It wasn’t like I was giving up my chance to pick Eloise’s brain forever… Swain had suggested we’d be using the map for at least a week, and even if it wasn’t a fixture of the classroom for the whole semester I could still talk to Eloise about it at a later date.

I did take the time to head back to Gilcrease Tower to retrieve the card first. What I’d said about Bohd and her ability to relate to people within certain contexts also applied to me… I found it hard to face just walking over to a professor’s office and knocking on the door without something like an engraved invitation in my hand.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t really blame Dee for having read it… it was just a postcard-sized slip with Professor Bohd’s info autoscribed on and my info written in. Not that I would have minded if either Two or Dee had gone out of their way to read it in order to relay the message… opening up actual imperial post would be one thing, but a little card dropped in the intra-campus mail was another. I really couldn’t see any harm in it.

Well, I could see Two taking it to far, if someone did convince her that it was okay. She tended to have a very dualistic view of things with little room for ideas like something occasionally being okay, or only being fine if it wasn’t taken too far. Where a natural-born mind would at least have some notion that boundaries can be pushed to a certain degree with relative safety, Two would need both the border and its flexibility defined for her before she’d be comfortable with it. Under the circumstances it was probably best to let her stick with other people’s mail being none of her business.

Of course, I was attributing Two’s lack of flexibility to her golemhood, but Professor Bohd was what the golems called “bornfolk” and she had her own operational parameters that she worked best within… for that matter, so did I.

I had been to Professor Bohd’s office before, twice when I was a student in her class and then intermittently during the summer term. Even though I’d turned down her offer to spend the summer assisting in her research, we’d still turned to each other for help with a few small things. As much as neither one of us preferred to relate to the other primarily as part-demons, she had found that my higher level of infernal energy made it easier for her to calibrate her apparatus so that it wouldn’t be thrown off by her own demonic influence.

Such influences only ever made very tiny differences in the course of ordinary magic use, but Bohd was pushing back the limits of mortal knowledge. That could be a dangerous pursuit in the best of circumstances.

Each time we’d met had been by prior arrangement. I thought we had a good teacher-student relationship, but that was it. She seemed to be fond of me. There were definitely times that she showed a warm regard for me, and she’d acted to protect me in the past. But as long as I was a student she could only interact with me as a well-liked student.

There were some teachers I’d had who were open and warm enough that I could imagine myself doing so if I had to. Professor Goldman, my freshman thaumatology instructor, had always spoken like everyone in the classroom was a good friend… or at least a well-regarded colleague. This despite the fact that he’d taught the biggest class I had yet seen. Professor Swain’s homespun wisdom… if that was the right word… had a similar effect.

I’d still feel presumptuous just dropping in on either of them, but I’d be less worried about how either one of them would feel about it because I imagined they prided themselves on being accessible. Professor Bohd had her own reasons to be proud, but I doubted she counted personal accessibility as a virtue.

I wondered how much of that was her own original choice or natural inclination and how much of it was something she’d learned to do, to protect herself and any student she might think shows potential.

As a demonblood working with college students… often people young enough to have parents who take a direct and active interest in their lives and well-beings… she would have to be beyond reproach and above suspicion. Keeping things strictly professional might have been a survival strategy to keep people from looking too closely at her when she’d been concealing her heritage, and to shield herself from repercussions when and if it came out.

I realized I was fixated on this even more than I usually would have been, and the reason for that was that for once it wasn’t completely irrational to think she might not be happy to see me. Calling me into her office just to chew me out would not really be typical for her, but it was hard to figure out what else it would be if she were even half as upset about whatever had happened as Twyla was and she assigned any blame for the incident to me.

The only way to find out for sure was to go. I headed for her office. It was in one of the three higher arcana buildings, where the serious magical disciplines were studied… well, I supposed that diabolism, necromancy, and transportation were all fairly serious pursuits, too, but none of the other colleges begrudged them their own halls set a respectable distance back from the others.

I was hoping she would be there. If she wasn’t, I had some ideas where she might be… assuming that she was still on campus and she didn’t have a class to teach in he mid-afternoon. I sot of envied the me who would have given up after the first failed attempt, but as it turned out it wouldn’t have mattered… the professor was in.

She was sitting at her desk in the outer office, which was unusually cluttered with wands and other devices, including what I recognized as the warding devices she used to help contain elemental reactions. She was reading from a big weighty old tome that I took at first to be a grimoire, but it seemed to have pictures more typical of a storybook. I didn’t get more than a glimpse of a muscle-bound swordsman stripped to the waist before she closed it and put it beneath the desk.

It wasn’t the sort of fare I would have imagined her reading for fun, but thinking she didn’t have any hobbies would be like imagining she didn’t have any friends… just because she was all business in dealing with me didn’t mean that there was nothing to her but business.

She looked rattled… whether she was startled to see me or fearful for some other reason, I couldn’t see. I didn’t have a lot of experience with her being nervous to compare this to.

“Mackenize,” she said. “Hello… just a little reading.”

She’d dropped the formal title from my name at some point over the summer, by which point I’d no longer been her student for more than a semester. It had been a surprising change, though one I’d only noticed in retrospect precisely because she didn’t make a big deal out of it. Still, it seemed like a big deal, once I noticed it.

“I got your note,” I said, holding up the slip.

“I didn’t expect you so early,” she said. “Not that it isn’t… of some urgency, but I hope you didn’t cut class to be here.”

“No, actually, I’m here now because I have class later,” I said. “I like to keep my classes spaced out… it’s just easier that way.”

“You do have a tendency to get things done at the last minute,” she said.

That would have been a great place to say something like Did you ask me here to talk about my study habits? or something, but it didn’t really occur to me, so I just nodded and said, “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Ms. Mackenzie, did you send Twyla Jenkins to see me?” she said. I hoped the reappearance of the title was another comfort thing and didn’t reflect a loss of respect.

“I… sort of put the idea in her head that you might be able to provide some guidance, elementally speaking,” I said. Suddenly I wondered if that was the problem. Bohd wasn’t just a full-time college instructor, she was also involved in cutting edge thaumatological research. What if Twyla had interrupted something important? Maybe I should have suggested that Twyla take one of her classes instead. “I didn’t promise her anything, I just thought you could point her in the right direction…”

“Did you tell her anything else about me?”

It would have been obvious what she was driving at, except there was no reason for her to be driving in that direction. There was nothing I could have told anyone about Profesor Bohd that wasn’t public knowledge… if maybe not exactly common knowledge… and I hadn’t even told Twyla that.

“I didn’t mention your ancestry, what I know about it,” I said. “Though I thought it wasn’t a secret.”

“Not being a secret doesn’t make it anybody’s business,” Professor Bohd. “What do you know about Twyla?”

“Not a lot,” I said. “I didn’t even know her last name until you said it. She’s Khersian…”

“She’s Khersian?”

She sounded surprised. I wondered at that… others might be surprised if they thought of Twyla’s horns or left-handedness as demonic, but Bohd wouldn’t have made that mistake. Unless it wasn’t exactuly surprise… maybe the confirmation of her Khersianity was making something Twyla had said or done fall into place? Though Twyla had never shown any prejudice against my demon blood, and I doubted she would have been more careless in how she addressed a teacher.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think she’s kind of serious about it, but I’ve never noticed her being aggressive about it before. I don’t think she has any particular problem with demons.”

“She wouldn’t, no,” Bohd said.

I thought again of the fact that having horns and being left-handed didn’t mean one didn’t have demon blood… Bohd herself had both infernal and djinn ancestry… but it would be hard to explain all the prayer, in that case.

“What do you know about Twyla?” I asked her. “She’s been trying to find out about her ancestors…”

“I’m sure you know I couldn’t possibly discuss that with you,” she said.

“You could discuss it with her,” I said, “if you knew something.”

“I will be having no discussions with Ms. Jenkins,” Bohd said. “It’s quite impossible. I simply wanted to… I thought she’d come to… well, it was only after she left and I started piecing together everything she had said that I realized she’d mentioned you. I simply needed to ascertain the truth of what she said.”

“What did she say?”

“Simply that she’d spoken to you. I had feared that might have been a pretext.”

“You feared… Twyla?” I said, trying to make sense of this. I couldn’t imagine a less intimidating person.

“Not the young woman herself, necessarily, but I thought she might have been here with some sort of agenda,” the professor said. “I can see now that I was mistaken and I overreacted.”

“You might want to apologize to her, then.”

“No, I think it’s best if there’s no further contact between the two of us,” she said.

“What is she, Professor Bohd?” I asked. Any question of whether or not I wanted to involve myself in Twyla’s mysteries was gone for the moment. I didn’t exactly feel an overwhelming sense of suspense or anything, but… it was right there.

“She’s a student, just like you.”

“Then why can’t you help her?”

“I doubt she would want my help,” Professor Bohd said. “And while she is a student, she isn’t a student of mine… I would certainly make an attempt to repair any misunderstanding if things stood otherwise, but in this case there is no need. Now, I’m sure that we both have things to do.”

“You could at least…”

“I’m sure we both have things to do,” she said, getting to her feet.

“Fine,” I said. It sounded both harsher and more final than I’d meant it to. “I mean yes, I do. I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable, Professor. Maybe I should have spoken to you first.”

The professor’s features softened, and in the space of the few seconds where her defenses crumbled there was an instant where I could clearly see the fear that had gripped her for the past day or so, then the walls came back up.

“I lead an existence that is uncomfortable, in some regards,” she said. “You did what you thought was best, under the circumstances.”

I didn’t say anything. She seemed conflicted, and I thought she had a better chance of convincing herself of whatever it was she thinking about doing.

“I wonder if I might ask a favor of you,” she said after a while. She pulled the book back out from under the desk. “I checked this out of the library and now it seems I don’t have any need of it. I wonder if perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking it back for me?”

It was hardly an unreasonable request, especially as I went to the library for fun most weekends anyway. But it was an unusual one for Bohd to make. It seemed even more out of character that she would hint I should read something instead of simply recommending it outright, but I couldn’t figure out why else she would be giving it to me. The only thing I could figure out was that she’d decided to give me some information about or for Twyla after all… or possibly an explanation for her behavior… but she still didn’t want to directly discuss another student’s heritage or secrets with me.

“Sure,” I said.

“There is no rush to return it right away,” she said.

Yep… she was definitely assigning reading.

Thank you,” I said, tucking the book under my arm. I resisted the urge to ask what I should be looking for or to examine the book more closely right then and there. She was bending her principles as it was.

If nothing else came of this, Amaranth would be proud that I’d apologized, and pleased that the apology had netted positive results. And if the book… which was quite weighty… didn’t seem to present me with an immediate and obvious answer to anything, I could always turn it over to her. We both enjoyed reading and could do it fairly quickly, but Amaranth practically devoured books.

Once I was outside the building, I took a closer look at the book. The title was written in flowery gold letters: Nights of Fire and Wonder.

“That’s pretty… unambiguous,” Amaranth said when I’d finished recounting what Iona had said. “A lot more so than I would have expected.”

“You don’t think Mackenzie misheard her or something, do you?” Ian said. There was a note in his voice that was accusing, but it seemed balanced against a desire to defend me, and that kept me from jumping in to defend Amaranth and turn the whole thing into another argument.

“What?” Amaranth said. “No! I just… I was hoping there’d be some room for doubt, you know?”

“It seems like doubt is the last thing you’d want when there are murders going on,” Ian said. “I mean, the whole point of an investigation is to remove doubt.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, once there’s some suspicion at all that somebody might be a killer and might have her sights on me, I’d really rather know for sure.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Amaranth said. “As long as there was some room for doubt, there was still the chance… however slim… that there hadn’t been any murders, that there wasn’t any killer, at least not in the sense of a person… a fellow student.”

It seemed like the part that bothered her the most: the idea that another student could have done this. Did do it, as it transpired. Amaranth liked to think the best of people. Even when she knew for a fact that someone had done something pretty terrible, she would be as forgiving and understanding as she could be. When faced with something that couldn’t be easily excused or explained away, she would prefer to believe that it didn’t happen… and when she couldn’t do that without deluding herself, then she didn’t know what to do, except for vainly wishing that it wasn’t the case.

I couldn’t really blame her for that, as I didn’t know how to process the information, either. It was a case where there was nothing we could do, and no redeeming message or comforting moral. Nothing that was said and no way of looking at it would change what had happened, make Leda less dead or Iona more innocent.

With nothing else to say or do, I put my arms around Amaranth and pulled her in close. She had given me so much comfort… giving some of it back seemed like an easy and natural thing to do. It didn’t do anything for Leda or about Iona, either, but it seemed to help her.

I agree that at a practical level it’s better to know,” she said, when we pulled apart. “Especially when there’s danger to you, baby. It’s good that we have a definite answer. It really is. But… I’m disappointed that the definite answer isn’t that she’s innocent and only interested in a little fun.”

“Funny, I think if you asked her she’d say that’s the case,” Ian said. “It’s the definition of ‘fun’ that’s the problem. And if neither she nor Feejee had anything to do with it? Then we’d still have the same basic problem of not knowing. I mean, if you’re gonna regret hypothetical things that could have happened but didn’t, why not wish that no one had died?”

“Ian, I haven’t forgotten about Leda,” Amaranth said. “Or anyone else who died on Veil Night. If I could bring them back with a wish…”

“That’s never a good idea,” I said.

“I mean metaphorically,” she said. “Well, I mean literally bring them back but not with an actual wish. My point is that if I could actually change the world by wanting things it would be a different story… but given what we knew, it was still just remotely possible that no students were involved in any of the, um, deaths.”

“I understand what you mean,” I said. “And how you feel… I’m sorry about the kneejerk correction. Some of my classes have been dealing with wishes, at least in passing, so the strict definitions are kind of engraved in my mind.”

“Anyway,” Ian said, “if it hadn’t turned out that it was a mermaid, you still wouldn’t know for certain that it wasn’t someone you knew. You’d still be in the same situation, as far as uncertainty goes.”

“Yes, but if it had turned out it wasn’t either of them, we’d be on the same ground as the rest of the campus,” Amaranth said. “Mack wouldn’t have any special knowledge that could help the investigation after all, and we’d have no more reason to be afraid than anyone else. If it wasn’t one of the mermaids, it could be a wandering monster, like the official report said. Wouldn’t that be better?”

“For us, yeah, I guess,” Ian said. “Okay. I can understand your disappointment. But why do I think you’re still hoping Iona can be saved?”

“Wouldn’t you rather she was?” Amaranth said. “I mean, if there were a way she could learn that what she did was wrong, and pay for what she did… but in a way that’s, I don’t know… I suppose ‘productive’ is the word I’m thinking of, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily the best one. Locking her away or… getting rid of her, that’s not going to help anyone.”

“It would help anyone else that she might hurt or kill in the future,” Ian said.

