2. Man of the Crowd
2
MAN OF THE CROWD
…the world seems full of good men—even if there are monsters in it.
— brAM STOKER, DRACULA
N ormally, I loved Boston in the snow. Snow meant fewer people who might bump into me along with every random thought flying through their heads. Snow meant quiet, a cloak that hushed the memories seething from every surface, every sidewalk, every patch of land in a city that had been continuously inhabited for at least seven thousand years.
Today, however, it just slowed me down.
By the time I jogged into Gasson Hall, one of the several neo-Gothic buildings at the center of Boston College’s campus atop Chestnut Hill, I was a mess, earning the baleful stares of the portraits of the college’s former presidents lining the walls of the meeting room.
All of them male. All of them priests. All of them men who very well might have cheerfully burned my ancestors alive if they had lived a few centuries earlier.
Professor James was chatting with the guest of honor next to several stacks of chairs waiting to be arranged around the room.
“Professor,” I called out. “Dr. Cardy. I am so sorry I’m late. My alarm didn’t go off. Please accept my apologies.”
Overkill? Probably, since I was maybe ten minutes late. Even so, Professor James’s glare matched the presidential portraits as he crossed the room to meet me. “How nice of you to join us at last, Ms. Whelan.”
“I am so sorry, Professor.” One boot was completely soaked from stepping in an ice-hidden curbside puddle, and the backs of my legs were splattered with slush. I dropped my bag near the lectern, then removed my coat and draped it over the top, but kept on my gloves.
Professor James stared as he often did whenever I showed up to our meetings with my hands covered. “Still?” It was a subject that had come up before. “Aren’t you hot in those things?”
I didn’t answer as I used a paper napkin to wipe snow off my boots.
“It’s distracting,” he continued in the Hepburn-esque New England drawl that only people over the age of eighty seemed to have anymore. “You must know that.”
I frowned. It was a quirk, like Aja had said. We all had them. Academia drew oddballs like moths to a dusty, library-filled flame, and nowhere more than the Department of Irish Studies. Aja only wore one pair of shoes—green combat boots with bright pink laces. Another professor in the department regularly colored his combover with black spray paint, and yet another had nothing in their office but a terrarium that was home to a human skull.
Sometimes, though, I wondered if Professor James knew my secret. That my obsession with hand accessories wasn’t about vanity, but protection. From him. And from myself.
I rubbed my hands together but made no move to remove the black wool. “Eczema.”
He scowled. “Yes. Well. Come and meet our guest.”
I followed him to where Rachel Cardy was examining the portrait of Jeremiah O’Connor, the fourth president of BC.
“Dr. Cardy. It’s an honor.” I offered my hand, glove on, to shake hers, bracing myself for the impact.
The hard truth was, the gloves didn’t always work. Nor did coats, hats, jeans, shoes, or other items of clothing.
According to Gran, seers sensed meaning, which was why some thoughts or memories spoke louder than others. If something mattered to a person, whether it was as small as a glance or as massive as a war, that meaning left its mark. On a bench. A desk. A piece of paper. A scrap of clothing.
Those echoes could usually be muted by more barriers that didn’t carry any history in them. Leather worked reasonably well. Wool was a close second. Cotton, linen, and other natural fibers came in as distant thirds.
But even on good days, these barriers only did so much. If the day was bad, or by some mistake, if I happened to touch an actual person in the midst of their actual meaningful experience? Gloves or not, I Saw everything. And it was like walking into a tsunami.
Still, I’d face a mental tidal wave as many times as it took today to get back into my professor’s good graces. My escape to quiet rural bliss depended on it.
Dr. Cardy shook my hand, and a summer breeze blew through my body. The room smelled of lilacs, despite it being February, overlaying a symphony of emotions that somehow worked in concert instead of against each other. Generalwarmth as well as the typically magnanimous curiosity of her kind emanated from the tiny, bright-faced woman.
And what do we have here? she thought.
Dr. Cardy was obviously a siren, an energy magnet with the ability to transform potential into reality through passion. Siren power was a constant source of frustration to other fae for its unpredictable and intangible qualities. Shifters could sense it, but not recreate it; seers could See it, but not firmly separate it from other emotions or thoughts; sorcerers could feel it, but couldn’t manipulate it or anything touching it.
