I frowned. “How?”
Mrs. Swan gave another soft smile. “We will see, won’t we?”
“And she’s going to be here all semester?” I didn’t know why the thought of meeting, or even seeing, Keller’s aunt gave me butterflies, but maybe it was because it almost as big an event as meeting his mother or something.
“She is harsh, but fair,” said Mrs. Swan. “When you do something wrong she will look at the facts and make an impartial decision.”
“What do you mean ‘when’?”
Mrs. Swan’s smile grew wide. “Sorry, I just assumed. . . .”
I sighed in spite of myself. “It’s not like I go looking for trouble.”
Her eyes became more serious as she said, “But given your position and given who your friends are, trouble is bound to find you.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What do you mean about my friends?”
Mrs. Swan brought over the plate of veggies she had been working on and sat down across from me.
“Your friends,” she said, “surely, you must realize how impressive they are.”
My forehead wrinkled in thought. “Lisabelle is a powerful darkness mage,” I offered, not sure what she was getting at.
Mrs. Swan nodded encouragingly. “Yes, she is powerful. So is her family, as you will find out when her uncle Risper speaks tonight. Lough, despite his kind and gentle nature, is a rare talent as a dream giver, which is a rare specialty to begin with, and what Sip lacks in exclusivity she makes up for in enthusiasm and talent. Then, of course, there’s Keller.”
“The school’s golden boy,” I muttered. “I also have enemies, though,” I said, feeling it necessary to point that out. Whenever I got too comfortable on campus I ran into Camilla, and that interaction brought me back to reality quickly.
Mrs. Swan took a bite of carrot. “Yes, you do.”
If I had been hoping she would argue and say that I didn’t, really, I was sorely disappointed. Mrs. Swan pulled no punches.
“Now,” she said, “there are a few things we still have to discuss, but for now you should probably finish unpacking and head to dinner. Once the Committee has briefed everyone you will probably have a better idea of what we need to talk about.”
I frowned. I didn’t like the sound of that. Not one little bit.
“I wish they would just e-mail us like I hear they do at normal colleges,” I muttered. Announcements were never good. I felt a deep sense of foreboding.
Chapter Eight
Heading to dinner that night, I realized I had a lot to get through. I would watch the Demonstration, probably a pretty small one, because for spring semester it only involved transfer students. And I would possibly see Keller for the first time since he had kissed me, and get introduced to the Committee and listen to whatever they had to say. Hopefully they would talk about the demons that surrounded Public; I felt like that was a pressing issue. At some point after all that, Mrs. Swan and I had to have a talk. And I had already been attacked by the demons.
And this was all before classes had even started. It was looking very possible that my hopes for a quieter and more relaxed semester, now that I had my ring and knew I was elemental, were futile.
I loved walking towards the Tower. As the largest building on campus it really stood out. The rainbow-colored glass shone in the cold light, visible from everywhere on campus. Public wouldn’t have been the same without it.
Stepping into the dining hall for dinner was a completely different experience than stepping into it for breakfast. Now it was filled with my fellow students, as if we had all never left. I made my way over to the tray stand, and as I went I realized that something odd was happening. When I had walked into the room there had been the usual chatter of voices, but as I moved the noise diminished. Finally, once I had turned around, almost no one was still talking. Instead, pretty much the entire dining hall, all the students at Public, were staring at me.
I raised my eyebrows, unsure what to do.
“Well, don’t everyone just stand there staring. It’s not like we’ve never seen an elemental before,” said a nasty voice to my right.
For the first time in my life I was glad Camilla existed.
“Besides,” she added, “she’s not worth your time and effort.”
Well, my gladness was short-lived.
It was easy to find her in the crowd, since she was the only one talking. Of course she was sitting next to Cale. His red hair stood out next to her brown, and the slight tint of green on his skin might have gone a shade darker.
Slowly, chatter started to pick back up again, but I could feel eyes boring into my back. It took every bit of self control I had not to turn around and scream. I didn’t want this attention! I just wanted to learn how to be an elemental and hang out with my friends.
As I turned around I almost collided with a dark chest. “Oof, sorry,” I started to mumble, and then I looked up. My tray started to slip out of my hands, but Keller’s own covered mine, keeping the tray, and my pasta dinner, from clattering to the ground.
“Charlotte,” he said with pleasure, a smile touching his lips.
I blushed furiously. My face was hotter than the center of the earth. If I had walked outside at that moment, I would have melted the snow. He must have been able to tell. Oh, my God, I thought to myself. I expected to have more time before seeing him.
Get hold of yourself, I ordered. I tried a smile, but it just felt forced, as if my lips must look like melting gum.
“Charlotte, I . . . ” he started to say. His voice sounded achingly familiar and at the same time like I hadn’t heard it in years. It had been desperately hard not to talk to him over Christmas break.
“I have to go,” I muttered, and dashed away before he could say anything else.
“That was smooth,” said Lisabelle, appearing at my side. “Just about as smooth as sandpaper.”
“Shut up, Lisabelle,” I muttered as I collapsed into a chair.
