Chapter 9

That first day back in Dr. Tekkin’s class, she could practically feel the sweat creeping down her spine in tiny little beads. She wanted to curl up into a ball or call in sick, but if she avoided him, then he’d know. He wasn’t stupid. It would be a little too coincidental for her to just find herself sick a few days after Dr. Tekkin had taken her prisoner for a political faction.

She did, at least, give herself the benefit of being nearly late to class, making sure she got into the room only after every single student was already seated. There was a room full of witnesses, nothing to be done about that. She felt a little better with so many other bodies there, so many other eyes. But, it very quickly made her feel alone, and a little bit trapped. They had no idea what was going on, what she’d gone through, what strange crap she and their professor now shared. It was like she and Dr. Tekkin had a secret no one else in the room knew. They were bounded together by that secret, whether they liked it or not. If one of them decided, the other would be affected. They shared a symbiotic relationship that wouldn’t be easy to wiggle out of anytime soon.

Yep. She should have called in sick.

He wasn’t looking at her, which Alessia felt made things a little too obvious. Not that anyone else in the class probably paid attention at all; it certainly made her realize the gravity of the situation, the fact that it was enough to still bother him. He was always such a stoic man and now he seemed completely on edge around her. It was like she was something dangerous and he looked to avoid her in all ways that he possibly could. On the one hand, it made things easy; she didn’t have to worry about avoiding him when he avoided her first. On the other hand, it made the situation that much darker, murkier, and ever present.

There was no shoving it all behind her when his avoiding eyes made it obvious to her at every turn. Her plan at the end of class was to bolt completely out of the room and forget this class and this professor even existed until the next lecture that week, but that didn’t happen when Dr. Tekkin called her to stay after class a moment. Fuck. She definitely wished she had called in sick. She swallowed, heavily, and packed her bag anyway, getting ready to make a quick break if she needed to.

When the last student left the lecture hall, Dr. Tekkin walked down the aisle and shut the door, turning around to face her. His face wasn’t dangerous, he didn’t look ready to bounce or yell gotcha as his comrades repelled from the ceiling and drugged her with chloroform to prep her for being dumped in some remote woods of the world. Instead, he walked over to her calmly, picked a chair across the aisle from her, and leaned back into it, his arms coming to fold over his chest. He let out a sigh.

“How are you?”

It wasn’t the words she expected to hear come out of his mouth, but there they were, hanging in the air between them. They sounded soft. They hadn’t been said in his normally sharp, hard voice he used for lectures. It had been a true request, a real desire to know exactly how she was. He sat there, waiting for his answer; he wouldn’t let her leave until he had it. He stared expectantly, but not dangerously.

“As good as can be,” she said.

He frowned. “I know it’s a shot in the dark, but I do hope you weren’t caused any undo harm by what happened.”

“Harm? No. A little bit of emotional upheaval and some missed sleep? Absolutely.” It was her turn to cross her arms. She cocked her hip out to one side on reflex. If he asked, then she would tell him. She wouldn’t sugarcoat it, so he could feel better about himself or feel absolved of what happened; he asked and she answered and his responsibility to the situation was over. “I’d still like an explanation of what the hell happened that day.”

“I think it was fairly obvious.”

She took a step forward. Her blood boiled. Everything she’d repressed over the past few days moved towards the surface like plate tectonics shifting the hot magma of a volcano up and up and up. She was ready to blow and all she could do was try to make it as calm and steady as possible.

“You’re part of a terrorist organization.”

“We’re not terrorists.”

“Could have fooled me. Plenty of people seemed pretty terrified. Myself included, by the way.”

“We’re a political activism group.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

He frowned now, just on the verge of outright glaring. His hands dropped from that protective cage over his chest and went to grip onto the seat he leaned on, tightly. Alessia wondered if she imagined the groan she thought she heard as caused distress to the poor plastic chair. She knew it was in the anatomy of a shifter to have some slightly unnatural strength. It wasn’t Superman levels or anything, but it was enough to be worrisome for anyone who got a little too close to a shifter on the wrong side of a temper tantrum.

“There are plenty of things in the world you don’t get, little girl.”

“Oh, please. I’m beginning to think you dye the grey hairs in your beard. You’re thirty-three, professor. Hardly world wary.”

“A lot has happened to me in thirty-three years.”

“And you have no idea what’s happened to me in twenty-five. Time is irrelevant where experience is concerned. I know what a group that uses scare tactics and violence looks like. You can justify it all you want, but you didn’t help your cause on Saturday by marching around, dressed in black, and wearing animal masks.”

“What would you have us do then?”

He stepped closer to her. She wouldn’t back down. She met his charge forward halfway, placing only a few inches between them. She could feel the heat coming from his body, the fluid rumble as the air around him shifted, moving faster from the effort. It was the unmistakable sign of a dragon shifter. She didn’t swallow, she didn’t blink. She wouldn’t show him an ounce of fear. That’s what he and his friends wanted all along, people to be afraid of them. She wasn’t buying into the game, no matter how afraid she really was.

“Protest. Sign petitions, vote,” she said, very nearly stamping her foot in the process.

