Chapter 14 Jessie
JESSIE
Mr. Vanderflit caught me outside the supply room with a stack of papers to grade. His hair was messy, his tie looked wrinkled, and his eyes carried that combination of worry and purpose that meant he was about to ask for a favor and expected me to say yes.
I stiffened, wondering what more he could want from me.
Being a new teacher was already enough to fill up my days, and evenings, preparing for my classroom, but I’d been managing to wedge the investigation with the ghost and the key around everything else I was doing.
I didn’t mind, because I wanted to help Cendi, but I was hesitant to take on more responsibilities.
“Ms. Crayne,” he said, soft enough that the corridor didn’t steal the words. “I need a substitute for Magical Creatures, lower division. One period. The regular instructor had a situation with an owlbear permit.”
Looking at the man, my heart softened. He hadn’t quite been himself since the key was stolen. I can’t even imagine what that would’ve been like, to finally have hope of finding my lost friend, only to have it all dashed away from me.
“I can do it,” I said before confidence had time to raise objections. “What lesson?”
“Camouflage and cohabitation,” he said. “Elementary safety around small shapeshifters. You’ll have the same cohort you met two nights ago.” A quick lift of his brow said Goldie and her cadre. “They like you. Or at least they behave for you.”
“They behaved because Cendi was scowling behind me,” I said, which earned a flicker of a smile from him. “I’ll take it though.”
He pressed a brass key into my palm. “Creature lab three,” he said. “The syllabus is in the binder under the lectern. And Jessie.” His tone turned a half shade warmer. “You’re doing well. Even when it doesn’t look that way from inside your own head.”
“I’ll teach the class,” I said, because if I acknowledged kindness I might cry, and he did not need that at nine in the morning.
The lab smelled of hay and lemon oil and the faintest hint of singe.
Glass terrariums lined the far wall, lids latched, humidity just so.
A net enclosure held a handful of moth-bright sprites that tucked their wings when the room stirred.
Two hedgehog-sized puffs snored in a straw pen with small whistles on the exhale, which would have been adorable even if I hadn’t needed an anchor.
I set my bag by the lectern and checked the binder.
A tidy hand had laid out objectives. Identify differences between mimicry, camouflage, and shifting.
Practice consent rules around sentient small forms. Review chameleons versus animal shifters.
The page flagged a caution about chameleons blending in high-traffic corridors.
Chameleons. My stomach did a small, sober turn.
The section ran three pages and didn’t waste words.
Human-presenting magic that borrows other humans’ faces.
Limited to people, not animals. Blending that works on more than color, that lifts pattern and posture and the way light lands, then folds a body down into the wallpaper until eyes slide past. Not true invisibility; a kind of social gravity.
Their changes don’t grant memories. They guess, they watch, they miss small things under pressure, and certain wards ignore them because their edge dips under the threshold.
I touched the corner of a diagram. The key on Vanderflit’s desk.
The double wearing Cendi’s face. The way our nets slid off the thing as if oil had slicked the air.
We kept saying shifter. Shifter fit and didn’t fit.
A chameleon could have slipped into the staff corridor, mirrored Cendi’s shape, and coasted on attention blindness.
It would explain how every restraint skimmed.
It would explain the wrongness when the glamour ran long in the orchard. We could be chasing a chameleon.
Footsteps in the hall snapped me back to the room.
I set open the pen for the puffs, rolled the lid to half, checked the wand safeties by habit, then breathed deep and put on the calm I wear like a useful jacket.
I might have just gotten a break in the case, but I still had a class to teach.
I could talk to Cendi and the others when I was done.
The door swung open and in came a small parade of kids with more elbows than sense.
Goldie entered first with her chin up and hair doing whatever it wanted.
The tall boy from the dare cluster trailed her, trying to decide whether to be a leader today.
Pigtails arrived with a friend from potions and a backpack full of snacks that had already tried to escape twice.
Two more filed in, smaller, bright-eyed, the kind you want to wrap in bubble wrap and also hand a wand.
“Morning,” I said, as if they had come for cookies and not lessons that might save fingers. “Please make sure your shoes are dry, your hands are clean, and your mouths are ready to say please and thank you to anything with a pulse.”