Siren ingenuity and innovation were unmatched, and they tended to become celebrities of culture and art (or at the very least, their muses). At the same time, they were more mercurial than the rest of us, with contagious moods that were often responsible for crowd-swaying moments in history, from mob hysteria to the greatest civil rights marches.
Most seers were not fans. I, however, was just grateful that Dr. Cardy’s state of mind seemed pleasantly lucid.
“The pleasure is mine, my dear,” she said in a thick Yorkshire accent as she took her hand back. “Do call me Rachel. ‘Dr. Cardy’ sounds like I’m your physician.”
Like all fae, she was noticeable, with porcelain skin and bright eyes that twinkled when she smiled. Her shiny auburn curls bounced with every small movement.
But it was her translations of ancient texts that had made my heart ache from their beauty long before this meeting. Critics called her the next Seamus Heaney because of the way she had made old Irish stories accessible and even popular to a new generation, so much so that her most recent work, a translation of Lebor gabála érenn , had become a New York Times bestseller.
“Rachel,” I repeated carefully. “I’m Cassandra, one of Professor James’s students.”
“Yes, yes. I understand you’re the lovely girl who’s arranged all of this. Horace tells me it will be standing room only. Well done.”
Professor James scowled at the informal use of his first name.
“Ms. Whelan will finish prepping you for the discussion, Dr. Cardy,” he said. “I’m going to the café while I still can. Like anything?”
“No, no, Horace. We’ll be just fine, happy as clams, the two of us.”
Rachel waved a hand, swiping my shoulder just long enough to allow me to hear her internal laughter as she goaded my advisor. It was hard not to join in.
Once the doors had shut behind him, she turned and smiled again, this time more knowingly. “Well, you’re quite something, aren’t you?”
“You’re very kind,” I said, suddenly unsure under her probing gaze. “I hope the talk goes as planned. I was excited about the prospect of you coming?—”
“No, no, not that, although you have done a lovely job with the event. I mean you, Cassandra. A mind witch, aren’t you? Or perhaps a sorceress, although you haven’t the terrible coldness about you that they do. Locked up tight as drums, aren’t they? You’re certainly not one of us. Forgive me for saying this, but I did read that paper you published last year. Insightful, but a bit dry. Not bad, though, not bad at all.”
I blinked, dumbfounded by her instant analysis. Sometimes, in my isolation, I forgot how easy it was for most of us to identify each other.
“Am I wrong?” she pressed. “Are you a shifter after all? I wouldn’t have pegged you for a selkie, but that black hair…it wouldn’t be the first time I was fooled.”
“No,” I finally blurted out. “No, I’m not a shifter. You were right on the first guess. We prefer ‘seers,’ though. As I’m sure—I’m sure you know.”
There was room for debate on the matter, of course. Some fae used the term witch to apply to any or all of us. Mind witches like me. Fever witches like her. Shape witches like shifters or stone witches like sorcerers. As with many other bigoted terms, “witch” had been reclaimed by plenty of fae determined to rewrite its definition with more positive connotations.
But that didn’t mean its origins had disappeared with new meanings, either.
“Oh, how rude I am,” she said. “Terribly sorry, truly.”
She was so earnest that I couldn’t help but grin. “How did you know? Am I that obvious?”
Rachel smiled like I was a child, even though she was the one who was only a bit over five feet tall. “No, no. Just practice and intuition, you see. It was harder since you were so polite.”
I frowned. “Polite?”
“Not prodding all about my head like your kin usually do. Except for that handshake, of course. Powerful, that one. But everyone is a little curious.”
I swallowed. She could have no way of knowing that was because I wasn’t capable of reading her mind without contact. Or that I couldn’t stop once it started.
“It’s not foolproof,” she rattled on charmingly. “So sometimes I do make mistakes, but you have that aura about you only seers have. Quite bright, quite lovely. Very sharp. Mostly blue of course, though you’ve got some other unusual tinges of crimson too. Perhaps you’ve got a shifter in your genealogy somewhere, eh? You’ve also the face of some of the wise women. Sharp nose, sharp eyes, like they could see right through you. Of course, that’s exactly what you can do, isn’t it?”