“I meant relative to a solution where she doesn’t die but also doesn’t hurt anyone,” Amaranth said. “I operate on the principle that less harm is better than more.”

“Even to a murderer?” Ian asked.

“Well, yes,” Amaranth said. “I mean, if you don’t take that view, then it could stand to reason that whatever punishment you can devise as fitting for a murderer, adding more brutality to it would be justified, or at the very least, acceptable. If more harm is not a bad thing.”

“I’m not going that far,” Ian said. “I just think avoiding harm to her should be considered a low priority. Anyway, if Mackenzie’s right, I somehow doubt she’s going to pay her debt to society…I think it’s more likely she’ll end up paying the family directly. And I’m pretty okay with that, if it comes to pass. From what she said, I really don’t think she can redeemed… or that she wants to be.”

“You weren’t there, though,” Amaranth said.

“Neither were you,” Ian said.

They both looked at me. I held up my hands. I’d been listening to their conversation with interest, but only insofar as I wanted to understand what they were both saying and where they were coming from. I felt like I did, but the fact that I could understand both of them made it hard to sort out which one of them, if either, I believed was right.

“I’m the wrong person to ask about this,” I said.

“Baby, you’d know better than anyone,” Amaranth said, and Ian nodded.

“Iona terrifies me… I feel like Ian’s more right, but I know that’s not a rational response… but that doesn’t mean that if I could sit down and think it through rationally that I wouldn’t come up with the same answer.

“Well, I don’t believe that anyone is past the point of redemption,” she said. “But it’s not up to us to save her, and it wouldn’t be safe for you to try… the one thing I think we can agree with is that you need to steer well clear of her, baby. Don’t give her a chance to catch you alone, walk away if she comes near you… run if there’s no one around. Make noise. Don’t worry about how it looks, as long as you can get other people looking.”

Ian nodded in agreement.

“And also,” Amaranth added, “if a couple of days go by and she’s still walking around… we’re going to have to do something more… say something. If the kind of ‘private justice’ we think is in play here has anything going for it, it should be pretty expedient.”

“So if nothing happens soon, it probably won’t happen,” Ian said. “Yeah, that makes sense… and I believe you already know what I think about this, Mackenzie.

“Yeah,” I said. “And you’re not wrong, neither one of you.”

“It’s good to know we’re on the same page,” Ian said. “I’d feel better if we had an actual plan of action, but, you know, I’ll take what I can get.”

Amaranth had to go get ready for her first class of the day. I started to excuse myself from Ian for the same reason when I realized that we’d be heading to the same place anyway. So we meandered down towards the big atrium-like lobby of the union and just hung out on a bench for a little while, talking about class.

Ian was of the opinion that Bohd was taking an unusual interest in me.

“Unusual for her, I mean,” he said. “Her reputation has always basically been that she’s a teaching automaton. No offense to automata. Or to her. The fireball she dropped on the class last time… well, I think she’s gong to have a new reputation to worry about.”

“Yeah, I really don’t know what to make of that,” I said.

“Did you go and talk to her?” Ian asked.

“No,” I said.

“You realize that whole ‘if anybody wants to come talk to me’ thing was aimed at you?” he said.

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “I mean… yes, I get that she was making a show of support for me. But she said she didn’t care about my demonblood, and I doubt we’ve got the kind of shared experiences where she could tell me anything to help me. I thought she was trying to negate as much damage from her coming out about hers as she possibly could, by offering to talk about it.”

“So you can believe that she’d be so interested in looking out for you that she’d re-arrange her class curriculum to help you and then reveal the heritage she’s been keeping secret for her whole teaching career, but you can’t imagine she’d have anything to say to you in private?” Ian said.

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds kind of silly,” I said.

“But you’re still not going to go talk to her, are you?” he said.

“What am I supposed to say, exactly?” I asked. “‘Here I am, in case you have anything you wanted to say to me?’ If it’s that important… well, she’s a professor and I’m a student. She can kind of demand my attention if she wants it.”

“But that doesn’t stop her from reaching out and seeing if you reach back,” Ian pointed out.

“True,” I said. “But also, I’ve kind of been preoccupied the past few days. I don’t think she could blame me for not finding the time to come see her.”

“True,” Ian said. “How about this? We’ll head over a bit early and see if she uses the opportunity to say anything.”

“Okay,” I said. “But, you know… she’s already stuck her neck out pretty far for me. Maybe that’s honestly as far as she wants to take it.”

It was some consolation that I didn’t have to see the look on Ian’s face when he was proven right moments after we entered the room, as his desk was much closer to the back of the room than mine and so he was already behind me when Professor Bohd looked up from some papers and said, “Oh, Ms. Mackenzie, I was hoping I could have a word with you.”

“Oh?” I said. “I mean, yes. Sure.”

“It’s not class-related,” she said. She glanced back at Ian. “Would you prefer to save it for a more private moment?”

“No, it’s okay,” I said.

“I don’t make a habit of prying into my students’ personal lives… and by that I mean, any aspect of their lives at, at all… but I can’t help being somewhat aware of your family situation,” she said. “Your grandmother is your only living relative?”

“The only one worth mentioning,” I said. “And that, just barely.”

“I thought that you and she might not get along,” she said. “Were you living on your own before the start of the term?”

“No,” I said. “We managed to co-exist through the summer after my graduation, but I really don’t see that arrangement… arranging itself again.”

“Do you know where you’ll be staying over the coming summer?”

“No, not exactly,” I said. “But that’s a long way off.”

“Yes, and if you spend the next several months telling yourself that, you’ll find yourself scrambling to get a roof over your head,” she said. “Have you considered student housing?”

“I’d have to sign up for a full load during the summer session,” I said. “I’m not sure I could afford that.”

“You’d be surprised… I can’t quote the actual restrictions to you, but I know that student housing isn’t just available for full-time students,” Bohd said. “I hire additional assistants for my research projects during the summer, to take advantage of my more extensive free time… many of them are undergraduates from out-of-province who are only taking a class or two so they don’t have to travel back and forth so much. And if you don’t think you could afford the summer semester, how would you manage to live in Enwich?”

“Well, I was sort of counting on finding a job,” I said.

“Ms. Mackenzie, I submit to you that a plan that involves the words ‘count on finding’ isn’t exactly much of a plan, and the inclusion of the qualifier ‘sort of’ does nothing to negat that impression. The summer job market in Enwich is pretty tight, and forgive me for saying this, but I can’t really see you working on a farm.”

“Poor choice of words,” I said. “It’s not like I’m factoring a lottery win or a pot of gold into my survival strategy. I feel like I’ve got some decent prospects. I mean, if nothing else I could sell my energy reserves to an enchanter or to a magic broker… that would hardly be work, but the pay would be decent enough.”

“Decent enough for a student, but you might be surprised how fast renting a property in town and living on your own would eat up your earnings,” the professor said. “Living on campus would be cheaper than any apartment or room you could find in Enwich.”

“Except I’d be paying tuition and going to classes, too,” I pointed out.

“You’d have time for some classes if that’s all you’re doing for your money… and I’d be surprised if your scholarships specify which semesters they can be used during,” Bohd said. “And I think you might be surprised at how much less… complicated… life on campus can be during the summer term. There’s less going on, fewer students around… and a much less homogeneous campus, as a higher percentage of non-human and international students stay behind. Some of my favorite students have told me that their first summer sessions were when they really found their footing. I’ve seen it happen, too.”

“I… I’ll think about it,” I said, and tried to sound like I meant it. I did mean it, but I wasn’t sure I could see my way to doing it. My fall-back plan… or fall-back idea, since it really wasn’t much of a plan… was to go home with Amaranth for the summer. I didn’t want to mention that, because I really didn’t want Bohd that involved with my life, and I doubted she wanted that, either.

“You don’t really have the qualifications for me to hire you as an assistant, but we need raw power, too,” she said. “So you wouldn’t have to leave campus, necessarily, to sell your energy. You wouldn’t have to just be a passive power source, either… you could gain valuable experience, by observing the experiments and helping out in small ways. An internship like that is a more valuable addition to your resume than a stint as someone’s powerstone.”

“What exactly are you working on?” I asked.

“Pseudoelemental constructs,” she said. “Primarily light and shadow. I’ve been doing some work with sound, but that’s still at the theoretical stage.”

“You don’t work with infernal energy, do you?”

“No,” she said. “Apart from the other reasons, it just doesn’t exist in any kind of abundance on this plane.”

“This doesn’t really relate to my area of study,” I said.

“No, but the mundane skills you could learn would be invaluable in a career as an enchanter,” she said.

“I’ll think about it,” I said again. I had a feeling that she would be happy to see me switching my major to elementalism, and I didn’t want to lead her on… or leave myself too open to being persuaded. I would never be an old-fashioned robed wizard like Ian’s father, or a serious academic practitioner like Professor Bohd. I wanted to learn magic I could use to make a good living, but I didn’t necessarily want that magic to become my life.

“Well, as you said… you do have time to think about it,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind if I drop you a few reminders throughout the year.”

“No, that would be fine,” I said. I almost added how likely it was that I would otherwise forget her offer in the intervening months… the fact that she was offering to remind me meant I probably didn’t need to say anything.

“Well, then, I’ll look forward to hearing what you decide,” she said. The door opening at the back of the room ended the conversation, and class began shortly after that. She kept things pretty much on point, after the digressions of the previous class. It was hard for me to judge if the atmosphere in the class had changed any because of her announcement the time before, but again this was because I didn’t have a baseline. Every time somebody coughed or cleared their throat, every time I heard a table leg scoot at all, my brain wanted to interpret it as a sign of discomfort. The quiet in the room got to me, too, which was silly because I knew she ran a quiet classroom.

I tried to end my worries by reminding myself that she could take care of herself. She was a tenured professor, and whatever her students might have been thinking, she was capable of maintaining discipline in the classroom. Still, if something did happen to her as a result of the revelation of her distant infernal ancestry, I knew I’d blame myself. It had been her decision, but my presence had brought it about.

When the class ended, it had been my plan to stick close to Ian since we didn’t have anything else until after lunch, but that plan got upended when I felt a sudden, insistent tug on my hand as we headed out of the room. Mariel had rushed up and grabbed hold of me with two of her hands.

“Um, hi?” I said. I didn’t know how else to react… I looked at Ian, but he seemed even more bemused by her sudden appearance than I was.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Well, sorry, but I’m kind of with my boyfriend,” I said, not wanting to be rude to her just because she’d always been rude to me. I also thought the mention of Ian might blunt her urgency somewhat, as the only thing she’d ever wanted to talk to me about before was Puddy, with the idea that I might be a threat to their relationship. “But if you want to walk with us for a while…”

“We really need to talk, privately,” she said. Her eyes darted to him. “He can come, too, I guess.”

“Mariel… you don’t get to dictate that,” I said. “I don’t particularly want to talk to you but I’m trying to be nice. If you want…”

“We have to talk about mermaids,” she said.

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Of course things were hardly normal on campus, but it seemed like in the natural progression of things that Tuesday should have been more normal than Monday had been. That was how “getting back to normal” worked, wasn’t it?

At the very least, things should have not grown more weird over night without something happening… and yet it seemed that this was what had happened. Fewer people were venturing out of their dorm rooms, and… though this was based more on a nebulous feeling of emptiness, of absence, than anything else… it seemed like more people had left campus.

“I don’t understand,” I said at breakfast. Our table, with Steff, Amaranth, Two, and her friend Hazel in addition to myself, was the largest group. It also held not quite half the population of the room, the people behind the counters aside. “I thought Sunday had made a difference.”

“We lit a candle,” Hazel said. “Problem is, candles don’t take much in the way of blowing out, you know?”

“But nothing new has happened,” I said.

Hazel nodded slowly.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’d think that would just about do it.”

“So we didn’t make a difference,” I said.

“We did to some,” Hazel said. “But it’ll be a long time before we know how much in the long term, and what kind of a difference it is. That’s the way the long term works. That’s why they call it that. Maybe some folks will be easier about us Harlowites. Possibly some will just associate us with really bad times and stay away out of embarrassment. Everybody learns a lesson when they get a helping hand and a kind word from someone they’d always thought poorly of. The problem is, it’s not always a good lesson.”

“I wonder how Dee’s doing,” Amaranth said.

“However she is, I think she’s doing it elsewhere,” Steff said. “I didn’t hear any trace of the underworlders anywhere in the building this morning.”

“Do they make much noise?” I asked.

“Dee and her people, not that I can notice,” Steff said. “But the rest… well, the eyeless fish-beast is kind of hard to miss, you know?”

“The eyeless fish-beast makes noise?” I asked.

“Well… maybe not the sort of noise you can hear,” Steff said. “But it’s hard for me to miss.”

“Dee was here last night,” Two said.

“You saw her?” I asked.

“Yes,” Two said. “She excused herself from her escorts to help me with my dreams.”

“I’m not sure that was such a good idea, Two,” Amaranth said. “I know Dee means well, but I think she overestimates her abilities.”

“Yes,” Two agreed, nodding. “She does. But she did get rid of my ridiculous owl-turtle thing.”

“Oh… well… okay then?” Amaranth said.

What else was there to be said?

“When was this?” I asked, wondering if her escorts had known she was excusing herself.

“While you were busy.”

“Oh,” I said. She didn’t really need to say anything more than that.

“With Amaranth and Steff,” she added. “Having sex with both of them at the same time.”

It might have seemed like a good thing that the dining hall was almost empty, but all this meant was that there were no other conversations going on. The only voice to be heard was Two’s.

“It’s nothing that people weren’t already saying you were doing,” Amaranth said quietly.

There wasn’t a lot of conversation for a while after that. We ate in silence… or in the awkward noisiness of eating while nobody is talking… until Ian came in, bearing part of a newspaper. It was not the student-run Gazetteer but a professional newspaper. Two and Amaranth both said hi to him… I gave him a wave and what I hoped was recognizably a smile, but I’d kind of retreated into shyness and my social reflexes weren’t that quick to begin with.

“Hey,” he said, waving at the others but with his eyes on me in a way that worried me. He held up the section of newspaper. “Does this, by any chance, remind you of anyone you know?”

It was dominated by a drawing of teeth… long, sharp teeth that wouldn’t fit in an easily-conceivable mouth, unless both the teeth and the jaw were protean in nature. I’d seen teeth like those, growing out of a mouth that was changing shape before my eyes.

They looked remarkably similar to mermaid teeth, or at least the sort of teeth that mermaids could have when they wanted to. Were they actual mermaid teeth? It was hard to say… I was pretty sure it wasn’t a picture of Feejee’s teeth in particular, but I also didn’t know how exact a rendering the picture was.

The headline blared “MYSTERY TEETH STYMIE IMPS”. Arrayed around the main picture were images of other races’ teeth that had been ruled out: the rows of iron knives that goblinoids have, a picture of typical human teeth to demonstrate what demon teeth looked like, and pictures of ogre, orc, and lizardfolk teeth.