He laughed. “Because that’s worked so well for us. This is civil disobedience—”

“Civil disobedience is a lunch-counter sit in or refusing to give your seat up on a bus. It’s not scaring the crap out of a bunch of college kids and kidnapping your TA when she gets too close to your little mosh pit.”

She could feel the heat prickling her skin now, making the light hair of her arm stand on edge. She wouldn’t back down. He made her scared once, but she wouldn’t tolerate it from him again. She was human, with below-average athletic skills, but she had a feeling her mind was a little sharper than Dr. Tekkin’s. It was always easy to outsmart those who thought they were the smartest in the room.

“I won’t tell anyone what happened,” she said. “I know that’s what you want to hear and what would be the point of me getting you fired, except for petty revenge? You did basically tell me I had no place in this field and refused to give me an active role in lectures. But I won’t get back at you this way because—as much as it pains me to admit it—I think you can do some real good with your lectures and your position here. Just don’t blow it trying to scare the general population into believing you’re not the bad guy.”

Their faces were inches away from each other. It wasn’t so much that the air around him was heating with his fury that their noses could touch if they turned a certain way, but their breaths were so mingled, it was hard to tell whose was whose. She could see the smoldering in his dark eyes, like long-forged black lava rocks coming back to life under some heat. She stared into them, getting lost in the way they somehow managed to heat up. She wondered how hot his skin might feel to the touch.

Then she backed away completely. Fighting her own breathlessness.

With that, she marched out. Two steps out the door, she got a party invitation from Erik on her phone. She said yes without even hesitating, not understanding why going to a party with another man felt like a jab at Dr. Tekkin.

#

The party was in some crappy house just off campus. It was three stories and supposedly held six people, each with their own bedrooms. The house had once belonged to some rich family at the turn of the century. According to Erik’s friend who lived there, the servants’ quarters were still there, even though it was basically used for storage. He said the house had almost zero insulation. In the winter, it could get a little chilly but that was what Southern California was for.

“It’s just a party,” he said. “No real theme or anything. Just a hang. Free alcohol and we don’t have to worry about cleaning it up later.”

If she thought parties in her graduate career would be a little more sophisticated, maybe cheese and crackers and tiny sausages next to tiny cups of Dijon mustard, she was proved wrong here. People close to their age having conversations on the patio, and undergrads with popped collars and too-short skirts, wandered in from other party-hopping excursions. Inside the house was even worse. Someone or several someones took up every available surface to sit. Beer cans and red solo cups littered the area and two frat boys drunkenly made attempts to get a game of beer pong going, but lacked the coordination at the moment to even set up the triangle of cups.

“Guess the first couple of weeks of the term did a number on them, huh?” Erik asked with a snicker.

When Alessia had been in undergrad, she had never been much of a party animal. She didn’t even drink alcohol until she was twenty years old. In fact, she smoked pot before she’d even done that and it was only because she was out with her roommate visiting her friends from some artsy school downtown. She didn’t want to be the only one not coughing up a lung in the bathroom. She tried alcohol for the first time when her friend offered to buy her some pumpkin beer from the gas station in the fall of her sophomore year. After that, she hadn’t turned into some party animal or alcoholic fish. It had taken over a year for her to actually like the taste of beer, even longer for wine after several bouts of white zinfandel warmed her up to the idea.

Now she drank only red and hoppy, bitter beers. It was a metaphor for growing up, she figured. Her tastes began to match the total decay in her soul.

They walked into the kitchen and had an array of choices in front of them. Erik went into the fridge to pull out a couple cans of whatever beer was stocked in there, but Alessia made right for the half-full bottle of Jack sitting on the counter, pouring herself a generous ounce and taking the longest gulp she could handle while it sweetened on her tongue, and then burned on the way down.

“All right then,” Erik said, looking at her and cracking her beer open. She finished the whiskey and drank that too. “Rough week.”

“You have no idea.”

“Tekkin getting up your butt again?”

“You have no idea.”

At this point, she realized she could never tell anyone about that weekend, not for a long time. Everything was too close to the situation. Dr. Tekkin and his friends could be anywhere, watching from anywhere, planning some new horrible attack at any moment and calling it something benign like a freedom rally or some other lie. No one had been hurt on Saturday, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know how to recognize when someone was willing to use force and violence. This wasn’t a peaceful group; it was the kind that would rather burn down law and order than obey it.

She chugged her beer. In five minutes, she was done and reaching for another one.

“Did you have dinner?” Erik asked. “I think there’s some chips around here or something.”

Classic alcohol safety from freshman year. It was cute, but she wasn’t in the mood. She was here to get drunk; she hadn’t been in a long time and wanted to see it happen now. She’d never blacked out but maybe tonight could be the night. It’d be worth it. She cracked her beer open; it went down so fast and so bubbly that she let out a burp when she pulled the can away. She was already past the point of embarrassment.

“Okay,” Erik said, taking the can away. “Maybe take five.”

She gave him the five he requested and then drank some more. She finished the can and moved back in for the whiskey. She spent the entire night downing what she could, not stopping until she was completely dizzy and felt like she couldn’t get up from the couch. Maybe then, all her fear and frustrations would just go away.