She erupted into laughter at her own joke, and it was so utterly contagious that this time I did join her.
“Er, thank you,” I said once we had calmed down. “I suppose that’s good to know about myself. Did Professor James show you around?”
I wasn’t able to enjoy much of the lecture after giving my introduction. Instead, I was more concerned with shoving myself into the corner but trying to touch as little as possible and also keep my distance from the standing-room-only crowd that inched closer to Dr. Cardy as she discussed Pliny’s accounts of the ancient Celts.
They were magnetized by her charisma. I just tried not to panic.
From the other side of the podium, millions of unwanted thoughts, feelings, histories, and dreams threatened to swarm this space the moment the talk was over. I couldn’t See them. Not yet. Not without touching, though a conversation about a new library from when I guessed was approximately 1925 kept trying to sprout through the soles of my boots like a persistent dandelion. Still, the other possibilities from the attendees heated the room like pressure building in a teapot that hadn’t yet whistled.
Applause broke through my thoughts. Dr. Cardy stepped down with a bright smile as I took her place and bent awkwardly over the microphone to conclude the talk at last.
“We’ll take a few brief questions,” I informed the audience. “And afterward, the department will welcome Dr. Cardy to a reception at the faculty club, which is open to members and their guests.”
Hands all over the room flew up. But while Dr. Cardy fielded questions, someone else in the back caught my interest. A man with gingery blond hair and light green eyes leaned against the wall beside the portrait of Thomas J. Stack, the sixth president of BC who served for less than a month before falling ill and dying just after his thirty-second birthday.
This man, however, looked fully alive. And about my age, too, though he stood with the bearing of a senior faculty member—self-assured with an arrogant, unwavering gaze. And that something. That sharp, striking presence only we had.
He was fae. I was sure of it. And judging from the cold, gruff control radiating from across the room, I didn’t need to touch him to know he was a sorcerer.
Spellhunters, some called them. Pirates, said others.
But it wasn’t the fact that he was a wizard that piqued my interest. What made the man stand out was that, instead of clapping or even glancing at Dr. Cardy speaking to her adoring fans, he had his large green eyes fixed squarely on me.And they did not move once.
The wooing of Rachel Cardy continued until the crowd followed her to the faculty club while I cleaned up the room at Gasson. By myself. Where I could breathe. Alone.
Well, not quite.
“I enjoyed your talk.”
The voice was distinctly British with a tinge of something else I couldn’t quite place. A lilt he was trying to hide, maybe.
Despite the compliment, the deceptively sharp tone caught me by enough surprise that I dropped the last of the stackable chairs on my toe with a grunt. Kiwi-colored eyes peered down at me with an expression that managed to be both cold and intent.
Kiwi-colored eyes.
Blinking through the dark.
I shivered.
“Would you like some help?”
After I had caught the man staring at me earlier, I stared back until he looked away. Dr. Cardy wasn’t alone when she said it felt like a seer could see right through her. Other fae believed we could in fact do such a thing (we couldn’t). It tended to make them uncomfortable when we looked for too long. I had thoroughly enjoyed that when I looked again a few minutes later, the man had disappeared.
Until now.
“No, thank you. I got it.” I set the chair on the final stack a bit more firmly than necessary.
“Cold?”
One gingery eyebrow quirked as the stranger nodded at my gloved hands. I fought the urge to hide them behind my back. Fae or not, he wouldn’t understand why I needed them. And I had no interest in presenting myself to such an imperious fellow as a defective seer.
“Winter in Boston,” I mumbled.
I had to crane my neck to look up at him, which meant the stranger was well over six feet tall next to my lanky five feet, nine inches. Up close, he looked a bit older than I initially thought, if the threads of silver at his temples were any indicator. He was also admittedly handsome, with pale skin and neatly trimmed ginger hair shadowed ashy black at the roots, as if his naturally darker color was bleached from too much time outdoors. A slim torso with broad shoulders was dressed in standard academic garb: an inoffensive brown corduroy blazer patched tidily at the elbows, an olive-green shirt ironed within an inch of its life, and a gray cashmere scarf knotted around his neck without a speck of lint.