“Mack, do you know the story of the bear and the wolf?” Steff said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Though it’s possible I heard it when I was little and have forgotten about it.”

“Not really,” Steff said. “Being as I just made it up. Once upon a time a bear attacked a wolf. The wolf got away. Then a hunter came into the woods. The wolf thought, ‘Oh ho, I’ll get even with that bear’ and called out, ‘Hey hunter, there’s a bear over there!’ No one lived happily ever after because no one ever does, but the hunter had a pretty awesome day because he bagged a bear and a wolf. The moral of this story is: don’t be a fucking idiot.”

“I just think it looks like what you said…” Ian said.

“If you think you know what kind of teeth those are, then someone else does, too,” Steff said. “That’s why they released that picture. Let someone else be the one who unstymies the investigators. Someone who’s not connected to us or anyone else who got dragged into this shit. I mean, stymied investigators probably aren’t happy investigators, you know?”

I realized that Steff’s lips weren’t moving and her voice was sounding directly in my ear. In at least Ian’s ear as well, to judge from the way he was reacting, which was like a guy who was frustrated but suddenly recognizing the value of discretion. He set the paper down and sat down.

“We’ll talk about it later,” I said quietly. “I don’t think you’re wrong. But I think I should talk to Lee.”

“You don’t need your lawyer to give the authorities a tip,” Ian said.

“If you’re talking to the authorities without a lawyer, you’ve already fucked up,” Steff said.

“I think he’d agree with Steff,” I said.

“Yeah, nine out of ten lawyers recommend the use of lawyers,” Ian said. “Funny how that works out.”

“I don’t think he’s going to make a whole lot more money if I take two minutes to ask him how to handle this,” I said.

“I just don’t want you to feel responsible if, you know, anyone else gets…”

“People aren’t responsible for anyone’s actions but their own,” Steff said. “And half the time, Mack’s only just barely responsible for hers.”

“Hey, I was only possessed the one time,” I said, thinking to drop my voice from “indignant and loud” to “indignant whisper” before the p-word got out. “And out of my mind with hunger once. I’ll make sure that the imperials know… I just have to talk to Lee, and that is seriously all I want to say about the subject here. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Okay,” Ian said. He picked up the paper and turned it around. “I’m kind of surprised by the ogre teeth… I mean, the tusky bits aside, they look more like reg… like human teeth than I’d expect. They basically look like bigger versions of orc teeth… I know orcs eat a lot of vegetables with their meat, but I didn’t think ogres had that varied a diet.”

“They really don’t,” Steff said. “It’s pretty much meat whenever they can get it.”

“Wouldn’t sharper teeth make things quicker and easier, then?” Ian asked.

“Quickness and easiness aren’t things that ogres value,” Steff said, and that pretty much exhausted that topic.

“So… do you have your spell sketched out for Bohd?” Ian asked me.

“Um… pretty much,” I said, thinking back on what I’d been working up in my head on Thursday. “Except for the part where I have it written out.”

Amaranth handed me a notebook and a pencil.

Ian didn’t seem interested in eating, so breakfast was mercifully over before too long.

Walking with Ian to elemental invocation later that morning, I expected him to press me again about the mermaid teeth, but he just put his arm around my shoulders and said nothing. I was glad… I understood how serious things were, but I had also been serious about talking to Lee. Nothing would be lost by that small delay, but so much could go wrong if I went straight to Inspector Gregory and started trying to explain where I recognized the teeth from.

“Today I’d like to take a little break from our routine work to discuss some advanced concepts,” Bohd said to a half-empty classroom. The words caught me by surprise. Professor Elizabeth Bohd did not seem like the sort of person who took “little breaks”… or even the sort of person who’d use that phrase.

While her benchmarks for individual progress had some range built into them, she had also made it clear that there was a timeline to be kept to.

“What I’d like to discuss is the concept of elemental affinities,” she said. “Everybody has them. By now you’ve probably realized that not all elements respond to you the same way… and vice-versa. There are personal affinities, but these are generally minor compared to racial affinities. Without something to change the elemental make-up of a given individual, there won’t be that much variation between two humans or two dwarves.”

I heard a lot of shuffling around behind me. Though I was stationed at the front of the room, I thought I could feel eyes upon me as she talked about racial elemental affinities.

“I’m sure everyone can think of at least one race with an elemental affinity for fire,” she said. “But of course there are other ones with an even stronger bond. Djinn, for instance, are creatures of ‘smokeless’… that is, pure… fire. Sylphs carry a higher proportion of air in their bodies than most solid races. Dwarves and ogres both have a powerful affinity for earth… but so do humans. Despite the conventional wisdom… conventional among humans, anyway… that the human body represents balance among the elements, humanity is an earth race. It’s simply easy to overlook, given its relative passiveness as an element.

“But what of other affinities? Pseudoelements,” she said. “These are things… concepts, forces… which are not elements by the conventional definition but which can be refined to an indivisble state and which can serve the role of an element in the make-up of matter. Light and darkness are pseudoelements. It was once thought that light was a property of fire, and it can in fact be treated as such… but we now know that fire ‘gives off’ light because it is an efficient destroyer of darkness. Divinity is a pseudoelement, as is its opposite. They are not elements because they are not naturally found in the world and because their origin planes are outside the structure of the elemental planes. However, they act as elements. Their energy infuses things in the same manner as elements.

“And just as some races have an affinity for various classical elements, so, too, do some races have an affinity for pseudoelements,” she said. “As do individuals. And while these affinities can provide a kind of power… or at least an edge in wielding kinds of powers… it’s important to note that even without an affinity for… say, water… one can use water in various mundane fashions. One can drink it, swim in it, float things across it, freeze it, splash things with it, and so on. One can even learn to invoke and shape it with magic, if with some difficulty.

“By the same token, one need not be made out of evil to do evil things. There exists a large number of people and creatures who have done horrific things without anything to account for it more fundamental than the freedom to do so, an ‘element’ shared in all measure by each of us, those with infernal make-up and those without.”

The room was dead silent as she spoke. I didn’t know what exactly prompted her to make this speech… well, my presence in her classroom was probably a big part of it… but I wasn’t sure what good it would do. I felt like she was more drawing attention to me than anything else.

“This does relate to our subject matter, at least tangentially,” she said. “As well as to recent events on this campus. But those are only part of the reason I’m bringing it up… the larger part is as a preface. I have…” She stopped and swallowed. Her face showed more emotion than I’d ever seen from her, of any kind. This kind looked a little like fear. “I have within me small proportions of non-human blood from various ancestors. Among those distant ancestors is a demon.”

The room remained silent. Very silent. I found myself wishing someone would drop a pin, both for the sake of form and just to break the silence. Someone near the back coughed.

“My reasons for concealing this fact… well, it wasn’t something that comes up in classes,” she said. “But my reasons were my own, as are my reasons for revealing it now. I don’t want this to be an issue that affects my teaching. I refuse to have it be an issue that affects anything else. And that is all that will be said about this. If anyone has any questions or would like to raise any concerns, my office hours and a-mail address are both on the course syllabus and the department weavesite. I will also be available in my office for the remainder of the morning, following class. The exercise I had planned for today… well, under the circumstances…”

Watching Bohd trail off like that was almost painful. I didn’t know what circumstances she meant: the events of the weekend, the absence of half the class, her revelation… possibly she didn’t, either.

“We aren’t going to be doing any lab work today,” she said. “If you have a projection formula to show me, you can bring it forward… if you need some more time, or would like some feedback or additional help… you can bring it forward. Otherwise, you are dismissed.”

I felt relieved… what I had scribbled out would work well enough, I was sure, but Bohd had advised me personally to pay attention to my spellbinding. I needed something better than “would work”.

Also, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stand there right in front of her desk for the rest of the hour. I didn’t want things to get weird now that I knew about her infernal blood… there was no reason it had to be, but I felt like if I hung around right then it would be.

I didn’t even bother wondering if this was why the man had said I should pay attention to her. I did wonder if he’d somehow known that she was about to make this revelation, or if he thought I should go talk to her. If her demonic ancestry was as slight as she made it sound, though, then I doubted she could give me much in the way of practical advice about carrying infernal blood or managing other people’s reactions. She’d said at the outset of the semester that she wasn’t concerned about my heritage. Nothing in her speech suggested that this had changed.

If my father wanted me to get together with her… well, maybe he just wanted to see what prolonged close association with each other would do to us. Even a small version of the reaction that female demonbloods seemed able to provoke wouldn’t be good.

It seemed more likely to me that it was a reaction to the rumors and assumptions that were going around in response to Leda’s murder and the other assorted deaths, and the way the investigation had started by focusing on those with “fierce” heritages. As she wasn’t in a mood to elaborate, it was hard to say if she was trying to make a statement, or protect herself or anyone else, or what.

My enhancement class, though as sparsely attended, was boring by comparison, leaving me to wonder what was going to happen in my weapons class. I supposed it was possible that Callahan was bisexual… she certainly looked and acted a bit like what I’d always thought lesbians did, based on all the huge amounts of knowledge I’d amassed being a socially awkward loner in a tiny town living with her grandmother. So it was just as likely that she was completely straight. Her banter… if that’s what it was… with Steff certainly suggested that her attraction to her was based on the image of Steff as a swishy guy. Steff seemed to be operating under the assumption that they’d go on exactly as before, with the possible exception that Callahan would accept her as a girl. No part of that seemed likely to me.

I really didn’t want to see what happened, but there was no way around it. Not only did I need to be there to give Steff my support… in some theoretical sense… but I was committed to showing up and doing my best in Callahan’s class two or three times over. Everybody who cared about me on any level wanted me to learn to defend myself. It kind of made sense to me, too. And Callahan had agreed to move the class indoors early because I had made the case that I wouldn’t benefit from trying to fight in the cold.

Realistically, I couldn’t do anything to help Steff if Callahan was pissed at her. It had been her choice to get involved with the coach in the first place, to give her the idea that she had some kind of personal stake in Steff’s body. That had been her decision, and like she’d said, no one was responsible for her actions… or their consequences… except for her. That didn’t mean I had to get her all pissed off at me, too. Callahan had given me a lot of shit I didn’t deserve, but if I blew off her class after making the deal with her then she would have a pretty legitimate grievance with me.

I went back and forth about whether it would be better to show up with Steff or separately… I was willing to get the teacher pissed off at me on behalf of a friend if it did any good, but I had a feeling that would just multiply our respective problems, get Callahan’s hate for each of us individually splashing on both of us.

In the end, though, it was really up to Steff… she could find me a lot more easily than I could find her. I tried to walk slowly on my way to the fitness center, but the chilly Calendula weather made that difficult. Well, it wasn’t like she couldn’t catch me if she wanted to. I might have worried about forgetting about the venue change given how much had happened over the weekend, but the cold made it really easy to remember not to head back out to the field.

Haste was probably a good idea, anyway. The fitness complex was one of the largest buildings on campus, and though quite a bit of that was the arena, the rest of it was larger than a building that was devoted to physical activity really had any reason to be on the grounds of a major university, and I had no idea where the class room was. I didn’t even remember its name, just that it was a name that was hard to forget… and luckily seeing it on a directory at the front of the building was enough: Kessherrakh Salle.

It wasn’t hard to find after that, especially as Callahan was waiting out in the hall in front of it. Instead of her customary slightly slutty looking leather armor, though, she was wearing a plain brown robe. Well, it could have been in addition to that, I supposed. Her head was bowed when I came around the corner. She looked up at me.

“Welcome to my temple, Emo Kid,” she said. “I’m surprised. You’re one of the first ones to show up for today’s service.”

Discuss this chapter on the Livejournal community.

Next: Callahan.

Once everybody had their materials, Bohd suggested that we start by working on producing a gout in any direction and then refine the technique by trying to aim for the target instead of focusing on it to begin with.

“One must, after all, learn how to handle a bow before aiming for the center of a bull’s eye… the first step is to determine whether you are pushing or pulling when you evoke,” she said. “It’s important to stop and think about that… we call it ‘pulling fire’ but that is not an accurate descriptor for everybody. In either case, the way to direct your evocation’s impetus is roughly the same: at the moment of manifestation, choose a point nearby and re-focus your concentration there.

“If you are pulling, the point should be in the direction in which you wish to aim, and if you are pushing, it should of course be in the opposite direction. If you work at it, you should be able to use either approach. The push approach is somewhat more difficult to aim, but many practitioners report it gives them more ‘oomph’. For now, focus on what you already know how to do.”

I’d always thought of it as pulling or drawing an element forward, except when I was using my own flame… that was a lot more like pushing than anything else. I pushed fire into my eyes, or out through my hand. When I wanted to do something with the heat of the shower, though, I teased it forth. A few small experiments with the nascent fire waiting inside the stubby candle confirmed this impression. I was definitely a puller.

I decided to warm up… no pun intended… by lighting the candle with its own internal flame. I found the element of fire mingled within the flammable wick and I called it forth, inviting it into being. Soon a tongue of fire was flickering away.

The next step was to evoke fire from the fire. Invoking fire from the burning candle simply made it flare up briefly with a flash of comparatively purer elemental fire. I did that a few times to get a feel for it. In order to pull off the directed evocation, I’d have to be able to do that and concentrate on another point at the same time… similar to what I’d done when I first tried increasing the metal’s reflectiveness in my enhancement class, using magic to “latch on” to the quality I sought at the same time I was enhancing it . Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to sustain the evocation it as long as I’d done that.

My first trial made the tiny pillar of flame bow out in the middle as I pulled on it, but didn’t produce anything like the directed stream Bohd had demonstrated. It didn’t even produce an undirected stream… just a deformity in the natural flame. It was like I’d snagged part of it with a hook and tugged on it.

My second attempt, I tried to expand my grasp on the flame to cover the whole thing and then pulled it towards a point above and forward. This time, the whole briefly flame bent and stretched a bit, but still nothing more dramatic.

It was a little bit embarrassing, considering how easily I could summon fire… considering that fire was my element and this was a class I had a natural affinity for.

Professor Bohd was surveying the room to get a look at our early efforts. When I caught her looking at me, I threw a lot of energy into the initial evocation and then wrenched. The result was nothing more than a larger, more visible version of my initial failures, with the addition of melting the top off the candle.

Okay, that was more than a little bit embarrassing.

Bohd came over and put her hand on my shoulder, then cleared her throat.

“Some of you may be using an evocation style that’s a bit more ’hands on’ than others,” she said to the class as a whole. “Most people require a sharp shock… a shove or a yank… to overcome the inertia keeping an unexpressed element in place, a fleeting contact with a lot of force behind it. But some practitioners use something more like a steady hand, a more sustained contact with steady pressure behind it. If you feel that this describes you, then you may have to make some adjustments and try pushing from behind, even if you normally pull. Depending on the circumstances, you may be able to achieve success by pulling repeatedly from points further and further away from the source… ‘walking’ the element, so to speak… but that‘s getting more complicated.”

