by Liz Meldon
So, I waited, schooling my features and remaining steadfast, strong, glaring, until he let out another long sigh and the impishness fell away.
“Look,” he muttered, surging forward so suddenly I flinched. He must have had to slow his movements considerably around humans; we all had to moderate ourselves outside of our communities. Calder, however, seemed not to bother around me, moving swiftly, surely, our faces suddenly a few precarious inches apart as he leaned over the desk. His scent intensified, his presence washing over me, but I refused to balk in our little game of chicken. Unfortunately, as he tipped his head to the side, that intense stare of his utterly unblinking, it seemed Calder wasn’t about to either.
“I’ve been doing this, teaching history, for seven years now,” he said softly, voice low and rumbly. “And I intend to do it here too. Not only do I enjoy the subject matter—”
“Because you lived through it all already?” It was meant to be a slight toward him, but really, it probably wasn’t far from the truth. Calder pressed his lips into a thin line for a moment, then huffed again, a lukewarm rush of air dancing across my cheeks.
“I also happen to enjoy the fact that it gets very dark here for many months of the year,” he continued, his words strained now, like he was trying to control himself—fighting the urge to shout. I bit the insides of my cheeks and swallowed a jab about sunlight; I could figure out just how sensitive these dead men were to the big orb in the sky on my own. At no point did I want, or need, Calder Holloway to teach me.
He eased in closer, cutting down the inches between us from five to two, and still I wouldn’t yield. My fingers curled, nails digging into the varnish.
“So, get this through your thick skull, shifter,” he whispered, eyes narrowed, each word oozing an unspoken threat. “I have no plans on leaving Solskinn anytime soon just because you’ve bared your teeth and growled. I get it—the academy is wolf territory. Fine. I’m not here to take it.”
Bullshit. There had to be an ulterior motive. Sure, not everyone fit their species’ stereotypes, but I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence, for my own safety and that of the humans inside this campus, if I didn’t approach him assuming, preparing for, the absolute worst.
Silence settled between us, thick with words unsaid. Somewhere inside one of his unpacked boxes, the tick, tick, tick of an old clock punctuated the moment, beating as swiftly as my racing heart.
Calder could have been feeding me lies. He could be waiting for me to turn my back on him—and then he’d make his move.
Or, he could just be here to teach.
I had no way of knowing, not when I struggled as much as I did to map his body language, the nuances of his expression.
“If you touch me,” I whispered at long last, “I will rip out your cold, dead intestines and feed them to my dogs.”
All the answers I’d hoped to find evaded me, and as we glowered at each other, a dozen more questions and uncertainties sprang to mind. For now, I would walk away, but had every intention of doing my own digging, with Foster, with the other staff who had spoken to Calder, maybe even in his personnel file, until I knew for certain we were all safe.
Or not.
And if not, then I would find a way to correct that. People might be disappearing in the surrounding villages, but there would be no blood spilled inside these four walls. I would make sure of that.
Calder glared at me a moment longer, then straightened with a chuckle and a smirk, the flush of color faded from his cheeks. “I’ll consider myself warned, then, shall I?”
I pushed back too, fingertips catching the edge of his desk. “Yeah, you do that.”
His grin sharpened. “Oh, I will.”
“Good.”
One thing was clear: I wouldn’t be sleeping tonight. Instead, I planned to prowl campus after dark, beyond the reaches of all the security cameras, in the blind spots, the shadows, just in case a certain vampire decided to do the same.
After shooting him one last withering glare, I headed for the door.
“Goodbye, Emma Kingsley,” Calder called from his desk, as if unable, unwilling, to let me have the last word, “a fan of hiking and swimming, and, uhm—”
I slammed his office door shut, the crash echoing through the empty corridor branching off in either direction. However, through the door, muffled, I still heard his voice.
“And camping!”
“Ugh.” I snatched up my shoes and marched the hell out of there as fast as my stockinged feet could carry me.
