Chapter 9
“I’m excitedto see Easter Island,” I said eagerly to Aiden as we took the stairs all the way to the basement.
“Personally, I’m more interested in finding out how we’re getting there,” Aiden replied. He stopped on the main floor, pulling me to a halt.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I just want to make sure you’re dressed warmly enough,” Aiden said, tucking my scarf more firmly under my chin and pulling my hat down over my ears. “Do you have gloves?”
“In my pockets,” I said with exasperated fondness. “And my boots are spelled to resist water and mud, as well as keep my toes warm. Your caveman is showing.”
“Is it caveman of me to make sure that you’re okay?” Aiden asked, raising an eyebrow. “If so, then I’m proud of it.” He scooped me up and slung me over his shoulder. “Ugg! Me have woman!” he roared.
“Oh my God, stop it!” I exclaimed. My blood was rushing to my face, although I wasn’t sure if it was because I was upside down or because I was embarrassed. Probably a combination of both. “Put me down!”
“Nope.” Aiden trotted down the stairs, each step bouncing me uncomfortably.
I crossed my arms and pouted. “Come on, please?”
“Since you asked so nicely,” Aiden said, returning me to my feet in front of most of the class.
“Ugh,” I said, lightly slapping his chest. I tried to arrange my hair into some semblance of normal, hoping to hide the heat creeping up my cheeks in the process.
“We’re just waiting on the last few students,” Professor Akhtar said, clearing his throat. “Has anyone seen Samuel? Oliver? Sean?”
A chorus of “no” went up from the students.
“Excuse me, professor?” said a boy near the back. “Sam is my roommate. He didn’t make it back to our room before curfew last night. I reported it to Professor Dunlop this morning. He isn’t usually late like that.”
“More students missing,” I hissed under my breath to Aiden, who nodded solemnly. “And they’re all boys. Are they the same kind of shifter as you?”
Aiden nodded again.
“Well, we have a link for most of the disappearances. What would someone want with so many fire monsters?” I frowned in concentration. Then a horrible thought occurred to me. “What if they go after you?”
Aiden patted my hand. “Don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen to me.”
I tried to take courage from his reassurance, but it was hard. Many of those missing were just as strong as he was.
How could he be so certain?
“Well,” Professor Akhtar said with a frown. “I guess we should get started! We’ll only be gone for a couple of hours, so be sure to use your time wisely. We’ll be staying together for the first hour, and then we’ll split up into pairs.” He pulled a large ornate key out of his pocket. “Follow me.”
He led them to a tapestry near the library that had an image of a large stone head on it. “These are the statues of Easter Island. We will look at, but will not touch them. Is that clear?” He waited until everyone had chorused their agreement before sticking the key into the mouth of the statue and turning it. When he removed the key, the tapestry flared with a brilliant light so bright that I had to close my eyes.
Blinking rapidly to clear my vision, I saw that the tapestry was now glowing white, no sign of the art visible.
“Right then, off you go,” the professor said. “Stay close, but get out of the way of the next person through. Miss Doyle? Please go first and direct the stragglers.”
I pushed through my classmates to get to the front of the crowd, Aiden following behind me. I stared at the portal for half a moment, took a deep breath, and walked through.
Drizzle hit my face, and I stopped, stunned. I was standing on grass, the sky a cloudy gray above me. I remembered that I had to keep moving, and skipped to the side just in time to avoid Aiden appearing through the portal, which was in the back of one of the Easter Island statues.
“Help me get the students out of the way?” I asked him as he stood there, blinking.
“Yeah,” he agreed, and stepped out of the way of the next student through the portal.
The next few minutes were busy as we organized everyone, sometimes getting them out of the way just in time for the next student. Professor Akhtar stepped through last, put the key in an invisible keyhole, and turned it.
“We don’t want a mundane accidentally leaning against the wrong spot and falling into the school!” he said to me, winking.
I grinned back at him. “They would be in for quite the surprise!”
“All right, everyone gather round!” he said loudly, his voice broadcasting to the class.