She nodded to me and I turned my face away, trying to hide my blush.

My embarrassment grew when I realized I’d already done a directed evocation… I’d made water spouts, back when Ian had still been struggling and I‘d been all giddy about my own progress. I hadn’t thought of it as anything more than a fun distraction, but that had been more of a push than a pull.

I focused on the element of fire burning brightly within the candle flame, taking hold of it in my mind. At the same time, I began to concentrate my attention at a spot a couple inches back from it, feeling energy building like a snake ready to strike. I flicked it forward at the same time I evoked, and this time I was rewarded with a lash of fire whipping out four or five inches from the candle.

That was neat, but it wouldn’t hit a target on the other side of the circle.

I heard laughter and my face turned crimson, though when I whipped around to see who was laughing I saw that people were looking at a girl with a dripping wet face.

“Water is not the most dangerous element, Ms. Anders,” Professor Bohd said, tossing her a terrycloth towel, “but you will want to keep your source inside the protective circle all the same.”

I sighed at my silliness and turned my attention back to my own work. Just because giggles erupted behind me didn’t mean that people were laughing at me… not everything that happened had something to do with me.

The distraction had knocked me out of a groove I’d only just begun to find, though, and it took me a couple of tries to even reproduce my short burst of flame. Once I had that basic technique down, though, I could produce a tiny little blast that went anywhere from four to seven inches.

It was tempting to blame the lack of range on the size of the source flame, but Bohd expected us to be able to cross the width of the circle without anything else. With my fire affinity, there was no excuse for not being able to do it.

I tried really concentrating and putting all the force I could into it, and succeeded in making a much thicker and slightly longer gout of flame that was also angled way downward, eating a notch into the candle wax. I realized that looking down at the subject had skewed my aim. In theory, it shouldn’t have mattered since I was aiming my mind and not my eyes… but the image in my mind was what my eyes saw.

I squatted down to get at eye level with the flame. I felt a little embarrassed, but as long as I couldn’t see the rest of class I could pretend they weren’t all staring at the spastic demon girl who couldn’t shoot fire. Repeating the show of force from this perspective solved the angle problem, but from what I could tell it did not make the burst reach any farther.

I heard a too familiar voice cry out, “Ah, yeah!”, jumped up and turned around to see Ian pumping his fist, his own candle smoking slightly after whatever he’d just done, which I had to imagine was impressive. I scowled back in his direction.

“Ms. Mackenzie,” Professor Bohd said, adjusting her glasses. “It still feels odd to address you like that, but if your desire is to be regarded as an adult, perhaps you should remember that this is a university and not a junior high school.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said automatically. I immediately blushed again when I realized how I’d responded, but of course, it didn’t mean anything to her. It was just a respectful response.

“I can’t separate the two of you any further without removing one of you from the room,” she said, coming closer. “I’m not going to need to do that, am I?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Please concentrate on your own work for the remainder. I was just on my way to give you a piece of advice: remember there is no one working technique for everybody. If what you’re doing isn’t working, the best thing to do is try something else. A few general techniques will cover most students’ methods, but the specifics within them can differ to a considerable degree.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, feeling mortified that I’d forgotten this basic principle, which we’d gone over at the start of the term. Even after Bohd had specifically pointed out one way my technique differed from the norm, I’d still kept banging my head against a wall instead of looking for a way around it.

“I’ll let you experiment on your own for a while, but I’ll be back in half an hour to work with you one on one if it’s necessary,” she said. “Though, I have a feeling if you apply yourself, it won’t be, will it?”

“No, ma’am,” I agreed. I was a little horrified at the way my mouth kept defaulting to these responses, but it was the only thing I could seem to say with embarrassment filling me so completely that I was choking on it. Amaranth’s more frequent discipline had made it easier to slip into the mindset.

Professor Bohd smiled, a sort of bemused but definitely pleased smile.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you today,” she said. “But your energy has gone from very chaotic to the most stable I’ve ever seen it.”

With that, she went off to assist other students, and I turned my attention back once more to my own work, where it remained for the rest of the class, save when I paused to listen to Bohd’s snippets of lecturing to the group as a whole.

“It’s perhaps easiest to see the offensive potential of directed evocation,” she told us at one point. “In fact, the whole sphere of elemental magic and evocation in particular are often written off as being ’attack magic’ or ’combat magic’. This is a shallow, short-sighted view, of course… elements are the basic building block of the entire world, and being able to manipulate them directly is a valuable skill in many situations. Even simple direction can be used for landscaping, for firefighting, for recreation, for blowing leaves or clearing snow, or for propelling small watercraft… in short, this magic is so much more than a weapon.”

She repeated variations on that basic theme several more times, including cautions not to get into elemental duels after class even with the “safe” elements like water and air.

I refined what I was doing once more… what I came up with was more complicated, but also more effective. I ended up with a three-part technique: evoke fire, snap forward with a sharp shove, and then pull that, the resulting burst, in the direction I wanted it to go. It was a directed directed evocation. It wasn’t easy, shifting my attention so quickly like that, but it worked and that was what was important. It didn’t take quite as forceful an initial push as I’d been doing… in fact, a smaller one made it easier to control… but just enough to get the evoked elemental fire moving separately from the flame from which it had sprung.

“Excellent work, Mr. Mason,” I heard Professor Bohd say, among her other comments to the students behind me. “You had a rough beginning, but your hard work seems to be paying off… you’re developing quite a flair for this, no pun intended.”

I ignored it. Or at least, I didn’t turn around or glare or anything. Professor Bohd had been very clear that I was to focus on what I was doing. It felt a little weird to realize that I was submitting to her, but I supposed that it wouldn’t make a difference to her why I was behaving in her class, and just as with the evocation, it was the results that mattered the most.

She checked up on me about thirty minutes after the last time, as she’d promised, and she expressed quiet approval at how precisely I could direct a narrow lance of flame. By moving my “grip” on the end of it around, I could even cause it to swing in a slashing arc.

By the time I was able to reach across the circle, I had enough control that I was able to sort of write my name on the stand-up target. I mean, it was sloppy even by the standards of my handwriting and it only said “Mack” because I could only get the letters so small, but if you knew what it said you’d be able to read it.

Having achieved the goal for the class, I started working on simplifying things. I’d realized that my initial problem with just pulling was that I still had a grip on the whole original flame when I did it. The one-two approach didn’t do anything except force me to let go and then give me a more visible separate target. Once I was aware of this, it was easier to simply evoke fire, let go, get a lock on the newly manifested elemental fire, and then pull it where I wanted it to.

That still sounded kind of complicated, but it was a lot simpler and wasted less energy.

I’d started codifying it into a spell in my head, so that I could do a basic fire stream without so much effort, when Professor Bohd announced that we’d be doing just that for Tuesday.

“Have at least the basics sketched out before class,” she told us. “I’ll want to see a formula when you come in. We’ll be working on a larger scale, and I’d rather you didn’t improvise.”

The bell rang and we started putting our stuff away. Professor Bohd put out the fires started by those fire callers who’d torched their targets rather than simply singing them.

“A word before you go, Ms. Mackenzie,” Professor Bohd said.

“Yes, ma’am?” I replied, and saw the hint of a smile. I decided to just go with it. Bohd seemed to have conflicted feelings about me as a student. If a touch of submission it helped my performance and helped her make up her mind, that was a good thing.

“I want you to remember what I said to you at the beginning of class,” she said.

My first urge was to roll my eyes and say, “I know.”, but I swallowed that.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”

“I believe you will,” she said. “But I actually meant the other part.

“Ma’am?” I said, confused.

“Elemental evocation is not just a weapon,” she said. “But it is a weapon nonetheless, and it’s one that you in particular should be learning how to wield. No matter how easily it comes to you, I would not be tempted to skimp on the spellbinding.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and then I stood there, unsure of what else to say or what to do. Hadn’t she been worried that I was going to fry somebody on accident? It seemed odd that she’d want to me to improve my ability to do so.

“Just keep it in mind,” Professor Bohd said. “You may go.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, and I hurried from the room.

Discuss this story.

I couldn’t quite sleep with my piercings digging into my chest and my butt feeling the heat of the punishment… but my mind felt weirdly empty from a combination of the punishment and the meditation session, so it was pretty restful, anyway. I just couldn’t stay there forever, so I ended up getting to my elemental evocation class fairly early.

Ian was there, too, standing in the hall. He spotted me and beckoned me over, away from the other students who were waiting for the door to open.

I smile when I see him. I can’t not. It isn’t just my face that responds to the sight of him, either… that sounded dirty, and yeah, it should, but I didn’t just mean that, either. In a strange way, Ian made me smile all over… body and mind, and maybe even soul.

I was also really intensely aware of the smell of him, his skin, a whiff of shampoo and soap and a little bit of sweat… the first and the last being the main notes I was interested in.

That was sexy, and also a little bit worrying. I would have to tell Amaranth. I hadn’t noticed being sensitive to smell until after I was starving, in my last feeding cycle. If that’s what this was, I wasn’t going to let it creep up on me.

“Hey,” I said. “I… uh… I heard a crazy, stupid rumor about you.”

“You know… uh… I’m not sure how to put this,” Ian said. I noticed now that he was kind of halfway frowning, and realized he had been since I saw him. The smile fell off my face.

“How to put what?” I asked, sure he was about to tell me that it wasn’t a stupid rumor, that he was dumping me and that he was doing it for Jillybean. It wasn’t bad enough that she had to make class time a living hell for me… she had to go after my lovers, too?

“If I had an answer for that, I’d know how to put it,” he said. He sighed. “Look… there are things about you that some guys would find kind of… well… embarrassing.”

“There are things about me that some guys would find kind of hot,” I said defensively. “A lot of guys, maybe.”

“Yeah, and a lot of those things are the same things that are embarrassing… and probably for the same guys,” Ian said. “The point is, I accept a lot of things about you without question. Well, much question.”

“A lot,” I said, folding my arms and scowling. “But clearly not everything, I guess… unless you just felt a burning need to tell me how embarrassing I am and how little you mind.”

“Mackenzie, I’m just… I want to ask you a favor,” he said.
“It’s nothing big, and really, it could almost be for you as much as me. I mean, you’d benefit from it.”

“What?” I asked.

“Could you maybe try to quit blowing off Callahan’s class?” Ian asked.

“Did Amaranth put you up to this?” I asked, remembering that she had gone to his residence hall the night before. “If she…”

“She didn’t!” Ian said. “But, kheez… I’d think you’d be happy to obey if it was from her. I have to feel like I’m making an imposition, or something.”

“I… I don’t think Amaranth would object to sharing authority,” I said, my breath catching in my throat, my body doing the responding-all-over thing again.

Ian could dominate me in a much more hands-on, physical, visceral fashion than Amaranth did. Could and had, though not frequently. Why not make that permanent and official, if he wanted?

“I don’t want that!” Ian said, and that was the end of that idea for the time being. “I want you to give me… give me a little consideration, that’s all. I want you to do this because you want to.”

“What if I want to do what you tell me?” I asked.

“That’s not the same.”

“The result would be,” I pointed out.

“But the path to get there would be a lot less pleasant,” Ian said.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to look sexy and sound sultry, though I probably didn’t do any better than sleepy. “I’d enjoy it. I think you would, too.”

“Less comfortable, then, or maybe safe,” he said. “And damn it, Mackenzie, I’m trying to get you to take this class seriously… and all you want to do is turn it into a game.”

“It’s not a game to me,” I said. “And why do you care how I take Callahan’s class?”

“Because it’s embarrassing,” Ian said. “I didn’t think you were the kind of person to clown around in class, but the way she talks about you, you’re joke.”

“I’m a joke?” I repeated.

“A bad one,” Ian said. “And it makes me feel like a bit of… well, a gigantic loser in her eyes for being with you.”

“You feel like a loser for dating me?” I said.

“I don’t mean it like that!” Ian said. “Wait… yes, yes I do. To her. I feel like I’m a loser to her because it seems like you go out of your way to come across as useless in her class.”

“You’re just going to take her at her word for that?”

“It’s not just her word… it’s her voice, her body language, her posture, her face,” Ian said. “When she gets on a rant about you, her face kind of contorts and… well, sometimes she doesn’t even look human. You piss her off like nobody else.”

“It’s mutual,” I said. “Why aren’t you on my side?”

“I am!” Ian said. “I just… I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask you to take a class seriously or drop out of it. That’ll solve your problems with her.”

“Why do you care how you look to her?”

“Mackenzie, she’s head coach for the gladiator program,” Ian said. “I spend a lot of time with her. Her opinion matters… she might be the best warrior…”

“What do you care about warriors? You should be a bard,” I said.

“Are you sure you want me to be in charge of you?” Ian asked.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t want to see you squandering…”

“You can’t even manage your own life worth a damn… don’t go telling me how to live mine. I’ve got a father for that.”

“Sorry!” I said. “Anyway… Amaranth already told me I have to obey Callahan, so this is all moot. You get what you want, okay?”

“What I want?” Ian echoed. “Mackenzie… would it be too much for you to tell me that you hear what I’m saying, you think it’s reasonable, and you agree with it?”

“Sure I’ll do that, if that’s what you want,” I said, feeling an impish surge of perversity. I turned and started walking away, and fortuitously the classroom door opened a few seconds later.

“Mackenzie…” Ian said, but I just kept walking.

That’s what you get for making googly eyes at Jillybean, I thought wickedly. He shouldn’t care about her opinion… certainly not enough to take her side over mine.

I went up straight to the desk at the front of the room that Bohd had moved me to… glad that I wasn’t at the same table as Ian, glad that he could see me but I’d have to turn around to see him.

Let him chew on that a while, I thought, and then I tried to push him from my mind completely. It seemed like that might have been hard, with Ian being such an important part of my life, but luckily the class that day was extra interesting.

“We are going to be diverging from the syllabus… by this point, everyone has a sufficient grasp on the basics of simple evocation for us to be moving forward,” Professor Bohd said. “That isn’t to say that all of you have mastered every element… and you will need to be able to produce each one on demand for the midterm. I expect each and every one of you to continue working on your own time to refine your skills. Even for those of you who have shown the most progress, a failure to practice will impact your test performance. For now, though, we are going to be moving on to the next step: directed evocation.”

She raised a hand… the sleeve of her cardigan rolled up to the elbow… and pointed a finger out to her side. A bolt of flame shot from it, stopping just short of the wall.

“Nobody attempt that,” she said. “Directed evocation is about calling forth an element and putting it into motion. The act of bringing an element brings with it potential impetus, which will normally dissipate without being expressed. By concentrating and guiding that impetus, you can produce all manner of effects.”