3
Calder
I so loved ruffling a shifter’s feathers—or, in this case, fur. Although she had left me in peace since yesterday’s ridiculously laughable encounter in my office, I suspected it wouldn’t be the last time Emma and I clashed. Vampires and shifters were, after all, natural enemies.
At the very least, my kind had gone about creating that rift over the last century or so. For her age, that would be all she knew: vampires were the enemy, a threat, True Evil.
In fact, I had already predicted several more bouts between us, all equally amusing, until a certain Emma Kingsley, wolf shifter, realized that I was, in fact, here to teach.
Honestly, the gall of that creature, the sheer ego, thinking I had trudged all the way to the ends of the earth just for her.
Maybe in an age gone by; she was an exquisite specimen, after all. Young, fiery, beautiful, strong—fertile, likely, just ripe for popping out a horde of pups anytime now. There would have been a bidding war over her, government agencies scrounging up what little funds they had to compete with the more insidious groups eager to exploit her. I’d seen it before. Emma would have been the belle of the ball at an auction. Derelict humans would crawl out of their holes from all corners of the earth to claim her, to add her to their creature collections of which the masses remained ignorant.
Yes, quite exquisite indeed.
Pretty little thing…
It surprised me to find her here, so far from a pack. Most shifters ran in clans, wolves especially, and she was the right age to breed. Strange. Imagine my shock when I first felt her in the auditorium, a lone wolf in the middle of nowhere, her energy, her vibration, her aura hot and explosive, positively pulsing, pluming, filling the room. Emma Kingsley, for all her bark, was certainly intriguing.
But, of course, also arrogant, foolhardy, and impulsive. If what had occurred in my office had been planned, well, I likely had nothing to worry about. But if it was meant to make me underestimate her, then perhaps I had a more worthy opponent than I’d initially thought.
Still, compared to the gargantuan task of establishing oneself at a new school, proving to all those rambunctious human children with their mobile phones and social media that I was a man deserving of their respect, and perhaps a touch of fear, Emma Kingsley was just a blip on my radar. I had come to Solskinn to teach and to put some distance between myself and what I’d left behind in England; some yappy blonde mutt wasn’t about to change that.
I kept that in mind as I darted across the gorgeous campus grounds, the sun dipping below an amber horizon, headed for my first real staff meeting the night before classes resumed. The day had been spent adding the final touches to my classroom, which I’d taken the last week to prepare, and then finally unpacking my personal effects in my new office—which still stunk of shifter.
Not wet dog, mind you, but rather Emma’s oddly aromatic scent, harkening my mind to Grecian fields of lavender. Either way, I’d left the windows open all day, hoping that would rid the space of her.
With my books finally unloaded, my trinkets in place, the academy had started to feel more like home. For home, to me, was wherever I had a bed, a blood bag, and my belongings. Ancient tomes with fractured spines. A creaky old yellowing globe that I had acquired in the 1950s. My prized pen collection, some of the older, more delicate feathery quills enclosed in their own special display case. Ships in bottles. Sanskrit tablets. Cuneiform limericks on fragile papyrus. Bits and bobs, glass, wo
od, metal, acrylic, that I’d collected over the centuries, all on display amidst dozens of books and journals.
All easily packable, shippable, deliverable.
All creature comforts.
All I needed in this world—these days, anyway.
Now that everything was in its proper place, my lesson plans for the entire year complete, I was actually looking forward to the term starting tomorrow. A bit on edge, as always when it came to a new institution, but the nerves would disappear after my first few classes. The me of twenty years ago would have balked at the fact that I taught; I’d never been a fan of children, not even as a human, but I had come to tolerate them. While the younger sort still drove me up the wall, the older teens with their odd little minds could be quite interesting. One or two usually impressed me each year, and I looked forward to meeting them this week.
In fact, I just looked forward to throwing myself into the work. Emma’s accusations, while unsaid and thinly veiled, had dredged up the past—a past I had been working so damn hard to forget, and I could certainly do with the distraction.