Slowly, the students quieted so that everyone could listen to what the professor had to say.
“Does everyone have their spelled glasses? Good. I want you to focus on the tiny details, to see beneath the outer glamor to really understand the depth of creativity here.” He led the group to another statue than the portal. “Tell me what you see here.”
I held the opera glasses that I had spelled the night before to my eyes and looked through them at the statue. “Is this native to the island?”
“It is.”
I frowned and moved closer. “It doesn’t really look like rock, though.”
“It isn’t.” The professor seemed positively delighted by my observation.
“Something that looks like rock that is native to the island...” I mused out loud. “Volcanic?”
“Very much so.” Professor Akhtar turned to the rest of the class. “These Moai were carved from volcanic tuff over half a century ago. What else can you tell me?”
I glanced down, changing a setting on my glasses to see through the ground, wanting to see how they had stabilized the statue. “There’s a body under the ground!” I gasped.
Several students screamed.
“Like, a corpse?” Chuck exclaimed, backing away quickly.
Professor Akhtar frowned and took a look of his own. “In this particular case, no, not like a corpse. Many of these were used as tombstones, but not this one. Everyone, take a look.”
The head of the statue stood high above us, but underneath the earth was the rest of its body.
“I had no idea that the heads had bodies!” I said excitedly. “Why are they underground?”
“Erosion of the soil caused the statues to slowly sink,” the professor explained. “What is special about these bodies?”
“You can see the carvings much more clearly than those on the head,” I said.
“Wind erosion must have whittled those away,” Aiden mused.
“Correct. The earth has protected these symbols for future generations to find. The Polynesians were incredible craftsmen—and women—and many of them were also witches, although they worked their magic in very different ways than we do. It’s a little difficult to tell today, because it’s so overcast, but I’d like you to theorize with me. What was the purpose of these statues?”
I walked a little further away from the statue to look at its position compared to the ones around it. “They’re facing inland, rather than toward the sea,” I observed.
“Why is that relevant?” Aiden asked me.
“Well, the Polynesian people are well known for their seafaring knowledge. Why would their statues be facing inland? There has to be a reason.”
“They traveled using the stars, didn’t they?” Aiden said. “Maybe these are related to star positions?”
My jaw dropped open in shock. “Of course they are!”
We hurried back to the rest of the class to tell them our theory.
Professor Akhtar nodded, impressed. “That’s exactly it. Good job. Now, I want you to chart these Moai, keeping in mind that constellations shift over time. Use whatever methods you deem necessary, barring touching the statues in any way. Make sure no mundanes see you using magic. We don’t want to cause an uproar.”
“Yes, Sir!”
I grabbed Aiden’s hand and we headed over to the statues standing a little further away from the rest. There was a family standing in front of one of the Moai, taking pictures with it.
“I want to see if I can figure out what the markings mean,” I told him. “I took Ancient Languages last year. Maybe that can help me figure these out!”
He smiled at me. “Your brain turns me on. The way you think about things is so different from anyone else I’ve ever known.”
I glanced at the family, now walking away from us through the grass. “I like how you can keep up with me when I suggest one of my philosophical ideas.”
“I like that you keep up with me when I fuck you three times in a row,” Aiden growled, snaking one arm around my waist.
“I like that you can get me to orgasm more times than I can count,” I whispered. “But we should really be focusing on the statues right now.”
Fire flared in Aiden’s eyes. He pressed a quick kiss to my lips and then released me. “To be continued back at school,” he promised.
I shivered pleasantly. “Looking forward to it.”
I took out my glasses again, comparing the markings on two of the statues. “I don’t think I can do a thing with this in the short time that we’re here. I’m going to copy some of them down and maybe I can figure them out later, when I have a break from my studies.”
Aiden chuckled. “A break. So, next summer?”
“I have the holidays,” I replied archly. I looked for the family again—they were far away now. “We should be able to start charting.”
We paced out the distance between three Moai, marking it down on our papers, and then compared it to our star charts. The calculations were intense and made my head hurt.
“This is definitely my least favorite part of this class,” I complained to Aiden. “Why does everything relate to math?”
