Chapter 6

Dr. Tekkin didn’t talk about the event at all. He didn’t even acknowledge it happened in class and Alessia wasn’t the only one looking at him strangely during the lecture. An email went out to everyone assuring them the bomb threat had been a hoax, that the campus was the most secure and safe place they could possibly be, and that the culprits would be caught. It felt like empty promises of a place that was, in Alessia’s opinion, truly scared of whatever danger lurked.

They didn’t call off the fall festival, they didn’t even mention the date corresponded to the festival. Everyone, it seemed, was ready to ignore what was happening. Erik, however, wasn’t.

“It’s fucking scary,” he said. “And it fucking sucks.”

“Eloquent.”

They sat again together in a bar off campus. She had her wine again and he ordered some hipster, hoppy beer. She told him he tried too hard to blend in with the undergrads and he was a twenty-six-year-old man and should act like one, and order some crappy beer like everyone else. He said undergrads couldn’t afford good beer anyway.

“I mean it, though,” he said. “These groups aren’t what shifters are about. They’re not what anyone is about. They’re in it for themselves, they don’t care who gets hurt.”

Alessia agreed. But she couldn’t help but wish she could have this conversation with Dr. Tekkin. She hadn’t been able to get it out of her brain. He was a shifter, he lived this life with terrorists claiming to being doing this work for him. How did that feel? She didn’t want to admit that there might be something to what he said about her inability to truly understand a shifter’s life and everything they went through. But talking with Erik, talking about how awful it was and how bad they felt did nothing to help anyone. They were just words from college-educated kids in positions of privilege.

“What did the devil professor have to say about it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said, shrugging. “He didn’t say a thing. Just kept talking about the shifters’ place in Marxism.”

“Well, maybe the best thing is to ignore it. Not give them any power.”

“They killed four people only two months ago. We can’t pretend this isn’t happening.”

“I know.”

Another class passed without Dr. Tekkin saying a word. In her study sessions the following week, more students showed up and more than one of them asked questions about the National Shifter Party and their tactics. They asked her if she thought something bad would happen next week, if she thought the party really did represent what shifters were thinking underneath it all. She had no answers for them. But she knew who did.

“Can I speak with you, professor?” she asked him after the next class.

“My door is always open,” he said.

“I’ve had a lot of the students ask me if we’ll be covering any of the events of last week,” she said.

“Events?”

“The bomb threat incident and the flyers.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because it’s relevant.”

He sighed.

“There is a difference between relevant and topical. You’ll do well to learn it.”

There it was again, his constant ego just asserting itself whenever possible, from below the surface. He pulled his leather jacket on over this week’s white t-shirt. “If you have nothing else to ask…”

“I just think we should be responding to student requests and student needs,” she said. “Isn’t that our job as professors?”

“One, only one of us here is a professor; don’t get ahead of yourself, Miss Monroe,” he said. “Two, my job is to instruct. I’m passing along my knowledge, not jumping at every bandwagon opportunity the news presents.”

He moved past her and walked out, and she felt like she wanted to scream. She wanted to take the textbook and just hurl it at his head. She settled for marching back to her apartment and slamming the door behind her, throwing back one of the few beers she had in her fridge.

“Uh oh, what happened?” Trish said from the computer screen when she spotted Alessia throwing back a beer during their Skype call. “You only drink beer when you’re exceptionally pissed.”

“I am,” she said. “Drake Tekkin is an awful human being.”

“You know for someone who hates him, you sure do talk about him a lot.”

“Because he’s horrid.”

She drank more of her beer, listing off the events of the week and his refusal to instruct the students in anyway on what had happened.

“Well, maybe ignoring it is the best way to deal with it,” Trish shrugged. “I know I wouldn’t want to draw any more attention to it.”

“Which would be fine if that was his reasoning,” she said. “But he thinks everything inside his brain is perfect and intelligent, and the only thing anyone needs to know. He won’t listen to what the students want to hear. He just wants everyone to be impressed with how smart he is.”