“So, you aren’t about to start dating the school’s golden boy?” Lisabelle asked. “Because you realize that when people are dating, and I know you don’t have a lot of experience with this, you run towards them, NOT away. Away is bad. For dating.”
“What would you know about relationships, Lisabelle?” Lanca asked, appearing at our table again. “Mind if I eat with you?”
I frowned, but nodded. I knew the paranormals had come together to fight off the demon attack, but going by the seating arrangements tonight, where no paranormal dorms mixed, that had been a one-time thing. Doing anything to get my mind off my shockingly pathetic behavior just now in front of Keller, I examined Lanca more closely.
What I noticed made me concerned. She looked pale and drawn. That was almost an oxymoron for a vampire, but usually her skin shone out like a star, whereas now it looked sallow, like old cheese. Still, she was probably just tired from traveling to Public for her last semester of college.
“Problem?” she asked, her dark eyes turning towards me. She had caught me watching her.
Hastily I tucked into my pasta. “No,” I mumbled. “Sorry.”
Glancing at Sip, I could see that she had noticed that something was wrong too. She raised her eyebrows at me, but all I could do was shrug. Lanca was a senior. The only reason she was hanging around us was because she had known I was elemental, not because she wanted to be questioned by a bunch of Starters.
“Are the Committee members here yet?” I whispered to Sip, who was sitting on my left. She nodded, inclining her head slightly to the front of the room. I turned to see where she was looking.
It looked different from before. Instead of a table made up of professors and students, there were simply four chairs, two on each side of the podium. Down below, off to one side towards the tables of food, sat the other professors. I couldn’t get a good look at any of the Committee members, because they had their chairs facing the podium. Don’t they eat? I wondered. My stomach was growling and I had already started in on my dinner.
As I watched, one of the Committee members stood up. He was easy to see, because he towered above the tables of diners. He must have been at least six and a half feet tall, with salt and pepper hair and a beak for a nose: the vampire, Dove. He didn’t even look nice. Oh, this semester was going to be such fun.
“Good evening students,” he said. His voice was loud and carried to the furthest reaches of the large room, a not so subtle command telling everyone to be quiet and listen. We all complied.
“As you know, your President is no longer in charge here. In fact, she is now an outlaw of the paranormal community, and as I’m sure many of you have heard, will be killed on sight.”
My breath hitched, as if I’d been wading through deep water and a wave had suddenly slammed into my chest. I hadn’t heard that she was supposed to be killed. I didn’t want her killed, I wanted to ask her about my mother!
Lough, sitting on my other side, reached his hand over to pat my leg. He must have felt how upset I was, because he didn’t remove his hand even when I gave him my best glare.
He leaned over to whisper. “Sorry, but it’s one of the drawbacks of hanging out with Lisabelle. No one else’s glare comes close.”
I almost giggled, then remembered how angry I was. It might have just been my imagination, but I thought Dove’s eyes flicked in our direction and his voice got a little louder.
“Now, for clarity’s sake, before we get to the Demonstration - there are only three new students this semester, so it will be brief - I would like to introduce the other members of the Committee and give you a little idea of what we’ll be doing here this spring.
“I am Dove. I am not a professor, so you will simply call me Committee Member Dove. As you can all tell, I’m a vampire, and I attended as a Cruor (blood) student when I was at Public. Do not think, however, that I will therefore show favoritism. I will not. All our dealings with students will be completely impartial. We are here to run the school and find a suitable president, not to turn it into a prison. I have taken a leave of absence from my current post, which is as the head of the vampire family in Montana. As the head I was responsible for our family’s safety, as well as vampire cooperation with neighboring wolf and pixie families. Now, that is enough for the moment. Here is Risper.” He gave a small cough before sitting down.
The next man to stand up could only have been Lisabelle’s uncle. I felt a stab of pride when I realized that Lisabelle was a tad more impressive, although no one would have called Risper a slouch in the looks or intimidation department. Lisabelle, sitting on the other side of Sip, stiffened slightly. I wondered what kind of terms they were on. Even though she looked uncomfortable and had said that Risper wasn’t her favorite, I was sure that there was pride shining in her eyes when she looked at her older relative.
The man who stood up wasn’t as tall as Dove, but he was far more solid, and it was all muscle. Through his black clothes I could see his biceps bulge. I tried not to gulp. His hair was long and black, pulled back into a ponytail, sort of like a surfer demon. He didn’t wear a ring, but neither did I see any sign of a wand. There was a chance he didn’t need one. Once you got to a certain level of power, a wand simply got in the way. All indications pointed to Lisabelle getting that strong, but it was a few years off yet. Risper might already have gotten there. Examining him closely I could see that his skin was darker than Lisabelle’s, leathery and weathered.
Unlike Dove, he didn’t even try to appear pleasant. “I’m Risper. Call me Risper. I don’t like people or students, so don’t come to me with your problems. I have spent the last twenty-five years as a bounty hunter. My niece, Lisabelle Verlans, is a student here. I understand that she’s the scariest thing on campus now that the President is gone. She learned everything she knew from me.”
