Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
At eight o’clock, the campus wasn’t empty.
There were some late classes, a few clubs meeting.
Lights lit up the gym next to the stadium like a disco ball, the mirrors inside reflecting light and movement out as I walked past. The libraries were also open, and I held the textbook I borrowed from Woolworth earlier to my chest, so I looked like a student.
Break-ins were best when there was some cover. You didn’t want to be the person who everyone remembers. I tried to pick a time when there were still students on campus, but all the professors would have gone home to their Masterpiece Theatre and salads for dinner.
Someone sneezed nearby me, and I spun. A kid with striking green hair wearing a dog tag from his ear had his elbow up near his nose.
I squinted, trying to see if he was wearing any colors or tattoos marking him as a specific pack.
The last thing I needed was another one of Dieter’s allies or a Five Dragons member to get their hands on me.
Malik had said I’d be safe, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t suspicious of anyone so openly wolf. The kid frowned at me, his nose twitching, and I remembered Malik’s warning about sniffing my kind out. Turning away, I strode towards Sallow Hall.
My shoulders hunched when someone called, “Hey! You looking for the meeting?”
I turned and frowned at a blond kid, hair cropped short. With oversized biceps and a tight green shirt, he looked like he spent a lot of time at the disco-gym.
“Sorry, you got the wrong guy.”
“Hey, no. You don’t have to be scared, man!” He held up both hands. “Humans Are Human is meeting over in the Qin building, room two-oh-five.”
My eyebrows crept up. “Humans Are Human?”
“A group of honest Americans who don’t like how werewolves and other nons are trampling all over our country,” he said. “I saw how you looked at that dog, I know you agree.”
Holding up my hand to stop him, I said, “I know Humans Are Human. I’m just surprised they let the club meet on campus.”
Especially since its premise was that people like werewolves and witches weren’t human and so didn’t deserve civil rights.
“Yeah!” he said. “I mean, of course we can’t call the club that, but the Human Debate Society is meeting in two-oh-five.”
His exaggerated wink made me huff a breath he took for a laugh and he looked proud of the joke. The last of the orange sunset faded from the sky, and the HAH member looked larger in the shadows. He grinned at me.
“Listen, maybe you haven’t thought of yourself as one of us before, but it’s really natural to realize once you’re away from home that just because a parrot can talk, doesn’t make it a person.
They can train a chimp to fly a space shuttle, but it isn’t any more of a human than a werewolf who wears a suit.
” He slapped my shoulder. “You get it, man.”
“I have a meeting with a professor.” My rage boiled in my stomach. I knew I couldn’t make a scene. I definitely couldn’t talk the ground into literally swallowing this trash whole without ruining my inconspicuous burglary.
“Maybe after.” He pulled out a blue leaflet with the meeting times and rooms. On the back were ten photos of older men and women, their faces surrounded by gun crosshairs.
It listed them as the members of the Alchemists’ Society.
“We’re protesting the Alchemists’ Society meeting tomorrow, you should join us! ”
Walking away, I raised a hand to wave instead of smashing him across the mouth like I wanted to.
HAH was just a more public expression of a tension roiling the country since the courts granted werewolves rights almost eighty years ago.
The sentiment was why it took until a few years ago for California to allow werewolves to be foster parents and why so many kids in care were werewolves.
And California had some of the most liberal laws on the books.
My fist ached as I imagined the muscle-bound HAHer facing anything half as frightening as I knew Malik had dealt with when he was in the system.
Shifting my shoulders, I got my head back in the game.
HAH was everywhere. It wasn’t any of my business if UCSA was turning a blind eye to a group of them meeting on campus.
Sallow Hall was more dramatic at night. The arching pillars on the roof seemed to reach down, and with most of the office lights out, it looked like something was about to happen.
I headed in, taking the stairs instead of the elevator. My footsteps were squeaky on the treads and I checked the hallway before opening the door. Empty. The office doors were all closed, and I walked down the hall, checking for cameras, but there was nothing.
Likely, the university was more concerned about someone hacking their system than someone breaking into a professor’s office.