She waved her hand over a glass of water on the edge of her desk, and a puff of steam came up, formed into a smiley face, which winked and then vanished as she shot a jet of air through it.

“The display with the water is, of course, a good deal more complicated than anything I will expect from you in this unit, as it involves shaping forces, a more complex form of directed evocation,” Bohd said. “We will begin with the most basic form, which I’ve demonstrated with fire and air: a jet or projected stream. You’ll begin on a very small scale, working inside the protective circles at your working stations.” She patted a pile of folded cardstock things on her desk. “These are targets. You will them set them up at the far edge of your stone circle, and choose an element: fire, water, or air. Your source for the initial exercise will be an ordinary sample of such: a shallow dish of water, a candle flame, or the air in the room. You should all be more than capable of pulling an element from a representation of itself, so you will be free to concentrate on directing it. As long as the sample is contained within the circle, you won’t have to worry about misfires. On that note, if you choose to work with fire, make sure you keep your hands, hair, and clothing free of the circle, unless you happen to be fireproof.”

She had us come up to get our targets and choose our sources one at a time, starting from the back of the room… which meant I was the last one to get mine, after everybody else had returned to their desks. Professor Bohd pulled me aside as I was picking up my candle.

“Ms. Mackenzie,” she said. “I’d like a word.”

“Yes, Professor?” I said.

“Between your energy reserves and your fire saturation, you could reproduce my first stunt of the morning rather more easily than most people could,” she said. “Producing a blast of fire from thin air is the sort of thing that most people have to work at in a way that requires discipline and patience.”

“You want me to pick another element?” I asked.

“No, Ms. Mackenzie… you’ll have to do fire in the course of things, and you’re hardly deficient in the other elements,” she said. “But I want you to be careful. I can throw fire as a reflex, but it took me years to get to that point and by then the practice of safety when dealing with fire magic was also a reflex. When you learn how to do this, you won’t be able to unlearn it. The ability to direct fire at will… I don’t mean to editorialize, but, well… everyone has moments of ill-temper.”

“You think I’m going to go out and fry someone,” I said.

“I don’t think you would do anything of that nature intentionally,” she said. “I’m speaking of what I fear may happen, not what I fear you will do.”

“So am I supposed to not learn this?” I asked.

“You are supposed to be careful,” she said. “This could prove to be a very valuable skill for you to master, even outside the academic setting… so long as you remember that it’s not a toy but a tool… and, in moments of great need, a weapon.”

Discuss this story

I had a better chance of success with Feejee, of course. She didn’t think anything about giving away priceless pieces of jewelry, but she was also giving serious thought to whether she should kill and eat me or become best buds. Yeah… probably best not to go asking her for favors.

“Um… how about I write up a form letter thing and you can get it into everybody’s mailboxes?” I said. “I mean, if I go around as a student asking for money it might look… off.”

“Oh, yeah, huh?” she said. “I didn’t even think of that.”

“You can figure out who they need to talk to make the actual donation and make sure it ends up here,” I said. “I mean, there’s probably official channels for that.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

It sounded like we were starting to get into the neighborhood of more work than she’d expected to do, but I did not want somebody trying to nail me for running a scam or something.

“Um… I have stuff I need to get back to,” I said. I’d made up my mind to go back to my room… Two’s cleaning and humming and pencil scratching might be annoying, but I figured I’d had my share of random encounters for the evening.

“Okay,” she said. “But don’t forget about this!”

“I won’t,” I said. Yeah… I was already answering questions for my lawyer and doing my history teacher’s work for him. What was a little canvassing for donations on top of that?

Back in our room, Two was already getting ready for bed.

“My friend Hazel says that I have a big day tomorrow,” she said. “And my friend Dee wanted me to remind you that you need to wake up early to meditate for us.”

“Oh, right,” I said. I was supposed to be doing that. I was also supposed to be contacting my grandmother in some fashion. Hopefully if I showed good progress at whatever Dee wanted me to learn, she wouldn’t press me on that.

Two showed absolutely no curiosity about the promised “big day”, nor any sign that she doubted what her friend Hazel had told her.

In the darkness of my bed, I did a little random gazing about the early history of the plains of Prax. It seemed that the area had been uninhabited… meaning, empty of humans, elves, and dwarves… until about five hundred years ago. Before that, there had been lizardfolk and goblin tribes in the Enias River Valley and the wetter parts of the swampy south, along with some “sub-goblin” races that been hunted almost to extinction even before humans arrived, but the open plains had held no permanent settlements until a Merovian paladin, Sir Karoleon, had arrived with a party of explorers. They’d built a fort to use as a base for sending goods downriver to the Merovia-controlled port at Aurelianum.

Fort Karoleon and the Merovian presence was well before the timeframe of my presentation, but knowing the background would be helpful.

I went to bed before too long. My subconscious evidently thought I’d got off too easy during my solo trip to Enwich, because I was treated to a protracted dream about being lost in an underground transit center that was more sprawling and labyrinthine than the real one. Awareness of this difference came and went throughout the dream, along with the ability to acknowledge that some parts of it were from the dwarves’ Underhall and my own basement. An undercurrent of menace followed me throughout the dream, but there was no obvious danger apart from being lost and I woke up without any sort of resolution.

It seemed like this was going to be my new flavor of nightmare…weird and unending. It seemed unfair that I was growing out of the phase of highly sexually charged dreams just as I was getting to the point where I might have been able to appreciate them for what they were.

Two’s voice was the first thing I heard outside the dream.

“Good morning, Mack!”

“Good morning,” I said, through a mouth that wasn’t ready to form words. I yawned and lurched into a sitting position. “How’d you know I was awake?”

“You stopped talking,” she said.

“I was talking in my sleep?” I asked.

“Yes.”

That was weird. I hadn’t remembered much talking in the dream.

“What was I saying?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think it was words.”

We got dressed. Dee reached the hall at the same time as we did… presumably, she’d heard us getting ready and had come out to meet us.

“Good morning, Dee!” Two said.

“Good morning to you both,” she said with her customary bow. “Are you ready?” she asked me.

“As long as I don’t have to get inside a protection circle this time,” I said.

“No, we will be doing some rather simple concentration exercises today,” Dee said. “In addition to teaching you more self-control, I will be working on my own. I fear that recent events have stripped away entire layers of restraint I spent years developing. Even before the… most significant event… my emotional control has faltered slightly.”

I thought about imploding glassware and bent forks… and Steff doubling over like her crotch was in an invisible vise.

We headed downstairs and went into one of the labs. The meditation lesson wasn’t that different than the first one she had given me, only there wasn’t nearly as much focus on relaxation after the initial descent into the meditative state. Instead, she had me focus on forming and holding images.

This was more difficult than it sounded. She’d say, “Picture a square. Form a square in your mind.” I’d think the words, “Picture a square. A square. A square.” The words were stronger than the image was. She’d prod me to keep my mind empty except for the image and to “hold it”, and then I’d start thinking about what would happen in my weapons class that afternoon or about my Mecknights story or tunnels under Enwich.

I was kind of wishing I hadn’t stopped my research so early in the evening. How had the future site of Enwich gone from being essentially a military outpost under the control of a Kharoline knight to the sort of place that would have warlocks building giant underground vaults in the span of about two centuries?

Also, I wasn’t entirely sure I believed that the Underhall was less than five hundred years old. It was certainly older than the buildings on the grounds above it.

“Tomorrow, we will build on what you managed today,” Dee told me when she decided we were done. The way she said it, I thought it was pretty clear she knew exactly how little I’d “managed”.

Amaranth and Steff were both in more than high spirits at breakfast. They both seemed like they were about ready to explode. I was glad the party was only half a day away… I didn’t think any of us could stand to keep the one happy secret much longer, and when it was all over we’d have something we could talk about again.

Before the party, though, I had to get through my classes. Ordinarily I would only have dreaded facing Callahan, but without knowing what I might have said or done on Thursday, my stomach was churning at the thought of facing Bohd as well.

I could very well have pissed off Rankin, but that didn’t worry me so much. It wasn’t just that I valued Bohd’s good opinion… it was the fact that she, in her own way, was as formidable as Callahan. Rankin might have been a capable enchanter, but it was hard to be afraid of him.

Despite dragging my feet all the way to the classroom, Ian was nowhere to be seen when I got to elemental invocation. Bohd was already at her desk, though. She gave me a look over the top of her glasses, which gave me a very inappropriate and more than a little bit creepy twinge in a very inappropriate and more than a little bit creepy place.

“Good morning, Ms. Mackenzie,” she said, still staring at me over her rims. “You’re feeling better, it seems.”

“Um… what do you mean?” I asked.

“Last Thursday, you evinced a badly disrupted aura,” she said. “As well as an unusually poor attitude.”

“Yeah, about that… um…”

How to finish that sentence? Was “possession” a common bullshit excuse for students who slacked off or acted up? Would I need to get a note from somebody to prove it? Or could I avoid the whole thing entirely somehow? The less people were aware of the possession, the better, as far as I was concerned.

“What about it?” she prompted.

“I don’t have any memory of class on Thursday,” I said. There. That was both true and cut to the heart of the matter, while leaving the possession out of it.

“Ah. Were you perhaps possessed?” She asked. So much for that idea. “That’s one possible explanation that would be consistent both with the symptoms I observed and with memory loss.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened,” I said. “I, uh… I got better.”

“Yes, I see,” she said. “You appear up to lab work, at any rate. Do you know about the written assignment?”

“I think I remember you mentioning that there would be one,” I said. “But not what it actually was. Um, it’s not due today, is it?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll write up all the details for you before the end of class.”

And that was the end of it, though she kept looking at me for several seconds before she called the class to order, and I kept catching her looking at me after that. It was freaking me out a little bit. Could she see something wrong or weird about me, or was she staring at me because she had expected to see something like that but hadn’t?

She didn’t say anything else, though. I told myself that Bohd of all people would say something if there was anything at all to say. She was just scrutinizing me to be careful, because I’d freaked her out on Thursday. That was all.

I kept telling myself that, and by the time the lab was over, I almost believed it.

Steff didn’t show up for lunch, but Dee was there. Two was working a lunch shift, and so Dee and I were temporarily alone at the table together when we got back with our food before Amaranth did. I wanted to ask her if she could see or sense or feel or whatever anything weird coming off of me, just in case. Before I could figure out how to ask, though, she took a small bite of a grapefruit and made a very un-Dee-like face.

“What exactly is this?” she asked.

“It’s half a grapefruit,” I said.

She looked down at it.

“What is the other half? Some manner of sour melon?” she asked.

“It’s a grapefruit that’s been cut in half,” I clarified.

“I see,” Dee said. “The grapefruits I am familiar with are smaller and sweeter. If this is what they mature into, then I must say I prefer them young.”

“Uh, I think you’re thinking of grapes,” I said.

“Yes. Are those not fruit?”

“They’re fruit, but they aren’t grapefruit,” I said. “I don’t know why they’re called that. I don’t think they’re related to grapes.”

“No, they’re actually a cross between an orange and a pomelo,” Amaranth said, rejoining us with her tray of food. It had taken her a while to find food that met her needs, and she’d ended up with a grapefruit half, a salad, and a piece of bread. “They look a bit like grapes when they’re growing.”

“Whatever this ‘pomelo’ is, I do not find that an orange is much improved by the mixing,” Dee said.

“If you don’t want to finish that, I’ll be happy to,” Amaranth said. “I like a nice grapefruit every once in a while.”

“I guess it must be what is known as an ‘acquired taste’,” Dee said, passing the small plate to Amaranth. “On the subject of oranges, Two’s friend Hazel tells me that gnomes get oranges from Saint Owain. Do human children receive oranges on the solstice holiday, as well?”

“The winter one, sometimes,” Amaranth said.

“There is more than one solstice?”

“Yes, one in the winter for the longest night, and one in the summer for the longest day,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, I had not considered that might be deemed worthy of celebrating, too,” Dee said.

“I think the oranges thing was mainly from a time when fresh fruit from tropical places was more of a luxury, so an orange was a huge deal,” I said. “And sugar in non-fruit form was even more expensive. I never really got the… well, once, I guess. I must have been like four or so. My grandmother had oranges for all of us. I tried to chew through the rind… that’s the only reason I really remember about it, is my mother told me about it every… well, the next five Khersentides.”

“That’s interesting,” Dee said. “The decline of the custom, I mean. The situation you describe matches that of my homeland, at least in superficial particulars. Fruit is scarce and sugar is unheard of.”

“You said you use it for birthdays,” Amaranth said.

“And for courting gifts,” Dee said. “My Darek, my… beloved man? Male suitor? Beau? My beau, Darek, won the attentions of my Dehsah with fresh fruit in order to court me.”

“He used her to get to you?” I said, looking for clarification. She’d said it like she was proud of him.

“Yes,” Dee said. “It was very clever of him. I had rejected other men out of hand, so happy was I with my pretty Dehsah… but once they two were involved with one another, I had to give him more of a hearing.”

“The things you can learn about yourself when you open your mind a little,” Amaranth said.

“Indeed,” Dee said.

Amaranth might have been happy to hear about Dee’s relationships, but the “my” thing was starting to grate on me a little. I didn’t want to begrudge Dee her happiness, but it reminded me a bit too much of Sooni and “her” nekos.

“It is not anything particular to our relationship,” Dee said to me, and I realized I must have been leaking that thought. “Our language contains various ways of inflecting words… using the possessive form is a way of showing a sense of pride in an individual, that you are willing to claim them, as it were. It’s considered polite when referring to family members or loved ones.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be so judgmental, baby,” Amaranth chided. “I can’t read minds, but it was written all over your face.”

“I wasn’t judging,” I said. “I was just… wondering. Thinking.”

“I apologize,” Dee said. “It was a private thought. I should not have given it air… I only sought to reassure you. I know that both you and Steff have expressed some concern over the nature of my relationships.”

“It isn’t any of their business, Dee,” Amaranth said. She looked at me. “And somebody’s going to get her little butt smacked if she can’t remember that. Anyway, Dee, why this interest in surface holidays? Thinking about sending your beloveds Khersentide gifts?”

“I’m unsure of the appropriateness of that,” Dee said. “But Hazel had mentioned the oranges, and I found the commonality in our cultures, however slight, to be interesting.”

“I’ve always said that different cultures had more in common with each other than they had differences,” Amaranth said.

“I’m not sure I would go quite that far,” Dee said.

“But that’s one huge similarity right there,” Amaranth said. “And it can’t be the only one, right?”

“I suppose it is unlikely to be so.”

“So… there you go,” Amaranth said.

I didn’t think Amaranth had proven her point as neatly as she seemed to think she had, but I held my tongue.

I figured I’d given her enough punishment fodder for a single meal.

At least, it seemed like everything was right. When I got to the elemental lab, I gave Ian a quick kiss and grope, and breathed in the heady scent of him. He’d masturbated that morning. I could smell it on him.

