Chapter 8
Goddamn surreal, this is. Just yesterday, I arrived at the Academy thinking I’m in for another year of working at the Library, and now I’m sitting in the back of B7, waiting for my first ever Lycanology One class to start with a hundred or so shifter students chatting and buzzing around.
“Can I help you?” I enunciate, gently but loudly, to a short but buff guy I see staring at me. Quickly, he turns his eyes back onto the people in his group.
I shake my head, letting out a sigh and leaning back on the bench with my arms folded.
According to my schedule, at least it’s not Bane who will be teaching me Shapeshifting Studies. It’ll be the somewhat senile but much less grating Professor Ahearn.
The goal right now is to avoid rocking the boat at all costs, and Lorcan MacArthur, well… The Grimm Academy Lycanology professor, he does not like me very much, and he also happens to have the power to prevent me from getting my old Librarian position back.
Sadly, the class hasn’t even started yet and I already have the stares to deal with.
It’s all perfectly understandable, I think as my eyes sweep over the people I’ve found myself surrounded with. After all, they’re just twenty-one-year-old shifter students rightly wondering what their twenty-nine-year-old human Librarian is suddenly doing in the classroom with them.
Hell, I myself have to fight the urge to stare at them. To gauge potential differences and similarities between us.
The interest is making me worried about how easy it’ll be for me to ‘blend in’.
Just relax, I tell myself. Instead of focusing on the people around me, I choose to take a closer look at the room.
It’s not like I’ve never been in a Grimm Academy classroom. But they’re all different and I’ve never seen this particular one. It’s more of an auditorium, square in shape and brightly lit by the magic from the large paneled windows to my left and right. Most of the space is taken up by the two rows of benches cascading down the stairs to the central pulpit and blackboard, but what draws the eye are the glass cases to the far left and right, displaying bones, magical items and even some works of art.
It startles me, when I hear a sound to my left, on the bench I had all to myself until only a second ago.
Now I see a scrawny girl with huge black eyes and impossibly long black hair taking her seat next to me, rummaging through her bag.
And the intention is to look away, but then I see her trying to get a book out from among a pile of… sticks. It’s a pile of sticks she has in her bag.
My eyebrows pull down and then shoot up.
Then it hits me. That’s the girl one of the researchers came to inquire about last year, showing me her picture. It was only a few years ago she managed to break a hundred-year-old curse that was trapping her in her animal form, the one that inspired the Seven Ravens fairy tale.
Her name is Raven, but they call her the cuckoo curse girl. Assholes.
Raven catches my glance, stops her rummaging and just keeps staring at me for a second, tilting her head in a way that’s at the same time cute and a little unsettling.
“Excuse me,” she starts in this flat, soft but high-pitched voice, “is the look you’re giving me one of interest or contempt?”
The question renders me speechless.
“I often confuse the two,” she explains, her large black eyes blinking at me in the same odd way in which she tilted her head. “Facial expressions are hard, don’t you think?”
What the… “They sure are,” I choose to say so as not to make her feel bad.
She presses her lips a little, in a way that makes me feel I’ve just been given a smile. It makes me instantly like her so much, I con’t seem to stop myself from leaning to add, “It was interest, by the way, the look I was giving you.”
“Oh,” she just says, her eyes rounding a little.
It makes me laugh, the look of incredulousness in them. I open my mouth to ask what’s with the sticks.
It’s at the very next moment that Raven’s head snaps ahead, the chatter in the classroom dies down, I see everyone scrambling to get to their seats and I turn ahead to see Lorcan walk in through a door to the right side of the blackboard.
“Welcome, everyone,” his voice booms as he marches up to the pulpit and slams his attache onto it. “This is Lycanology One, so if you’re in the wrong room…” He pauses, his eyes sweeping over the crowd with a grumpy look on his face. “Now’s the time to leave.”
No one makes so much as a sound, except for a few people awkwardly shifting in their seats and the girl going back to rummaging through her bag.