In fact, I’d guess they only had a few security people, relying on alarms and witnesses to stop most crime.
Still, I kept my pace quick and when I got to the office, I dragged a breath through my teeth. I had a problem.
The door had a keypad lock. There wasn’t even a keyhole for emergencies, which meant there was some master code overriding professors’ personal ones.
Closing my eyes, I tried reaching out with magic to see if I could make the lock work for me, but I got back a resounding silence.
The electronics were too complicated and the individual parts didn’t make up a larger whole the way they did with an analog lock.
I glanced around the hallway, but there was little to help me.
The ceiling might be a good entry point with its removable squares, but I had no way to get up to it.
I could wait until the cleaning crew came by and try to sneak in with one of them, but that would mean a lot of waiting and the hope they cleaned daily.
In quick succession, I ruled out climbing in through a window (I’m fae, not Spider-man), stealing keys (who from?), and trying to convince the hinges they should open for me (they would bend the wrong way).
My options were getting more limited, and every minute I wasted on this was one less minute I’d be spending tracking down the students in the seminar.
Exhaling, I thought about how Thistle zipped in and out of the world, to the fae realm and back, into my apartment and out.
He had more experience than I did, sure, but we were on equal footing when it came to actual, raw power.
Time had replenished my magic. I had more than enough to try something stupid.
Turning the problem over in my mind, I realized it must be like a game the fae crèche played during school.
I’d been too old and too weird, by their standards, to participate, but between lessons I’d watched them.
They weren’t trying to get between realms or even between two rooms. Their goal was to cross a small pond on rocks set too far apart to walk on.
They would dance to the first one and then take a step, convincing the space between the two rocks it was only a stride away instead of farther.
To the naked eye, it looked like their bodies disappeared and reappeared in the same position, as though they were walking in an old movie with missing frames.
If they failed, they only got dunked in water. If I failed, I’d end up sliced in half.
Facing the door, I narrowed my eyes. The problem didn’t have to be unlocking the door. Instead, I could try convincing two spaces they were closer than they actually were. I’d been inside the office. All I needed to do was arrange it so the inside of the office was closer to the hallway.
Closing my eyes, I thought of Woolworth’s office, how it had felt, all the spirits that lived in it.
The older books had more energy than the younger, mass-produced ones.
The desk was over twenty years old and had seen many a junior professor behind it.
It was solid, grounded. The chairs were relaxed.
Few people sat in them these days, but they knew their purpose.
Weaving a web of the energy, I wiped away the door, erasing it from my mind, pulling myself closer and closer to the energies inside the office. I could feel reality bending a bit. Yes, the office is much closer to me than you think. In fact, if I take a step, I’ll be inside.
I took a long step, my eyes still closed. Forcing a breath into my lungs, I opened my eyes. I was inside. My knees gave out, but I locked them, grabbing hold of a chair to keep myself upright.
There had to be an easier way of doing that, one leaving me less convinced I was going to end up embedded in a door. The energy of the office was still flowing, and I pulled back my magic, drawing it back in. Such a big spell had taken something out of me, but less than I expected.
“Okay. Let’s find the class list,” I said.
Woolworth’s desk was an organized mess. That is to say, I’m sure he knew where most papers were, but with the stacks everywhere and the file folders only labeled half the time, it wasn’t likely he’d notice if something was out of place as long as it was mostly where he remembered it.
Starting on one side of the desk, I rifled through piles of paperwork, finding stacks of college essays, department bulletins, even some personal mail mixed in. His electric bill last month had been outrageous.
A red folder stuck out where he’d placed it on top of his keyboard.
I opened it and raised my eyebrows. Bingo.
Taking my phone out, I snapped a quick picture of the class list, the flash making me glance at the door.
I hadn’t heard anyone coming up, but that didn’t mean some mouse-footed janitor wouldn’t notice the light under the door.
Under the class list was a half-completed worksheet, and my eyebrows went up when I saw what it was. Someone had filed a civil-rights complaint against a student in Woolworth’s class. He’d been writing his own statement about the event, but had only managed a few paragraphs before leaving off.