A staff meeting ought to do the trick. While past experience suggested these sorts of gatherings could be rather dull, it would give me the opportunity to learn the social mores of Solskinn International Academy and to glean information about my coworkers. Tonight’s meeting had been called by Principal Foster, a rather intense, spry, neurotic sort of man who appeared to have a hand in everything at this school. Thrice last week he had popped into my classroom with suggestions about how to arrange it, none of which I had taken seriously.
Evening descended across the grounds, long shadows blending together, wind rustling through the meticulous landscaping. Students would be attending dinner at this hour, sequestered in the dining hall and monitored by some of the support staff. Meanwhile, the rest of us faculty had a meal of our own waiting in the staffroom—none of which I intended to partake in, naturally, with my evening meal sitting inside the little fridge in my office.
As I neared the back doors to the main building, cutting across the outdoor amphitheater, I caught my reflection in the tinted windows cut into the grey stonework. Yesterday had been, perhaps, a touch too formal for Solskinn, my three-piece suit the only one of its kind amongst the male faculty. I would continue to wear them to teach, of course, for I was a man of class, accustomed to a certain style in a professional setting. For tonight, however, I’d kept it simple with just a crisp black button-down, a blue-and-silver checkered tie, and dark grey slacks.
My off-duty attire—consisting of a vintage leather jacket worth thousands—would have been completely inappropriate.
After marching briskly through the otherwise silent, echoey corridors, I strode into the staffroom to discover that I was among the first to arrive. I forced a smile when three sets of eyes darted my way, then checked my watch. Given we were five minutes out from starting, I’d thought I was late. Apparently not.
“Ah, Calder!” Foster strolled over to shake my hand. “Hope you found the place all right.”
I forced a chuckle, catching the man’s slight wince when he clapped down on my shoulder and perhaps discovered it was akin to smacking a stone statue.
“Thank you, sir,” I offered. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing how things are run here.”
He insisted I dig into the platter of sandwiches and the steaming pot of soup situated in the middle of the enormous round table. I indulged him by pouring myself a cup of coffee instead, bringing it up to smell—for the smell of coffee would never go out of style, even among my kind—but refusing to take a sip. Food and drink that we vampires had once enjoyed now tasted like ash, and I had no intention of trudging through the charade tonight. There were plenty of other opportunities to choke down a bite or two of food, just to prove I did, in fact, eat.
As we waited for the rest of the lot to arrive, I chatted politely with my new colleagues. I knew my neighbors in the staff lodgings fairly well, and the rest I could tolerate professionally, though all their irksome little quirks still had time to surface over the next few weeks.
Once again, I was woefully overdressed. One by one, the academy’s faculty waltzed into the staffroom in their casuals, jeans, cozy sweaters, and long-sleeved cardigans as far as the eye could see. They all went straight for the food, a pack of ravenous hounds, then perched on the depressed, aging sofas arranged around the outskirts of the room. Some of the younger staffers—a clique of men in their mid-twenties who all appeared to be very close—even cracked open a few bottles of local ale, something I graciously refused, citing I was still working through my coffee.
A few minutes after the hour struck, we all settled at the round table, and in scampered the last of us: my new favorite shifter. Her wild blonde mane sat in a dreadfully messy bun atop her head, and—my god, were those pajama pants? When our eyes met, I realized my jaw had dropped, but how could it not? The woman was wearing flannel pajama bottoms and moccasins, then some flimsy black tee like she had just rolled out of bed. While the rest of the human staff were bundled up in a layer or two, the summer nights nippy this far north, Emma Kingsley stood out in her T-shirt—for more reasons than one.
She ought to enjoy this climate, I thought as I pressed my lips together and curled both hands around my piping-hot coffee mug. Something stirred within me, something alien and unsettling, at the memory of her body’s intense heat radiating through her clothes yesterday.