Trish let her rant more until she was red in the face. She giggled at her and apologized when Alessia glared at her for it. She took a breath when she was done and slumped back in her couch.

“Have you noticed,” Trish said. “You’ve done nothing but talk about this guy for weeks. Is he hot?”

“Not the point.”

“So he is.”

“He’s an asshole. He’s the worst kind of egotistical professor only concerned with his own agenda.”

“Fair enough, but maybe you should focus on something else,” Trish said. “Like with these threats. You’re only making it a bigger thing by constantly talking about it. Ignore him, make him go away. Boom.”

She knew there was a very real chance that Trish’s hesitance was rooted in her own desire to forget these threats, and other things like them, were happening. She couldn’t blame her. Each time something like this happened, the more people turned against shifters at large, not just the terrorists. Alessia thought to that audition that Trish didn’t get because of her status. She wondered how many times that happened and Trish didn’t tell her, for the reasons she obsessed over it now.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” she said but didn’t mean it.

Trish changed the topic to something else, some Broadway opening that she got tickets to and how she almost slept with the director once while in college, and all sorts of other things. Luckily, Trish was a night owl and a talker. She could keep Alessia entertained and awake for hours with all the stuff she rambled on about. It helped to pull her mind away from things. She didn’t know what bothered her more, the meaning behind the campus-wide silence on the threats or the chance that Trish was a little bit too close to the mark when it came to her opinion on Professor Tekkin.

#

The day of the fall festival was the day that Alessia, later in life, would mark as the period of twenty-four hours that changed the course of her life forever. She always knew she would work for shifters’ rights and study shifter culture. That wasn’t news. What did change was how embroiled, how close she would come to the fight, and what she’d one day be willing to do to get the goals they wanted.

She decided to go to the fall fest. That wasn’t a question. Though many students talked about avoiding it and some professors hinted heavily to the younger undergrads to stay away, she had to go. She was faculty, she was an adult, and this was exactly what she studied to combat. She had to go, whether Tekkin would acknowledge it all or not.

It was a fine day. The sun was, for once, not shining, which should have been the first sign that something would go a little bit wrong. It wasn’t raining or storming, but the sun was behind a thick cover of gray clouds and the air was chilly enough that she had to put on a denim jacket. She brought sunglasses, even though she wouldn’t need them, and blended in with the crowds that did decide to show up. She moved through the festival, taking in some of the vendors, the student publication tables, the advertisements for the local bands they got to play at the concert later.

It was boring, more than anything else. It was greasy fair food and a sea of undergraduate students drunk from several beers and wandering around, looking for any deep-fried Oreo they could find.

Everything about it seemed normal. Until it didn’t.

The chaos started when someone set off a fire cracker, setting off a sharp blast that got a few jumpy kids screaming. The firecracker, however, wasn’t the real threat. It was a prelude to something else entirely when something actually dangerous went off. Alessia wouldn’t call it a bomb; that made it seem dramatic. A boy did end up in the hospital with some projectile debris lodged in his arm and back, that would never be removed.

Next came the chants.

“We are here. We are human.”

Over and over, they moved in a line, masks of their shifting animals, Alessia guessed, covering their faces. Other than that, they were dressed in black and moving like a dark cloud of danger. Several people around her ran, screaming, as the chants continued. It wasn’t in Alessia’s nature to run from anything, so instead, she moved towards the mass, specifically towards a freshman girl who tripped on the ground and was in real danger of being trampled by the oncoming march.

“Up. Let’s go,” Alessia said, rushing over to the girl and grabbing her by the arm, pulling her to her feet and running along with her quickly.

As she turned back to gauge how far away she was from the danger, she spotted him. At least she was pretty sure it was him, at that moment. A man with a large build, made even larger by the black clothes hanging off his body. His mask was that of a dragon, his eyes met hers and she knew them instantly, dark and burning like an ember. They held eye contact for a few seconds, but it was too long for him. He turned away and kept moving. Someone tried to pull her along, screaming for her to follow. Then someone else was right next to her. Next thing she knew, she saw nothing around her vision by black.