The kiss surprised him… the touch more so… but I couldn’t restrain myself. It was bad enough that I couldn’t have him in my mouth, or my cunt. It would be too much to ask me to keep my hands off him, too.

The first sign I had that something was very, very wrong came mere moments after Professor Bohd sat down at her desk. She glanced up from her notes, then just about jumped out of her skin. I mean, she literally jumped, scooting her chair back, and then stared at me… taking off her horn-rimmed glasses and rubbing her eyes before looking at me again.

“What?” I said, looking at my shirt. It had some bacon crumbs on it, but it was hardly dirty.

“Miss… ah, Ms. Mackenzie, what in the world have you been up to today?” she asked.

I looked at her, not sure what answer she was looking for.

“Um… I ate breakfast,” I said. “This is my first class, so really… nothing.”

“Are you feeling alright?”

“I had a headache,” I said. “It’s sort of been coming and going, but I feel fine now. Why?”

“Your energy is in a state of considerable disarray,” she said. “I cannot, in good conscience, allow you to perform magic. The results would be far too unpredictable.”

“You can’t allow me?” I repeated, feeling ire rising up within me. Yes, something was very, very wrong… there was no good reason for Professor Bohd to be speaking to me like this. I was easily the best student in her class, even with stupid shit like Ian to distract me.

“I’m afraid not, and watch your tone, young lady,” she said. “I’ll be giving the class a written assignment today. You’ll go to the library to work on that while the rest of the class stays here and does their invocations.”

I would, would I? It seemed to me that if she was going to dismiss me from her class, then her authority over me ended… it would be one thing if she’d asked me to work on the paper, or even politely suggested it, but the way she baldly stated that I would do this thing…

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, forcing a smile. “Of course I will.”

The hell I would. I could be reviewing that warrior book for Callahan, or better still, working on my Mecknights fic and looking for an idea for what to do with Steff.

Well, Steff probably had plenty of ideas about what to do… but I had promised her dinner first.

It occurred to me that Steff and I had a common interest, one which she’d only been able to indulge on her summer vacation with Viktor and which I, for some reason, had only availed myself of in tiny little bits and pieces. If she was serious about learning to appreciate ogre cuisine, there were some interesting possibilities there.

I didn’t think Steff would quail at free-range food, but apart from the risks it would involve, it might take too long to arrange. There were slavers in operation in Enwich, though… I probably couldn’t afford a whole slave for slaughter, but there might be a market in surplus parts, from people who needed a heart or liver or whatever.

It probably wouldn’t be cheap, but then, I was about to sue the pants off the school… and anybody trading in man meat would probably know a buyer for infernal blood.

While I was considering these things, Bohd was droning to the class about the paper and her requirements. It seriously took about half an hour. As soon as she was done, I was gone.

The library was pretty dead in the morning, so I grabbed two crystal balls that were next to each other. I recalled my Mecknights work in one and read through it. I read through it again, and wondered if I’d kept the wrong draft somehow… I couldn’t put my finger on it, but somehow it wasn’t quite as good as I’d remembered it being.

That bothered me. I felt like something was off… like something had changed in the world around me. Whatever the difference was, it was subtle… but at the same time it was jarring.

I’m a better writer than this. I know I am.

So why did the lines I was looking at look like shit?

I’d meant to pick up where I’d left off, but now I found myself wanting to scrap the opening of The Ratchet Chronicles and start over… and not having any idea how to make it any better.

It was even more disconcerting than Bohd’s disrespect had been.

I left it up and turned to the second ball. I could turn it over in my head while I worked on my other little project. My first attempt to divine out some slavers ran into a wall of fire, as did my searches for human meat and cannibalism. What the fuck? I had thought I was in a major university library, not an elementary school resource room.

Well, it wasn’t like I didn’t know how to get around that kind of thing… it would just take a while, since I wasn’t familiar with the school’s wards. While I threaded my way through the ball’s defenses, I let my mind turn over the possibilities.

A restaurant that specialized in the right type of fare would be ideal, but I’d settle for a do-it-yourself thing if it came down to it. If I could find the meat, I could look for inns that had kitchenettes. I couldn’t think why I’d objected to getting a room… my only class before three was thaumatology, and Professor Goldman had practically given us permission to skip on the first day. Yeah, Friday was quiz day, but I had a free grade coming.

That would be a date worthy of my love for Steff: a real meal, cooked and enjoyed together, and then a night of having my ass pillaged repeatedly… and whatever else her wonderfully twisted little mind could come up with.

Of course, if we had a whole night to enjoy ourselves, maybe the live food concept would be worth another look.

Once I was through the wall, I realized right away that self slaughter was going to be impossible, at least if I wanted to stay inside the bounds of law… that was probably a good idea for our first date. Steff was hotness incarnate, but she wasn’t worth getting arrested and destroyed for.

An adult female slave… and it would have to be female, I wasn’t that interested in male meat… of any attractiveness started at five platinum. A virginal one was worth twenty times more. If I wanted to feed my hunger along with my impulses, I’d have to get some blood separately.

It struck me as both stupid and horribly unfair that it was illegal to harvest from child slaves… an adult took eighteen years of feed and care to grow, but babies should be able to be churned out once a year without a problem. They would make for cheap food… and they’d probably be really tasty, too… if it was legal, but because it wasn’t legal to slaughter them or traffic in their flesh, they’d cost way more as food than a much larger and expensive-to-raise adult.

Going outside the bounds of law was starting to look more and more attractive.

Of course, there was always Two. Dear, sweet Two… she was almost as innocent as a baby, a bit meatier, and absolutely free for the taking… but if Steff had balked at torturing me, there was no chance she could be induced to cook and eat her precious “pseudowench.”

I’d have to prepare her in advance and make sure Steff didn’t know where her meal came from, if it came to that. I put that possibility on my mental “maybe” list. Two was begging to be eaten, but I’d really rather have somebody I could share completely with Steff, from beginning to end. We’d both denied ourselves for so long… we deserved a treat.

It seemed like slavers didn’t deal in parts… not directly, at least… so I tried a few different approaches. At first I just got articles about ogres and demons, and some moralizing weavesites decrying the brutality of the slave market and the traffic in flesh, but eventually I found strings that led me to “alternative” butcher shops that offered “unusual components for magic or other use.” I made a note of the ones that looked most interesting and kept pulling at the string.

Finally, I found what I was looking for: an advertisement for a restaurant that listed no name and had no menu selection, just the tagline, “We Serve All Races*”… and in smaller text, “*Subject to availability.”

I pulled the string, and found myself in heaven.

Looking at the pictures… the artfully arranged entrees, the recognizable cuts of meat… I could feel the great black pit yawning open within me, beneath me, sucking me down… I felt the most wonderful hunger stirring within me. Why had I denied myself the taste of human flesh for so long when I knew there were people in the world who even the law recognized as nothing more than property, the same as any other livestock?

Sure, it was expensive… I couldn’t afford to eat like this all the time… not legally, anyway… but there was no reason I couldn’t indulge some of the time.

Some of their selections were clearly designed to look like any other cut of meat, or were even ground up to totally disguise their nature, but some of them were designed and arranged to emphasize the fact that you were looking at a part of a human being. It all looked good to me, but those were the ones that really got my juices flowing… in my mouth and elsewhere.

I couldn’t see much particular appeal in eating a foot… the only feet I was interested in tasting belonged to the beautiful Ms. Suzune Hoshinotama, and that interest wasn’t culinary… but some of the other whole cuts were interesting, to say the very least.

I went a little crazy and started putting in a delivery order for whatever caught my eye. When I was finished going through their human menu… the most well-represented race, apparently… the total price was about ten times what I had available.

I also realized that I didn’t have an address to deliver to.

I cleared the story off of the other crystal ball and started looking for inns. I wouldn’t need kitchen facilities after all, but we’d definitely want more privacy than I could get in a dorm… both for the feast and what came after. I looked for one that was about medium price. Cheap rooms would mean thin walls, I figured, but I couldn’t afford to go too nuts. The food was expensive.

By the time I’d made all the arrangements for our night on the town… arrangements that would just about use up the rest of my remaining coins… it was just about time for lunch. I hadn’t had any time to try to fix my terrible Mecknights story, but I figured I just might have to face the fact that it was essentially unfixable. In any event, I was feeling fucking ravenous.

I really hoped against hope that I’d run into Two before any of the others.

If nothing else, it would be good to get some practice in. Steff had more experience in eating humans and near-humans than I did… if that wasn’t an embarrassing state of affairs, I didn’t know what was.

On my way back to Harlowe, I heard Two calling out her insipid greeting… a greeting that sounded more like “Eat me, please!” every single time I heard it… but I couldn’t spot her.

There was a nimbus of light that seemed to be moving towards me, and on top of making it hard to see, it was also doing something to my hearing. My ears were ringing… my whole head began to swim as the light drew closer and then the pain, oh fuck, the pain, burning me, tearing away from myself…

No, I won’t go back… I can’t go back!

“I said, ‘Hello, Mack!’” Two said, stamping her foot in that adorable way that she did. I had to smile at her little pout, even through my raging headache. It would have been unconscionable to provoke her on purpose, or else I probably would have done it all the time.

“Hello, Two,” I said, leaning into Amaranth’s welcoming… and welcome… embrace.

“Baby, put your hood up and zip up your coat,” Amaranth said. “You’re shaking like a leaf. Really, after that fuss you made this morning…”

“Oh, I must have been in a hurry?” I said, fixing my coat. I was freezing. It was amazing I hadn’t noticed it before… I guess I’d just been so excited about seeing Amaranth.

“Well, are you ready for lunch?” she asked.

“Yeah, I feel like I’ve been thinking about food all morning,” I said.

Amaranth frowned, biting her lip and digging her nails into her thigh.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But you seem… off… today.”

“I feel fine,” I said. “I’ve got a headache, but it’s fading.”

“Anything unusual happen in your lab class?”

“Nothing that I can remember,” I said.

My words about fate and having a target on my head were coming back to me. Damn it.

“The campus one,” Ian said. “You really didn’t see it?”

“No, I don’t really pay much attention to the campus paper,” I said. Another memory came back to me. The reporter, Kent something… he’d wanted to talk to me after my ordeal in the maze. Had he done something?

“Yeah, neither do I,” Ian said. “I don’t think anybody does, really… people just grab it because it’s free and it’s there and they need something to read. But I’m surprised you didn’t see it lying around the dorm or something.”

I had to stop and think. Had I ever seen the campus newspaper sitting around Harlowe?

“Where do you even get the paper from?” I asked. I knew there were little bins as you came into the union, but I didn’t imagine that was the only distribution point.

“They have them at the front of all the residence halls,” Ian said.

Of course.

“All but Harlowe, apparently,” I said. “Anyway… what exactly did the paper say?”

“Um, the headline was something about your best friends giving their opinions on your disappearance and recovery,” he said.

I looked at him, trying to figure out what he seemed so apprehensive about. If that was the other shoe dropping, fate was really off its game today.

“That doesn’t sound bad,” I said. “I mean, my friends can be a little… wait. When did any of my friends find the time to talk to this reporter before Monday?”

“Sunday,” Ian said.

“Amaranth and Two were in Enwich all day Sunday, with me,” I said. “And Steff was with Viktor. Dee was resting… unless this is your roundabout way of telling me you got your name in the paper, who the hell does that leave, exactly?”

“Um… to start with, your best friend,” Ian said. He cringed, like he was bracing for me to hit him.

“My best friend? But, that would probably be Steff,” I said, confused. “She would have been over with Viktor…”

“Your best friend Sooni,” Ian clarified.

“Sooni?” I asked, the presence of the paddle at my side doing absolutely nothing to remind me that I was supposed to watch the volume of my voice. “What the fuck did that crazy bitch say?”

“I do hope everybody’s ready to begin,” Professor Bohd said in a loud, clear voice from the doorway. “We’ll be moving on to bigger and better things after this week,” she said, speaking as she crossed to the front of the room. “So, everybody, please focus on your work. Also, so you’re forewarned, I will be assigning the first of three papers this Thursday. You will have two weeks to complete it. Some lab instructors assign the minimum amount of written work because they don’t particularly care about it. I’m the other way around. I have high standards for my written work, which is why I ask for so little of it. Miss Mackenzie, if you would come switch work stations with Mr. Robeson up here,” she said, tapping one of the tables that was right in front of her desk. “I’ve enjoyed watching your progress and would like a chance to do so up close.”

“Um, there’s more,” Ian whispered quickly.

“More?” I repeated.

“Miss Mackenzie, if you please?” Professor Bohd said.

“I’ll tell you later,” Ian said.

“Okay,” I said. I grabbed my stuff and passed the very confused-looking Robeson on my way to the front of the room.

“Now then, class,” Bohd said, smiling. “You all know what you’re working on, so let’s get to it. I’ll be making the rounds just as soon as I get caught up on a few things.”

She sat down and, after adjusting her tortoise shell glasses, started sorting some sheets of paper into two stacks, marking them as she went.

I got up and crept towards her desk. As much as I would have loved to get right on the frittering away of an hour and a half of elemental lab work trying to figure out what my “best friend” Sooni had told the newspaper and what exactly the “there’s more” portended, I wanted to be consistent in how I dealt with my teachers.

“Um, Professor?” I said, while I was still what I figured to be a respectful distance away. “Can I talk to you about something?”

“Certainly,” she said, without looking up.

I came closer.

“I don’t really have to explain why I moved you, do I?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “That’s fine. I mean, I think it’s a good idea, it’s just… I kind of prefer to be called ‘Ms. Mackenzie.’ Instead of ‘Miss.’” Her hands froze. “If that’s okay,” I added.

She raised her head and looked at me, over the rims of her glasses.

“This isn’t a put-on, is it?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I just… I think it’s more respectful.”

“I can almost see that, a bit,” she said. “It’s just… well, it isn’t even proper speech.”

I didn’t really have an argument ready for that. I mean, she was right. It sounded a bit silly to my ears, like somebody saying “the pinecone is a dog,” or something… they were all real words in the correct grammatical order, but they didn’t add up to make any kind of sense.

“Well, yeah, but that can change, right?” I asked. “I mean, a couple decades ago, they used to address non-human men as ‘Master Karl’, or whatever.” Lynette had mentioned this to me. I could only assume it was actually true. “Then, I guess somebody pointed out that with humans, that style’s mostly only used with kids… or slave masters, though that’s not really a lot better.”

“Well, yes, that as may be, but in that case it was because the term was found to be insulting,” Bohd said. “But there isn’t anything wrong with ‘Miss’. I was addressed that way myself, when I was a good… deal…”

She trailed off, and I finished the thought for her. “Younger?” I said. “See? It’s the same thing. I mean, the school requires female human students to be addressed with ‘Ms.’ so there’s no implications of disrespect to anybody, so…”

“Would you prefer to be addressed in the human style with your surname, then?” she asked.