“Probably because physics is the building block of our universe?” he teased. “Have I found something that you’re not good at?”
“Ugh, don’t make fun of me. Math and physics are my worst subjects. They’re so hard.” I pouted. “Why do they come so easily for you?”
“Maybe our soul bond knows what the other person needs. It knows that you need help with mathematics, and so it gave me a better than average ability with numbers.” Aiden kissed my forehead. “I would never make fun of you.”
“I hate not being the best at something,” I grumbled.
“Now, that I will tease you about,” he replied with a grin. “Accept your limitations and ask for help.” He paused, eyebrows raised.
I sighed. “Fine. Help me, please?”
“Music to my ears. Here, this distance aligns with this one, so you need to set up your similar triangles in this way...”
We had almost finished our chart when Professor Akhtar called us back to the portal head.
“You’re all doing very well so far. I thought we might explore a bit more toward the middle of the island. There’s something else I want to show you. We haven’t exactly looked at what this nexus point has done to the ecology here. Any guesses?” The professor looked around for raised hands.
I raised mine when it looked like no one else was going to. “I haven’t noticed any mosquitoes.”
“Fascinating, isn’t it? Follow me!” Professor Akhtar pointed into the sun and took off through the grass, leading us toward the center of the island.
I grabbed Aiden’s hand, excitedly following the professor up the hill. The view from the top was breathtaking. The Pacific Ocean spread out behind us, stretching as far as the eye could see.
“Not much further!” Professor Akhtar said, walking around the edge of the hill.
I looked down into the bowl of the hill with astonishment. “This isn’t a hill! It’s an old volcano crater!” I said excitedly.
“Correct! There are quite a few of these on this island. What does that mean?” he called over his shoulder.
“It means that the plate tectonics move really slowly here,” I said. “Giving the volcanic eruptions plenty of time to build up land.”
“Exactly. Why do you think that is?”
I squinted in thought, avoiding a rocky outcropping. “Well, on the Pacific side, the plates are moving together, rather than apart like on the Atlantic side. There must be some immovable plates in the Antarctic shelf.”
“You’re thinking like a geologist. I want you to think like a witch.”
“Oh. Right.” I flushed. “Umm, I would guess that the nexus point would slow the plate down in order to create this island on purpose. There must be something here that needed land.”
Professor Akhtar held up a hand, bringing us all to a halt behind him, and pointed down into the bowl. “We’re going to stay here, leaving them alone, but you can see their houses from here. Use your glasses to get a closer look.”
I peered down into the bowl of the old crater, unsure of what I was looking for. There were plenty of rocks piled haphazardly in the middle of the crater, but the longer I looked at them, the more sense they seemed to make. I lifted my opera glasses to my eyes and gasped excitedly. “They’re miniature rock people!”
Sure enough, the people were no bigger than the tip of my finger. Each one was a slightly different type of rock. They moved around their little village, busy in whatever it was that they were doing.
“How many communities like this are there on this island?” I asked, delighted to be able to observe them.
“Many. They were born when the erupting volcanoes cooled, and have been here ever since,” Professor Akhtar said. “They can make more of themselves, not in the way humans can of course, but by digging down under the earth and molding new life from the embers of the volcano.”
My eyes widened. “Wouldn’t that set off the volcano again?” I inquired, alarmed.
“You’re forgetting that the volcano has moved on,” the professor chided. “Volcanoes are only on the edge of the plate, not in the middle.” He moved one hand overtop of the other. “As the plates shift on top of each other, you get volcanic activity, leaving islands behind that show us the motion of the plate. Hawaii is a brilliant example of this motion. But the island here no longer has an active volcano underneath it, so when these Vulcans dig, they don’t awaken the volcano.”
“I see.” I rolled the name of the people, Vulcans, around in my mind for a minute while I watched them. “Vulcan is the Roman God of volcanoes. Do these people have cousins in the Mediterranean?”
Professor Akhtar chuckled. “Other way around, I’m afraid. These were named for him. Easter Island is the only known location of Vulcans.”