Goldie aimed a grin at me, then at the sprites. “We’re good,” she said. “We’re very good. We’re the best.”
“You’re alive,” I said. “We’ll work from there.”
We started with names to make everyone feel more comfortable.
I learned that Pigtails answered to Mina and the tall boy to Devin, and the small serious one with the tidy braid was Leila, and the boy with the silver ring on a chain was Ezra, who badly wanted to be fierce, and had kindness leaking out of him.
I stated the rules out loud. No tapping glass.
No reaching into enclosures without an invite.
No showing off. If anyone says pause, we pause.
“Miss Crayne,” Mina said, hand already half raised. “Are the puffs chew safe?”
“For you or for them,” I asked. “Because the puffs are straw chewers, and the straw is fine. Your shoelaces are not.”
She looked down, realized her laces were on display, and tucked them into her shoes with the efficiency of someone who had learned that lesson before.
I talked them through a lesson on camouflage.
Devin volunteered to stand against the map of the northern woods while we matched his sweatshirt to the darkest swath and watched the rest of his outline vanish under suggestion.
Leila explained mimicry more clearly than some college students, and the sprites preened at being used as a positive example.
I wrote on the board with a student’s old glitter marker and pretended not to love it.
Then chameleons. I made my tone even and careful because this part mattered. “What’s the difference between a shifter and a chameleon,” I asked. “Goldie.”
Goldie squared up, pleased to be both a cat and a student. “Shifter turns into an animal,” she said. “Chameleon turns into different people and a shadow of the room around them. They don’t get memories when they change, so they have to lie to convince people they are who they’re pretending to be.”
“Good,” I said. “They’re not better, just different. What keeps you safe?”
Leila raised a hand halfway and then committed.
“Show proof of self with a tell,” she said.
“Like the way my brother taps his pencil. Or the scar on Ezra’s knuckle where he burnt himself baking bread.
Or the teacher’s joke that’s always the same.
” She looked at me, a challenge and a question tucked together. “Do you have a tell?”
“Several,” I said, trying not to wince. “I say please too often when I’m scared, and I draw boxes around lists. Also my left eyebrow goes up when people who should be in bed tell me they’re out for a quick walk.”
Goldie snickered. Ezra checked his knuckle and blushed, caught and oddly proud. Devin tried to raise one eyebrow, but it just did a bit of a jig.
We practiced spotting tells. I let them watch each other for a minute, then switch partners.
I made them write three things about their partner that a chameleon could learn and one thing a chameleon would miss under pressure.
They worked in a hush that meant they took it seriously and savored the work.
A sprite landed on the top of my marker and flicked its wings without leaving glitter. Small blessings.
Halfway through, the smaller puff woke, sniffed the air, and toddled toward Mina’s shoe.
She didn’t see, Devin did, and he set his palm down flat on the straw.
The puff climbed aboard and sat, interested in the new elevation.
I praised him for offering a safe platform and rewarded the puff with a dry apple cube the size of a pea.
It took the cube with solemn dignity and sneezed cinnamon dust.
We closed with a short demonstration that required everyone to listen with their eyes.
I slid on a glamour like a shawl, nothing heavy, just enough to blur me at the edges.
I walked the length of the room, then stopped and asked who knew it was me even when the light went strange.
The answers they gave were perfect. My stride.
My do-what-I-shoulder, which is apparently a thing.
The way I plant my feet when I’m about to ask a question that matters.
“And the room?” I asked. “What about the room?”
Leila pointed at the space near my elbow. “The light bends wrong there,” she said. “A shifter wouldn’t change the light.”
Smart children undo me. I kept my voice steady and called it a win.
When the bell chimed, we reset the lids, thanked the sprites for tolerating us, and wiped the straw off our knees.
Ezra hung back to tell me he was going to apologize to his neighbor for the stew-fire brag that turned into a dare, and Mina asked whether puffs could learn to fetch, and Devin tried one more time to raise a single eyebrow.
Goldie drifted near the board and read the chameleon section I had left open like a trap with a note that said don’t stick your hand in here without a teacher.