It was funny that she asked this, as I’d previously asked most of my other teachers to call me that way… but because Professor Bohd had never been anything less than respectful to me, and because I’d let it go for so long, I’d never bothered to correct her when she called me “Miss Mackenzie” before.

I liked Professor Bohd. She’d cut me a lot of slack and gone out of her way to point out the danger I was in from teachers who wouldn’t. I hated to endanger her good will by arguing with her.

“No,” I said. “I’d prefer to be addressed as ‘Ms. Mackenzie’.”

She sighed.

“Students in entry level courses don’t usually provide me with this level of difficulty,” she said. “But… if you insist, then I don’t really see the harm.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“It might take me a while to get used to it,” she said.

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Was there anything else?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, then, back to work for both of us.”

“Thank you,” I said again, and headed back to my new station to get on with the important business of my class work.

What the hell had Sooni told the guy? That I liked to watch kid’s shows in my underwear with her? That I was a horrible liar who made promises and then broke them for fun? There were any number of embarrassing or damaging things she could have told him that were based on her tentative grasp of reality… and there was nothing to say that she couldn’t have resorted to malicious lies.

Even if she hadn’t, maybe Maliko had. Ian had said “friends”, plural. Had Sooni’s nekos decided to get in on the act?

Or had somebody else seen the reporter asking around about me as an excuse to make trouble? I could see the Leightons seeing that as funny.

It was impossible to concentrate, so I stayed away from working with fire. I decided to try another invocation: water from air. Pulling anything from air was a pretty ambitious subject to tackle, but I’d already managed some earth while under stress, so water didn’t seem like that big a deal.

Also, I figured my scattered state of mind would make air easiest to relate to… and if Bohd noticed I wasn’t getting anywhere, it could be chalked up to the difficulty of the task I was attempting. I was already way ahead of the game… a few members of the class—Ian included—were still working on getting fire reliably. In that light, me spending a class period testing my limits wouldn’t be that big a deal.

Water from air… it happened all the time, in nature. Water was weightier than air so it sort of wanted to fall out of it, anyway. Clouds were air with a superabundance of the stuff. It was only the traces of fire within them that allowed them to remain aloft, but if they got heavy enough they’d start to break apart and the water would come raining down.

Fog was basically the same thing, but without all the fire. That was a good thing, too… otherwise people would risk being struck by lightning every time it was a little misty out.

I thought about rain, and about fog, and early morning dew being left on the grass, and I reached out to the air in front of me with my magic. I could feel it, in passing. If I tried to hold it, it went slipping out of my grasp.

This was the sort of thing that had to be handled very delicately. I didn’t need a tight hold on the air, I just needed to have a kind of feel for it. It was the water I wanted.

The classroom air was a bit dry, but not terribly so. I remembered Professor Bohd’s advice on using my connection to fire in order to approach water. Elemental water recoiled from me, but that very reaction made it easier to find when it was dissipated throughout the air. I just had to open myself up, reach out, and look for the…

Just what the hell had that guy written about me, anyway?

By the period’s end, I’d made contact several times but hadn’t done any better than getting a little mist-like swirl of water droplets to briefly appear before they were absorbed back into the air. Every time I’d managed to attain the right mix of mental relaxation and concentration, my mind had slipped back to the subject of the newspaper article and its possible contents. How was I supposed to get anything done with that hanging over my head?

Still, Professor Bohd seemed impressed with my initiative, and told me so effusively near the end of the class. Despite that having been my planned cover story, I felt guilty at receiving her praise when I’d basically wasted the day.

I wanted to be mad at Ian for telling me about it, but he’d had no idea I hadn’t seen it. He couldn’t have guessed what the incomplete knowledge would do to me. I told myself that. It would be terribly unfair to take things out on Ian. It would. It would. I repeated those words in my head, in time with the slapping of my paddle against the side of my leg as I headed back towards where Ian was waiting for me at the back of the classroom.

“Who else was in the article?” I asked him once we were out in the hall.

“I’m not sure how to tell you this…” he said.

“Just say it,” I said. “Please. No more suspense.”

“Puddy,” he said.

Shit.

It made a sick kind of sense, though. If Kent had shown up at Harlowe and hadn’t been able to find me, wouldn’t he try looking up my “known acquaintances?” I couldn’t say if it was just because I had the bad luck to be her roommate, or because she’d seen me as her ticket to notoriety, or something else entirely, but Puddy had certainly done her damnedest to make sure the whole campus knew we were “acquainted” during the first week or so of school.

“What exactly happened between you two, anyway?” Ian asked. “I mean, it sure seemed like you were, you know, dating… and now you’re like worst enemies.”

“I think we were always ‘worst enemies’,” I said. “I just wanted friends too badly to realize it. Though I don’t think of her as an enemy… exactly.” The topic made me uncomfortable. Part of me felt bad for Puddy and part of me, perversely, mourned the loss of my first “best friend”, no matter what the truth of the situation had been. “Anyway, what exactly did this article say?”

“Maybe it would be better if you just read it for yourself,” he said.

“Do you have a copy?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I just assumed you’d have read it.”

“Well, I bet it’s on their weavesite,” I said. “Let’s go to the union. We can look it up before we go to lunch.”

“Um…”

“What?” I asked.

“I’ve kind of got practice,” he said. “But… I can see you at dinner, if that’s okay.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’re going to the dance on Wednesday, right?”

“Oh, totally,” he said.

“Oh… and I have a mirror, now,” I said, taking it out of my pocket to show it to him. “For a little while.”

“Where’d you get that?” he asked.

“My attorney gave it to me so he can keep in touch with me,” I said.

The words “my attorney” were among those that automatically made me feel like I was being phony. “My attorney will call you with the details.”

Who had an attorney, honestly?

I did, apparently.

“Cool,” he said. “I’ll have to give you a ‘flect later.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling the smile of the hopelessly lame. My boyfriend was going to give me a ‘flect later! It would probably go something like…

“What are you doing, Mackenzie?”

“Not much.”

…but I was looking forward to it all the same.

He gave me a kiss on the cheek and then he was off. I sighed. I could hardly resent him taking the time to rehearse with his band when I’d wanted him to embrace his musical talent, could I?

Probably not. It wouldn’t be fair.

Also, if he wasn’t in a band, I couldn’t picture him up on a stage, bent over his lute, with no shirt on.

Mmm…

I needed to focus, though. I headed straight for the student union so I’d have a chance to get on the ball without being missed by the others. As it was nearing midday, the room was pretty busy with students either doing homework or idly gazing, but there were still open stations.

I sat down and focused my mind. It didn’t take long to find a string to the Gazetteer‘s page from the school’s main site.

My first thought when the image formed was that I wouldn’t have to look far to find the article, because the very first thing that became visible was an image of Sooni beaming in her stupid black tit-sling dress, with Kent Angstrom’s by-line floating over her head.

But… she’d been wearing that dress Monday evening. Hadn’t Ian said it was yesterday’s paper that she was in? That was all I had time to think before the rest of the page came into view, topped with the headline:

Harlowe’s Super-Star Student Senator
Suzune “Sooni” Hoshinotama promises equality, change.

What would she say to me now that I’d deliberately transgressed, even for something harmless and stupid? What would she do? Had she been the hated Professor Ariadne, I’m sure my mind would have come up with some kind of lurid punishment, but I was drawing a blank.

Would she yell? Kick me out of her class? Fail me?

I stood quietly behind my work table. I wished I had a chair. Standing felt… wrong. Impudent, almost. I felt like I should have been crouching and cowering on the floor, but of course that would have been even more inappropriate.

Bohd came back to my table and stood across from me, looking at me silently for many seconds. Her skin seemed to be stretched tight across her face. She was white and trembling. I was red and frozen.

“You silly, stupid little girl,” she said, her voice shaking. My eyes teared up at the words. I was stupid. Of course it was true. “What were you thinking? Were you thinking?”

“I only…”

“Be quiet!” Her nostrils flared. For a moment I thought she was going to hit me or scream in my face. “I should report you. I honestly should. There’s right, and there’s wrong, and two wrongs do not make a right… showing you favoritism myself will not undo the prejudice you face from others… others who would not hesitate to act on this kind of behavior, and of course, there is only one course of action that is prescribed for cheating. I couldn’t give you just a warning or slap on the wrist if I wanted. That’s what zero tolerance means. Do you understand that?”

I stared at her, feeling helpless. Was I supposed to answer her? The last question she’d asked had evidently been rhetorical. I didn’t want to make her any angrier.

“Do you have any idea how reckless that was?” she ranted on, when I didn’t answer. “Are you honestly unaware how precarious your position is? If you pull this kind of stunt in your other classes, you might very well find yourself packing your bags. You cannot afford to be this careless, Miss Mackenzie… you cannot! Well… do you have anything to say for yourself?”

That seemed pretty unambiguous.

“I was only trying to help,” I said. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

“No, I suppose you didn’t,” Bohd said. She took a deep breath. Her manner changed, tension draining away from her face. “That’s what’s so terribly tragic about all this.” She leveled an unblinking stare at me. I was uncomfortably reminded of Amaranth, giving me the look. “I’m moving you to a different table, effective Thursday. You will be on your best behavior from now on. If there is any more funny business, you’re out of my class. I will not be responsible for your expulsion, but neither will I cover for you.”

Of course, being booted from a course could be the same thing as expulsion, if it resulted in a failing grade. I couldn’t afford to stay in school without my scholarships, and I couldn’t keep my scholarships if I failed a class.

“Professor,” I said, trying to sound respectful and probably sounding timid instead. “The thing is…”

I stopped, struggling to take my next breath around a lump in my throat.

“Yes?” Bohd prompted.

“I can’t afford to fail any…”

“Then your path should be clear,” Bohd said. She sniffed. “That’s all.”

I grabbed my bag, then hesitated. I felt a need to explain myself, to the extent that this was possible. I needed to redeem myself in her eyes, if I could.

“I really didn’t mean…”

“That’s all, Miss Mackenzie.”

I grabbed my bag and scurried out of the room as fast as I could. I made it out the door before the dam broke and I slumped back against a wall by the corner of some stupid display case, sobbing.

She was right… I was stupid. Steff had lectured me for my initial decision to tough it out in Ariadne’s class because she knew what the consequences of being failed would be. If I couldn’t continue my schooling, I’d be torn away from her, from Amaranth… and of course, from Ian. If Bohd had been less sympathetic, my bid to help him would have ended up keeping us apart.

Of course, I’d fucked it up so badly that I’d probably brought that about, regardless.

“You like being called names,” Ian said, suddenly uncomfortably close, in front of me. I looked up so fast I banged the back of my head against the wall, feeling chips of brick falling into my hair and clacking my teeth together painfully. The world swam for a few moments, but at least I didn’t chomp my tongue. “You beg to be hit, and you cry before I get to yell at you properly. You really take the fun out of being mad.”

I gave him a weak smile, through the tears.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were doing it on purpose,” he said. His eyes still showed some anger, but he was trying to hide a smile of his own and just failing, maybe on purpose. “Just to bug me, you know?”

“You… you caught me,” I said.

He sighed.

“I came back to my room last night and found the words ‘demon lover’ gouged into the door,” he said. “It’s fixed now, but my roommate’s pissed at me because somebody might see it and think it’s about him.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It isn’t your fault,” he said. “And it probably wouldn’t stop if I broke up with you… but honestly, it’s the sort of thing that weighs on me.”

“Do you really care what other people think?” I asked.

“I don’t want to. All things considered, it almost makes me want to stick by you out of stubbornness, you know? To say ‘fuck you’ to people like that. I kind of have to care what my roommate thinks, though,” Ian said. “I live with him.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, sniffling.

He handed me a wadded up tissue from the pocket of his corduroy jacket.

“It’s, uh, just crumpled,” he said. “I haven’t, you know, used it or anything.”

“Thanks,” I said, dabbing at my eyes and nostrils with it.

I didn’t blow my nose.

I hated blowing my nose in front of other people. It always seemed way too loud and gross when I did it. I suspected I just didn’t know how to do it properly, that there was some secret trick I’d never mastered, like how I’d never learned how to whistle.

Of course, that idea seemed ridiculous most of the time… just none of the times I was crying and needed to blow my nose.

“Does it count for anything that I’m crying over this?” I asked.

“I’m not adding up points,” he said. “But I noticed, yeah. It would count for more if I thought you’d break up with Steff for me, if I asked.”

“I wouldn’t break up with you if Steff asked me to,” I said. “Which she wouldn’t.”

“You would if Amaranth did, though,” he said.

I sighed. He wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t see any point in going over it again. Amaranth was the first person who’d told me she loved me since my mother. Even if I hadn’t loved her back, I would have followed her anywhere for that.

Was that unhealthy? Or was it just love?

“I thought about you during class yesterday,” I said. It was something, anyway. “It was… pretty hot.”

Hadn’t it been? I was fuzzy on the details, but I’d definitely been thinking about going down on him.

“I think about you a lot of the time,” he said. “Saturday night… the lead-up was kind of messed up, but it was unbelievable.”

I nodded. It really had been.

“Does that mean you’ve made up your mind?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I gave a little sob, and the streams from my eyes which hadn’t fully stopped redoubled themselves.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my face. “Fuck… I don’t know why I’m still crying. I wish we could just talk about this, but…”

“Um,” he said, shifting uncomfortably. “It’s not, you know…”

“What?”

“That time?” he asked.

I blinked away tears, trying to figure out what he meant. Then I had it.

I sniffed hard, pulling an impressive amount of snot into my throat without meaning to–just in case you were wondering–and glared at him. What the hell did he know about that? Not every girl got all weepy and moody around her period, and anyway, it wasn’t like I was going to forget about mine.

No matter how eventful my college life had turned out so far, that would be an impressive trick. I’d always been as regular as they come, and I’d spent my entire post-pubescent existence under the watchful eyes of my grandmother, who had never let me forget when my “unclean time” was coming up.

I still had… I had… well, I’d been at college for two weeks, and before that, it had been…

Shit.

I needed a calendar.

First things first, though.

“It’s not my period,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, like he didn’t believe me.

“It isn’t, okay?” I said. “I have perfectly legitimate reasons to be upset. I thought I was going to be kicked out of class, out of school… and I probably made you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Ian said. “I hate that you did that.” He sighed. “And if I was going to make up my mind right now, I’d say fuck it and be done with you, but I’m not. I wouldn’t break up with somebody for doing something stupid. I might get mad as hell for a while, but it happens. If my dad left my mom every time he blew his top, he would have… um…”

He trailed off into uncomfortable silence.

“So you’re not breaking up with me, but you’re not going out with me,” I said, trying to sum the situation up. It sounded worse outside my head than it had inside, and I choked back a wail.

