around.
But the raven had disappeared.
Click .
I turned toward the door.
No. No, no, no, no, no…
Motel Creeping
Tony Morales
My panicked heart pumped against my chest and I looked around the room frantically. There were only the two chests of drawers, the bookshelves and... a wardrobe.
I closed the drawer and hurried across the room as quietly as I could, thanking myself for locking the lock three times before I slipped between the light blue shirts and closed the closet door as far as I could.
I immediately regretted it, because despite the subtle detergent, these items smelled of the man who entered the office at that very moment.
The detergent had removed the citrus scent, but not his body scent, which was far too pleasant.
My stomach tingled overwhelmingly.
I was annoyed that this smell was just as pleasant as Erik’s. Did all men smell like that? And would I ever forget Erik?
A burning in my heart made my vision blur. My fingers began to tremble. I forced myself with all my willpower to peek through the slit in the wardrobe and discovered the professor closing the door behind him before putting his things on the desk.
He took a deep breath, as if he needed it, before unbuttoning his vest.
Shit. What if he wanted to open that wardrobe?
But luckily, he hung his vest over the back of his chair and... started unbuttoning his shirt.
I pressed my lips together and watched as he opened button after button with his hands adorned with elegant veins.
My cheeks warmed and the strange tingle shot through my stomach again as he slipped the shirt over his shoulders, revealing his toned torso.
My eyes wandered over his massive chest to his six-pack and his groin, which peeked out of his low-waisted chinos.
Images flashed through my mind, making my head spin.
Julie, what the hell are you doing here?
The professor pulled a golden key out of his trouser pocket and opened one of the drawers, from which he took out a vial filled with shiny black liquid and a needle.
Irritated, I tore my gaze completely away from his athletic body and watched as he attached the needle to a syringe and then inserted it into the head of the ampule. He filled the syringe halfway with the black liquid. Then...
I held my breath.
He placed the needle directly on the crook of his arm, on one of his massive veins and took a deep breath, his whole chest rising.
He wasn’t going to...
Shocked, I watched as he inserted the needle into his vein and very slowly emptied the syringe.
The professor groaned softly, which sent another tingle through my stomach, but the strange sensation disappeared abruptly as he put his head back on his neck and squeezed his eyes shut, while I watched in shock as the veins began to pop out all over his body, especially on his face, under his eyes, at his temples, on his cheek and neck.
He opened his eyelids.
I pressed my hand over my mouth as goosebumps crept up all over my body.
His eyes were... completely black.