It all brings a smile to my face. I’m sitting in the back, where there’s no chance of Lorcan being able to focus on me. It’s a theoretical, not a practical class, which means I should be able to kick ass, not embarrass myself. It should be a piece of cake, to blend in with a bunch of weirdos like the girl sitting next to me.
***
With a smile on my face, I keep watching Lorcan as he starts pacing up and down the space in front of the benches, saying, “Now, as you all know, in this class, we’ll be dealing with the theory related to shifters and their powers. It’s in Shapeshifting Studies that you’ll be doing actual training. However…”
He stops, making my ears prick up. He seems to look straight in my direction. “That doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun, does it?”
I swear he throws me that smug smile of his. “You’ll go one by one,” he explains as he goes back to pacing, “you’ll introduce yourself and you’ll tell us about your first gift, demonstrating it along the way. How does that sound?”
Everyone seems thrilled.
After all, a shifter’s first gift from the constellations is the power they’re most used to wielding.
With a smug little smile, Lorcan goes to stand behind the pulpit and a girl from the front row gets up. She says she was first picked by the Aquarius, and when she closes her eyes and her tattoos start glowing, she makes an upwards sweeping motion with her hands and all the water bottles in the room go flying up into the air, followed by loud clapping and cheering.
Fuck, this will all be stuff the likes of which I could never even dream of faking, let alone executing for real.
Another girl gets up, and she mumbles her name in the lowest possible voice, but then she turns to face us students and — her tattoos glowing, she slams her fists together and I feel such a strong wall of air slamming into me, it’s like a kick in the chest.
While the next guy is demonstrating his gift, I feel this gush of wind come from my left and I hear the door behind me open with a thud, followed by Raven shifting and flying out, carrying her bag in her beak.
My eyebrows shoot up, but no one else seems to pay her any mind. The guy just finishes his demonstration and takes his seat.
Damn it, if Raven’s no longer here, it means I’m next.
Lorcan leaves the pulpit, saying, “Very well, thank you, Mister Finnegan.”
He starts walking between the two rows of benches, turning his eyes onto me.
As he’s getting closer, there’s this energy I start registering all of a sudden. I frown.
It’s the energy I felt coming from the Lexarcanum book.
“That leaves only one more student,” I hear him say.
It takes me a second to pull myself together. The pretense makes me grit my teeth. With a smile, he comes to a stop not too far away from me, gesturing for me to get up and introduce myself. He’s probably expecting me to be all apologetic and evasive about it.
I have to fight not to dart out of the room, but I choose not to give him what he wants. I get up and I say, “I’m Anna Novak, and I don’t have any gifts from the constellations yet.”
I can see the way in which everyone turns to stare at me, and I can hear the little snickers, but I decide to ignore them. I sit back down.
Lorcan shows no such restraint. He shakes his head, pretending as if he can’t believe it. As if he doesn’t know me. “Well well, Miss Novak,” he says with fake sympathy, “this is highly unusual.” Then, as if he’s just remembered something, he takes a few steps closer to me and says, “But not to worry. If you can’t show us any of your gifts, you can shift for us.”
For a second, I just keep looking at him, fighting the urge to snap. I fail. “You know very well that I can’t.”
Feigning surprise, Lorcan clicks his tongue. “Well, Miss Novak, your incompetence coupled with your attitude…”
Fuck.
“You’ve just earned yourself the obligation to attend special classes.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. Then I notice everyone around me suppressing laughs and I realize that having to take special classes must be something degrading.
Perfect. I grit my teeth, but I decide I won’t be rocking the boat any more than I already have. “Yes, professor,” I say.
The bell sounds, Lorcan dismisses us and everyone starts dispersing. I grab my tote and move to rush out of the classroom, fuming when I realize I’ve just earned myself the pleasure of having to see Lorcan on an even more regular basis.
The guy who stinks of the book that set this entire chain of events in motion.