His lichenesque eyes were the only colorful things about him—sharp, feline, and rimmed with lashes so dark it almost looked like he was wearing liner. The rest of his features were chiseled without seeming harsh. A crooked nose and straight jawline were softened by neatly groomed stubble.
As he noticed the way I noticed him, those green eyes rolled. Then he produced a semi-polite smile, lips pressed together. Forced. Irritable. Knowing.
I frowned. He was legitimately handsome—okay, fine, he was very attractive. But arrogance was not a quality I enjoyed in anyone.
“The reception for faculty is in McElroy,” I said curtly, turning to locate my coat and bag. “Students aren’t allowed, but they’ll probably make exceptions for non-member faculty. Just walk toward Beacon, and you’ll run into it.”
“Oh, I’ll call Rachel later. I wanted to compliment your stewardship of the event. Your comments were much more insightful than the average moderator’s.”
I paused, unsure of what to make of this odd, stiff compliment. “It was just an introduction. I welcomed a scholar and set up some chairs. Are you in Irish Studies too, or do you know Dr. Cardy via the Classics or Archaeology departments?”
“Archae—gods, no.” His face wrinkled with distaste. “I’m a scientist, not a bloody humanist.”
Of course, he was. I didn’t know any sorcerers well, but the few I’d met over the years weren’t the least bit interested in, well, people—other than what they could do for them. Calculating to the core, all of them , Gran had said time and again in her thick Irish accent.
“But Rachel and I have known each other for a very long time,” he was saying. “Really, though, I’ve yet to hear any moderators with the insight that you have. In fact, I was wondering if you’d be willing to engage in further discussion over coffee or tea this afternoon. Perhaps now that you’ve finished here.”
I took a bit longer than necessary to button my coat and put on my scarf. I didn’t need to be a seer to sense the man’s obvious bullshit. But Aja’s description floated back to me—a good-looking guy…with a British accent. One who disappeared easily.
“I suppose,” I said, resetting my expression to bland acquiescence. “I have plans right now, but I’m free later this afternoon. We could meet at the café just off the end of the B line on Comm Ave. Do you know where that is?”
The man smiled, revealing a row of sharp-looking white teeth. “I do indeed.”
We eyed each other for a long moment. And then I made a decision for the second time that today I could very well regret.
“I’m Cassandra, by the way.” I pulled off a glove and extended my right hand, bracing myself for chaos.
Something told me it wouldn’t be like other touches. Not a haze of recollections like I’d experienced with Aja or the bright, complex warmth I’d gotten from Rachel Cardy. Power oozed from the man. Maybe my day would be ruined by this single touch, but something also told me I needed to know who he was. And that I couldn’t trust a thing he told me.
“Pleased to meet you.” The man eyed my hand like I was offering him a knife blade first. He didn’t take it.
Then he also seemed to make a decision.
“Sorry,” he said as he stepped back. “Bit of a germophobe, I’m afraid. Hope you don’t mind.”
I couldn’t even pretend not to be relieved as I backed toward the table where the rest of my belongings were. The man’s eyes narrowed. My skin prickled.
“Actually, I just realized that I’m busy this afternoon anyway.” I tugged my glove back on. Suddenly, I wanted to be as far from this stranger as possible. “You can contact me through the department if you need. My email is listed there.”
“Perhaps I will see you at another talk in the area,” he murmured lamely, now focused on a pair of his own smooth leather gloves, pulling them on one elegant finger at a time, pinky to thumb.
“Sure.” I picked up my bag.
Twenty minutes back around the reservoir, and I’d be home. Sain the hell out of my room, take another very long bath, and then call Gran for an interrogation.
When I looked up to bid the man a final farewell, I was alone in the center of the room, the heavy door swinging shut with a loud squeal while forty-five priests, complete with their collars, stared me down.
At that moment, I realized I hadn’t asked the elegant stranger’s name.
And then the voices started.