“The fact is, I made up my mind about you weeks ago,” he said. “I saw you and thought, ‘She’s pretty. Talk to her.’ And since then, I’ve been changing my mind about a lot of things I was pretty sure were set in stone. I don’t know how much more I want to change.”

“Hey, I’m changing, too,” I said. “If you could see what I was like before I came here, you wouldn’t recognize me.” I stopped and thought, and fought off another bout of sniffles. “I don’t know if I would.”

“Maybe that should worry you more,” Ian said.

I shook my head.

“You wouldn’t have noticed who I was before,” I said. I turned my face away from him. “Or you would have pitied her, or hated her for taking up space.” I crossed my arms. “I’m glad that girl’s gone and I hope she never comes back.”

I was suddenly very aware of how close he was, and the wall behind me. Tears were trickling down my face, but I was starting to want… to want.

“It’s okay,” he said, leaning in even closer, putting one hand on the wall beside me. With the brick behind me and the trophy case projecting to my other side, his arm and body enclosed me, walling me in. I was in a box again, and it was nice. His voice was quiet, confidential… but confident. I relaxed and melted into it. “I was kind of a loser in high school, too. In fact…”

The word “loser” bit into me like a knife.

“I was not a loser!” I said, stomping my foot.

“Fucking Khersis!” Ian swore, jumping back like I’d bit him. “What am I supposed to do here, Mackenzie?”

I was about to tell him exactly what he could do, when an idea hit me.

“Come eat lunch with me,” I said. “With us. Me and my friends.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a fun time.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “Just hang out with me for a while. You can get to know Steff a little better. You’ll see that she’s okay.”

“The question isn’t whether or not she’s okay,” Ian said. “I don’t have a problem with her, per se…”

“But you don’t really know her,” I said, seizing on the idea with desperate force. “I got to know her before I found out about her situation, and I can’t think of her as anything but a girl.”

“A girl whose cock you crave,” Ian said.

“Don’t say it like that,” I said. “It isn’t like that.”

“What is it like, then? Tell me.”

“I love her,” I said.

“So how do you feel about me?” Ian asked.

“It’s different with you,” I said. “You’re a guy… you’re in a different category from her.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Is that ever true,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Bisexual or not, you’ve got a pretty clear preference,” Ian said.

“I like boys,” I said. “I like dick. I like you.”

“Not like you like your girlfriends,” Ian said.

“I’ve spent my whole life being attracted to men,” I said. “The girl thing is new, that’s all. That doesn’t mean I don’t want a man in my life.”

“You want a man, or you want me?” Ian asked.

I stared at him, confused. My definition of gender had changed a bit in the past few weeks, but I was almost entirely sure he was a man.

“You know what, never mind,” he said. He sighed. “You want lunch?”

I nodded, a stupidly insane level of gratitude washing over me. It was a small step, but it was a step all the same, and it beat the hell out of crying my eyes out in the hall.

“I guess I can buy for you,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” I said, trying to figure out if I had any points left. It was hard, when my mind kept wanting to count days further back.

“I still like to,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, smiling.

Why fight it? He liked to pay for my lunch. That was another way of saying he liked me. He still thought of me as his girlfriend. He liked me. That thought managed to make me unbelievably happy.

I started crying again.

Shit.

It was barehanded, but with some good, sharp stinging slaps as added punishment for having missed her last night. Not fair, maybe, but it was just… I was Amaranth’s toy and she was my owner. I took the penalty she decided.

After that, she stroked my ass in a far more gentle sense, tracing her fingernail from down between my legs up to the base of my spine and playing with my cheeks while I told her about Steff. Her other hand reached beneath me to squeeze my breasts and pinch at my nipples. When I thought I was going to explode, she gave me a set of rapid, backhand whacks that finished me off.

“I think you did fine, baby,” Amaranth said, after I voiced a concern that I could have done or said something more. “I think you did just fine.”

“Has Viktor said anything yet?” I asked. “About us dating?”

“Mmm, nope,” Amaranth said. “I haven’t spoken to him since before your little interview, though. Maybe I’ll head over to the boys’ side tonight and see if he’s in a good mood.”

When we opened the door, Two was standing patiently outside it, with a towel for a robe and her hair up in another.

“Hi, Amaranth,” she said. “Hi, Mack. I thought maybe Ian was over.” Her brow creased the tiniest bit when she said Ian’s name.

“I don’t know if Ian’ll be coming over any time soon,” I said. I realized Two was still just standing there, so I pulled my sock off the doorknob and she stepped inside the room as soon as I was out of the way.

“He still needs time to think?” Amaranth asked, frowning.

“Well, I haven’t talked to him since Sunday, but it’s only been like a day,” I said.

Amaranth pulled at the corner of her lip.

“Well, baby… I’m sure he’ll come around,” she said.

“I hope he doesn’t,” Two said, taking her towel off and hanging it carefully over the back of her chair.

“Twoey!” Amaranth said.

“What does Mack need a boyfriend for? She has you and Steff,” Two said. “And Steff has a penis.”

“I like Ian,” I said. “He was there for me when I needed it.”

“If he hits you again I’m… I’m… I’m going to hit him with my mace!” Two said. “Maybe.”

“That’s enough of that,” Amaranth said. “Twoey, don’t hit anybody with your mace.”

I mouthed “ignore that” from behind her, and Two nodded, then headed to her dresser and began picking out her outfit.

“You’re so smooth, honey,” Amaranth said, watching Two as she bustled around. “Do you shave or wax?”

“I do not,” Two said, without self-consciousness. “I was made this way.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said, sounding a little disappointed. “I was hoping you could help Mack shave her pussy.”

“What?” I said.

“Just so I can see what it looks like,” Amaranth said. “I think you’d be cute bare.”

I blushed.

“Then we’d match,” Two said, pulling on her panties.

“Can we not talk about this in front of… ever?” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Amaranth said, eyes downcast but a smirking smile on her lips. “I guess I thought you were mine to do with as I pleased.”

I blushed and buried my face against her.

“I think you were correct,” Two observed. She finished dressing, and then we went to breakfast. Steff seemed more herself… a little subdued, but mostly okay.

I saw Ian in my first class of the day, elemental invocation. We exchanged hellos. I wanted to ask him if he’d had time to think, but I didn’t want to press him… or distract him from the class, which was an important prerequisite for his declared major. The fact that I was doing so well in it while he floundered hadn’t helped our relationship.

The suggestion from Professor Bohd that I should tutor him hadn’t, either.

“I’ll be coming around to talk to each of you individually about what step you’re going to take next,” Bohd said at the start of the class. “Your midterm grade will be based partly on your ability to codify a spell for each element. The second quarter, we’ll focus on functional spells using these basic techniques, but there’ll be little point in that if you can’t invoke consistently.”

When she was done addressing the room, Ian pulled a couple of quartz-capped studs out of his pocket and stuck them in his ears. He closed his eyes and began to tap his hand on the desk.

“Earphones, Mr. Mason?” Bohd said, jarring him from his reverie.

“They’re… um… a concentration aid,” he said, pulling them out hastily. “It was sort of Mackenzie’s idea.”

“Ah, well,” the professor said. “Unorthodox, but worth a try. Miss Mackenzie, how do you feel about water from earth?”

I waggled my fingers lazily over the pot, rather like I was playing a keyboard, and little spurts of water shot up in response.

After being way too successful in the first exercise of calling fire out of an enhanced log, Professor Bohd had moved me to invoking water from a pot of moist earth. Having had my rear tended to by Amaranth just that morning helped me slip into the water mindset… for some reason, the (apparently) orgasmic release I felt always seemed to do that.

“Very impressive,” the professor said. “I think it would be a mistake to put you back on the log, or candles or anything else that’s normally flammable. Do you think you could produce fire from that earth?”

I thought about it. There was almost no fire in the soil, and it was rather heavily saturated with water, but fire was mine in a very fundamental sense. I couldn’t necessarily feel any fire, but I knew it was there. I could feel the earth, a solid comforting mass that pressed against my aura when I probed it.

“I can try,” I said.

“If you get stuck, get some water and you can work on invoking air,” she said. She gave Ian a pointed look. “Mr. Mason, I’ll talk to you about your progress after class.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ian said. I gave him a smile and what I hoped was a look of friendly support. He glowered in response. “What are you looking at?”

“Sorry,” I said. I wanted it to sound sarcastic, but it hurt.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said. He sighed. “I talked to my dad last night.”

“Um… my sympathies?” I said. The way he’d said it made it sound like an appropriate response.

“The Crimson Tongue is lowering the age for novices from twenty-one to eighteen this summer,” Ian said. “Which means I’ll be eligible.”

“Do you want to be a Crimson Tongue?” I asked.

“It’s expected,” Ian said. “My family’s pretty much always been in CT. My grandfather wasn’t, and my dad said his grandpa never forgave him for that. He broke a chain that lasted ten generations.”

“Well, then there’s not really as much pressure on you, is there?” I said.

“I don’t know why I’m talking to you about this,” he said. He put his earphones back in. “Why don’t you play with your dirt and let me work on this.”

Stung, I turned away, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. He closed his eyes again and was moving his head in time to the music. If I hadn’t known about the earphones, I would have thought he was chanting. As it was, I couldn’t make out what he was singing–or lip-synching–along to… his mouth wasn’t quite as clearly expressive as Two’s.

He was cute head-on, but he really did have a beautiful face, in profile. Not all lantern-jaw rugged macho manly, but masculine in a way that Steff most assuredly was not. Two might not understand it, but I did. He could be a bit of a dork, but he was also a boy… a man.

He was reliable in a crisis, and hot to the touch, and he had strong hands, and he could play the lute.

And he was mine… sort of.

I watched him move his head faster and faster until he was practically head banging. He moved his hands up and out, over the table, more or less over the log. When his music apparently reached some sort of a climax, he gestured forcefully with both hands and opened his eyes.

The log failed to respond in any fashion, most particularly by bursting into flames.

I was still watching him, and he noticed.

“Will you quit hovering?” he said. “I’m trying to work here.”

“Sorry,” I said, slinking away.

Talking to his father was apparently not the best thing for Ian’s mood, apparently.

I turned my attention to my own work. I definitely wasn’t feeling quite as watery any more, but the earth was still there. I could still reach out and touch it, and I did, physically reaching out and pushing my finger tips down against the dirt.

It was cold to the touch. There was latent fire in it, as there was in all matter, but it wasn’t being expressed. I remembered how I’d pulled the fire element closer to the surface in the showers to make the water steamier. That had been a lot easier than invoking fire completely. I could probably do that with the earth, too, and that should make it easier to get actual fire.

I gave it a try. There was a lot of resistance… it was a bit like shifting a big weight. I figured it was probably that way to get earth to do anything. I pushed and strained… and had a random and not entirely comfortable flashback to when I’d been younger and had a more mortal digestive system… and gradually felt the fire energy rising within the elemental matrix that made up the soil.

Once I got past the initial resistance, it felt more like rolling a boulder down a hill. I could feel the heat coming off the top of the pot in waves. The wet surface was baking dry. Professor Bohd must have felt something, because she returned to our table and observed the pot of earth for several seconds, then carefully held her hand out over it. She drew it back quickly.

“Very good, Miss Mackenzie,” she said. “I think you’re on the right track here.”

I beamed at the praise, then made the mistake of turning to check on Ian’s progress with the smile still plastered on my face.

“You are really such a…” he said, letting the sentence trail off and shaking his head.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“What were you going to say?” I asked.

“Show-off,” he said. “You’re such a show-off.”

“Oh,” I said.

Ian had anger in him, and his father had brought him up with a certain amount of disdain for women that I don’t think he really felt. These were things that I could respond to, though… physically, sexually. We could be a good match, in some ways.

He was just hung up on the idea of Steff. He could accept me having relationships with women, but not with other men… or girls with non-traditional equipment, apparently.

Class wore on and though I didn’t get an open flame, I continued to practice “stoking” the pot of earth, making it radiate like a furnace, turning the once-moist surface into a dry and dusty desert. I felt like I was close. I was hitting another plateau, another patch of resistance I needed to muscle through. A little more practice would get me there.

If I’d started with a less watery sample, or one that had been fire-enhanced, I would have been there already. That was okay, though, I was enjoying the challenge.

Among other things, it kept me too occupied to keep checking up on Ian. He was so touchy and he got huffy every time he noticed me looking.

He was apparently not getting anywhere with the musical approach, either. I figured he would probably do better if he was actually making music, creating it as he went along… but he wasn’t likely to take a suggestion from me right that moment.

I wasn’t quite exhausted, but I could feel the strain of what I’d been doing and I figured I wasn’t “pushing” with all my strength any more. I knew I wasn’t going to break through the barrier this session. I watched Ian, with as much discretion as I could, while pretending to focus on my earth.

He was trying so hard.

Class was almost over, and Bohd had been to each of the tables, talking to each of the students for varying amounts of time. Some were trying to produce air bubbles within beakers of clear water. Others had pots of soil like mine. Some were still playing around with fire media, or were working their will on nothing but the mixed air in front of them.

Desperation was clear on Ian’s face. He was sweating, and he was scowling and gesturing frantically at the wood. The bell rang. Students who hadn’t already done so began gathering their things. Professor Bohd was heading back towards us.

It was apparently now or never, for Ian, and it looked like it might be never.

I reached out. It was just a little nudge… the tiniest of prods. Well, maybe it was a little stronger than I intended… after working on the earth for over an hour, it was a bit like going to lift a heavy box and finding it unexpectedly empty.

Before Ian’s eyes, his log burst vibrantly into flame. He gave a little whoop and pumped his fist, dancing in place.

I smiled. He was so happy. Okay, he hadn’t actually done it, but I figured that maybe now that he thought he had, he’d be able to relax and that would let him get the hang of it for real.

It could happen, right?

Professor Bohd quenched the fire with a wave of her hand. Then, she turned to me.

I saw death in her eyes.

“Are you planning on following Mr. Mason around and helping him with his fire workings for the rest of his academic career, Miss Mackenzie?” she said, then turned to Ian. “That wasn’t quite what I had in mind when I suggested you ask for her assistance.”

“What?” Ian said, confused. “I didn’t…” He looked at me, and I’m sure guilt was written all over my face. I felt about six inches tall, and lost three or four of those inches under his gaze. “Oh, you cunt. You fucking…”

“Mr. Mason!” Professor Bohd said. “I’m sure you both are familiar with the academic code of conduct and the zero tolerance policy about cheating in class.”

“He didn’t…” I said at the same time as Ian said “I didn’t…”

“However, class ended thirty seconds ago,” Professor Bohd said. “Mr. Mason, leave. Find time to come to my office before next session.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ian mumbled, embarrassment warring with gratitude on his face. He hoisted his book bag. I started to do the same.

“Miss Mackenzie,” Bohd said. “Stick around.”