And with that he sat back down. I was pretty sure a couple of the students in the hall had had heart attacks, and even I, as accustomed as I was to Lisabelle, found myself trying to breathe.
“That’s exactly what I would have imagined a relation of Lisabelle to be like,” Lough whispered next to me. “Although I don’t think he had to call her out in public.”
I nodded, my eyes still on Risper, who was draining a glass of wine. Another dangerous sign. Alcohol had strange effects on paranormals, so for him to be drinking it meant that he either had a very high tolerance or used the effects to his advantage. Either way, it made him more dangerous.
Risper didn’t bother to introduce the next Committee member, but it could only have been Keller’s aunt. She was small and compact, with a grace and self-possession that only comes with having done lots of impressive things. Or so I thought, because I sure wasn’t graceful like she was. She wore a long white dress and her hair was pulled back in a severe bun.
She had the same piercing blue eyes as a certain other fallen angel on campus I was very partial to.
“Good evening,” she said, her voice more feminine than I would have expected, but still strong and clear. As she spoke she clasped her hands in front of her waist.
“I am Professor Erikson. I have been on sabbatical for the past two years, doing research in Canada. I was a professor of advanced flying techniques for fallen angels, and my research focuses on how to perform spells while simultaneously maintaining control in the air. It is not an easy task.”
We were supposed to have learned more about fallen angels in classes the previous semester, but with everything that had happened no one had ever gotten around to teaching us much. The small amount I had learned I had promptly forgotten. All I knew was that Keller was very fast and very strong, and that he was special, but of course that was because he was Keller. I had to physically force myself to keep my eyes on his aunt and not turn my head to look at him to see his reaction to her speaking.
“It is odd to return here as anything other than a professor, but we will all do our best to run the school with as little disruption as possible. Now Oliva, the pixie representative, is running a little late, but do not fear, he will be here. And of course the elementals are not represented on the Committee for obvious reasons.”
I had a hard time not bristling at that. Obviously, I couldn’t be a member of the Committee, because it was made up of all senior paranormals who were the best of the best, but I resented that there was no one else there like me.
“Dove, Risper, and I are more than capable of handling things,” she continued. “We will speak after the Demonstration, but now let’s get these new students introduced.”
With that she swept back to her seat. Dove, Risper, and Erikson were all very different, and it was difficult to imagine how they would govern together. It was also difficult to imagine what a guy like Risper was doing there. He didn’t seem like the type to want to spend some extra time around his niece.
Without hesitation, three new students walked up to the podium. They were all boys.
“I was wrong about the other dream giver being a girl,” Lough whispered in my ear. He did not look happy about it.
The first of the new students was handsome in an “I’m blond and blue-eyed and grew up at the beach” kind of way. He had gentle curls cropped close to his head and wore a necklace of seashells. Lisabelle snorted.
He stepped up in front of the school, the picture of confidence, and smiled.
“See if you can guess what I am,” he said, his voice rumbling to my ears.
And we could.
In a flash of light I saw a familiar scene before me. I was transported out of the dining hall, so that even though my eyes were open I could no longer see it. Instead, the lake by the President’s house came before my eyes, where my mother had appeared to me. I could see the frozen water, smell the cold, and rub my food in the scraggling dirt at the water’s edge. Only this time Mom wasn’t there. Instead, it was simply a head floating.
Feeling sick, I inched forward, simultaneously repelled and pulled towards what was stuck in the ice.
My initial feeling hadn’t been wrong. It was
a head, but whose? Lisabelle’s? The hair was dark, the skin pale.
No, not Lisabelle.
Lanca’s head had been sheered off and was now frozen in the lake of my mother. Her eyes were iced over and pupilless black.
Someone had murdered the vampire princess.
Chapter Nine
From the sound of shouts I could tell that I wasn’t the only one who had been given a bad waking dream.
Well, at least Lough wouldn’t be the only dream giver around here this semester.
“Isn’t that nice, now we have Lough and a professional male model to represent the dream givers,” Lanca murmured.
I jumped at the sound of her voice and she looked at me questioningly. I was relieved and felt a little foolish to see that her head was still attached. Well, of course it is, stupid.
Obviously no one else had had a waking dream of Lanca’s death.
“That’s enough, Trafton,” said Professor Erikson sternly.
Trafton grinned at her and sat down. There was a smattering of disgruntled mutterings throughout the hall as the next student stood up.
“You are now an official member of Airlee as a second semester freshman,” said Erikson to Trafton.
He nodded, still grinning, and started to make his way through the tables, joining another group of Airlee students near us.
“He’s in our class and everything. Sweet,” Lough muttered. Next to me he sank lower in his chair, looking very disgruntled.
The next student had dark hair and skin, and he didn’t bother with much ceremony. Suddenly his wings burst from his back, black and massive, even bigger than Keller’s. Gasps went up around the hall as they stretched to their full span.
Just as quickly as he had opened them, he closed them again. They disappeared, and with that, he sat down.
Museum of Masks (Paranormal Public Series) Page 6