Had she been affected by my frost in turn? Cold enough to warrant the I Have Bad Circulation talk with anyone new, my skin must have burned like ice to her.
After snagging the only seat left, directly across the table from me, the shifter loaded up her plate amidst the soft chatter of our coworkers, then sunk down with a scowl. At first, the look was reserved for her overflowing plate of food, but soon enough it found me, her eyes narrowed, her cheeks flushed pink.
She needed an opponent—someone who warranted her anger, her suspicion, her instant dislike.
So, I grinned back and gave her a little nod. The color in her cheeks deepened. It was always so much more satisfying not to react in situations like this, to show that her glares, her snarls, her attitude had zero impact on me.
Scowl all you want, wolf. I lifted an eyebrow, wishing, just for a moment, that vampires and shifters were telepathically compatible. I can take it—easily.
Even without the mind connection, she seemed to read me loud and clear, pointedly avoiding my stare when she asked Robert Howard, if I remembered his name correctly, to fill her dark blue mug with ale as Foster called for our attention.
“Everybody, thank you,” the man said, standing in place while the rest of us peered up at him. “First of all—welcome back for another fantastic year at SIA. I speak for the whole administration when I say that we’re thrilled to have all of you on staff.”
Grins erupted all around the table, a few of the faculty clinking knives against their mugs. I tapped my nail against the rim of mine as a show of unity, steam spiraling up from the scalding liquid inside.
“Second—the disappearances.” The atmosphere turned grim as Foster nodded, hands slipping into his pocket, a notebook open with indecipherable scribbling across both pages on the table in front of him. “A representative from local law enforcement has insisted that the disappearances this summer are coincidental and not linked. If parents contact you directly regarding the situation, please reassure them that we take safety precautions here very seriously. Refer them to our security page on the website, and if that isn’t enough, please direct further inquiries to the administration. It isn’t your job to deal with this, er, unfortunate situation.”
Unfortunate situation indeed. I had been monitoring the disappearances from the surrounding communities all summer while I was still living in Bath. It wasn’t that I cared about a few missing humans; in my world, humans went missing every day. There were plenty of other nefarious supernaturals who fed on the bottom of the food chain, not just my kind. Unfortunately
, people were paying attention to the disappearances now. There were enough to spark curiosity, interest, and public speculation.
All of which were the last things I needed. I’d chosen Solskinn not for its impressive reputation or prestige, but because the school had been quite literally plunked down in the middle of nowhere. Any additional attention was a risk to me—a risk that someone from my past could discover where I had run to this time.
Beyond that, I didn’t need Emma getting any wild ideas that I had turned the communities dotted across the dense landscape into my new hunting grounds. I hadn’t been hunting in years, nor did I intend to start now.
With the more gruesome bits of conversation out of the way, Foster fell into the administrative side of things, the sort that I’d expected from staff meetings. Owed paperwork. Upcoming events. The fall and spring theatre productions. Emma’s rescue dog program. Each of us were required to spearhead a student club, and the signups would go up during Spirit Week at the end of September. Foster then went around the table, forcing us to announce what we planned to run.
Film Club. AV Club. Comic Book Club. Biology Club.
The pajama-wearing shifter across from me had a dodgeball league in the works, which was supposedly very popular last year. My offering of a debate club was met with lukewarm smiles by all but Foster, who insisted he had a number of ideas he wanted to run by me.
I nodded indulgently. Fantastic. Couldn’t wait.
This year’s homecoming theme was announced: a night in Paris. The student council had voted on it before they adjourned last year, and on the final Friday in September, the faculty were required to decorate the gymnasium for the dance the following evening. I’d honestly rather shove two-inch nails in my eyes, but everyone else seemed rather excited about it.
But then again, homecoming was a rather American tradition, wasn’t it?
I’d taught in the IB program for several years now, but this was my first venture into an Americanized international school; I still had a lot to learn about the expected customs.