Chapter 7 #2
Professor Raith’s voice breaks in. “Are you going to actually put in some work or just sit there chatting, Miss Devine?”
My spine goes rigid, shame and frustration colliding inside me. I hate that hard, gravelly tone he brings out when he’s feeling particularly critical.
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it directed at me.
Why the fuck is he directing it at me? I only just found my partner. We’ve barely exchanged ten words.
He’s looking at me from behind his desk with a downward crook of his lips that’s somewhere between a frown and a sneer. Like I’m a bug he’d like to squash under his shoe.
He always seemed to hate that I was close with Asher, before. They might have struggled to make ends meet, but I had a supposedly unknown dad, a mom who might be crazy, and no established family history of magical talent on top of that. He thought I’d drag his brother down even farther.
What’s his problem with this Elodie? He still doesn’t like me when I’m as far up the ladder as you can get?
No matter how my life turns out, I can’t win with him. Not until years after he’s found out he’s my match, at least.
My teeth set on edge again, the frustration burning away the shame. I keep my voice even. “Just getting started, sir.”
I set my notebook on the table. The exercise is simple, one I’ve done dozens of times. We glean everything we can from the ephemera collected in our partner’s item. Professor Raith circulates and listens to our observations. Our partner confirms how accurate or not our reading was. The end.
Simone and I swap objects. I peer down at the ashtray, taking in the swirls of amber coloring laced through it and the subtle vibration of ephemera permeating the physical substance. Setting one hand just an inch away, cupped toward it, helps me pick up the resonance even better.
For most of my time at the academy, I thought I was only okay at divination. After my Cole eased up on me and started encouraging my abilities at home once he’d finally embraced our match, it turned out my mind had been freezing up out of fear of his judgment.
Within several months of practice, I wasn’t as good as his wunderkind capabilities, but I was startling the new divination professor and my fellow students with my readings.
Unfortunately, none of my practice with Cole took place in a classroom. And having him strolling around glowering at everyone—glowering at me—is bringing back all the worst feelings from my past.
Squaring my shoulders, I narrow my focus to the object in front of me as well as I can. The rhythms of the energy travel through my gloves and skin to form wisps of sensation in my head.
“Oh, come on, Ma.”
A jab of a cigarette ground into the glass.
The clink of another glass surface underneath.
“She deserves your respect! When are you gonna—”
The faintest hiss of tiny fading embers.
A whiff of cloves mingling with the nicotine stench.
Only fragments. Every time I start to delve deeper, the creak of the floorboards under Professor Raith’s feet jerks me back to the room.
Why can’t he just stand still for a minute? Give us a chance to do the work he’s badgering us about?
He comes to a stop next to Simone and me. His tone is even brusquer than before. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
Simone snaps a piece of gum I didn’t notice her tossing in her mouth. She prods Other Elodie’s skin cream. “One of her grandmas bought it for her. She mostly uses it on her hands. Nothing thrilling.”
I don’t think Simone would necessarily be able to dig up much even if there was more to glean.
Professor Raith turns to me, his expression etched with an undeniable frown now. I take a breath to give my own report, but he speaks before I can.
“Then it’s particularly surprising that Miss Devine offered up this artifact for the second time in as many months.”
Forget Bigfoot. Let the Loch Ness Monster drown me.
I scramble for an explanation. “It’s the same kind of cream, but this is a new tube. I thought—”
He doesn’t let me finish my sentence. “You thought you didn’t need to put any effort into my class, so you’d half-ass the exercise. You didn’t settle on this as your artifact until you were already here, did you?”
He must have seen me riffling through my satchel for it. But he doesn’t know. And he has no idea what an immensely good reason I have for being unprepared.
I can’t even tell him. If he had any idea—
With a panicked hitch of my pulse, I yank a waft of ephemera from the room around my body. It condenses into a subtle shield so he can’t read more from me.
Exactly the way my Cole taught me. He could never have imagined I’d be using the skill for this.
I speak as confidently as I can manage. “Next time I’m sure—”
“There may not be many next times if you continue to show such a lack of commitment to our studies here, Miss Devine. No matter what your name is, I don’t tolerate laziness.”
For fuck’s sake, does he think this ashtray is an object of incredible meaning to Simone? As far as I can tell, it’s her mom’s. She probably half-assedly grabbed it off the coffee table on her way out the door this morning.
But he has to lay into just me.
The tug in my chest I’ve been suppressing the best I can cracks something loose that spills onto my tongue. “If you want to talk about laziness, what do you call putting us through the same paces every second week for five years?”
Someone behind me gasps. Professor Raith’s eyes flash, his dismissive expression cracking in turn. “Maybe if I saw many examples of real divination, I wouldn’t need to insist on so much practice.”
He scoops the tube of cream off the table. His fingers tense around it. “It’s not that new. You got it last summer. You don’t even like the way it smells, which is why it’s lasted this long; you’re just desperate to show off anything with a fancy brand name.”
I’m pretty sure he’s making up that last bit out of conjecture—Other Elodie has seemed like a lot of things to me, but never desperate.
He’s simply looking to humiliate me. Any chance to knock the privileged students—who’d have sneered at him most of his life and still do at Asher—down a peg.
It’s not as if the administration minds our professors heckling us however they see fit. Our parents expect the academy’s professors to prepare us for all the hostilities we’ll face in our coveted positions in the broader lucent world.
But I’m not the pampered girl he sees me as.
A quiver in the ephemera around his body tingles through my awareness. My Cole always knew how to hold his own energies close, of course, and no doubt this version of him does too, but he wouldn’t bother to shield much around students he barely respects.
And I know enough about him that I only need a hint.
I stare right back at him. “And I’d bet a hundred bucks you were chewing kavish leaf this morning just to perk yourself up enough to do your job.”
The second the words leave my lips, I want to stuff them back in. Too bad sound doesn’t work that way.
If Professor Raith could shoot fire from his eyes, I’d be very crispy right now. He smacks the tube down on the table.
“Be glad I bother to come and attempt to teach you at all,” he growls as he spins on his heel. “Zero points for today’s session, Miss Devine. Failure to complete the assignment.”