Assassin's Bride

by C. J. Scarlett

  She bristled. “Sir, if you’d like me to switch to another section I can—”

  “Nope. You’re here. We’re going to see it through. I’m not overly interested in cultural tourism that the majority of this major seems to be populated by—”

  “Cultural tourism?”

  “—And it seems as though every single one of my teaching fellows up to this point has been a kind hearted ‘ally’ just looking to piss off Mommy and Daddy with a controversial field of study, not realizing there are actual lives and lifestyles at stake here—”

  “Sir, I absolutely do—”

  “—But there’s always hope that someone will be different.”

  He dropped the chalk down, finishing writing his name on the board. It bounced off the ledge of the chalkboard and hit the ground in a tiny white cloud. He walked away, not bothering to reach for it. On instinct, Alessia came forward and picked it up, placing it back on the ledge. He turned to look, smirking, and then went back to his notes on the podium.

  “You’re already a natural, Miss. Monroe,” he said. “Take a seat, if you will, and we’ll see if the rest of the class doesn’t decide to show up.”

  She felt her face heat up, watching him pace back over to the chalkboard, his black boots clanking on the floor with authority. She watched his back, the muscles underneath moving as he put words on the board. She ignored the impressive stature of the flesh that so perfectly seemed to wrap around his frame. She hated that assholes always seemed to have the nicest bodies. They didn’t deserve it, like that bitch Becky Holland in the eighth grade who had the massive breasts and pushed her in the cafeteria once.

  She marched over to the front row, looking at the present students who didn’t seem to retain a syllable of the conversation that happened in front of them at the podium, texting and tweeting their lives away. For once, she was fine with the awful technological addiction everyone seemed to lay on her generation. She dropped into her seat with more of a huff than she intended. She always managed to come off childish when she was agitated in situations like this.

  It would be a long first day.

  Chapter 2

  Alessia founded the Shifter-Non Alliance in her high school. Virtually every high school in the country had one except for her backwoods Arizona high school filled with nothing but racist white kids picking on the Mexican kids who could barely speak English. No one showed up the first time. The kids who were shifters never admitted it aloud. Though it became easy to tell who was who, after a while. Alessia didn’t like giving into stereotypes. The amount of times she said Mom, you can’t say that on a weekly basis was getting painfully repetitive. But there were some things that she cringed to admit did reveal shifters.

  Everyone always said they started to look like their animal other halves, something wolfish about the wolf shifters, that the dragons had crazy body heat. But the easiest way to tell who was a shifter were the kids getting thrown into the dumpster after school, or worse.

  James Tory was a bully. He probably still was for all she knew. He was probably some high-class businessman with a job and a bimbo wife who let him put it in her ass every night and pretended to like it. While he was in school, he made a hobby of picking out the kids he thought were shifters and putting marks on them. He took his dad’s old Swiss Army knife and put deep x’s on their left wrists so he could always find them and they’d always know what they were, what their place was.

  That’s how she met her best friend. Because James didn’t differentiate between boys and girls, he put scars on them all the same. He didn’t have a sense of chivalry when it came to shifters. He said animals were animals.

  Alessia found him one day, in the normal spot. Instead of a scrawny boy in glasses or a Mexican pleading for help in another language, it was a girl. Alessia recognized her from her algebra class freshman year. Her name was Trish, she was a wolf shifter and came from a poor branch of a proud wolf clan. Now she was looking at the sharp edge of a knife about to put an inerasable mark on her skin.

  “Hey.”

  She called it out without thinking, before she could stop herself. But then there she was, staring down James and his gang, and the pale face of a petrified girl.

  “Leave her alone.” It wasn’t overly commanding and if she heard someone say it to her, she probably wouldn’t have obeyed either. But it was a start. If nothing else, it delayed the pain, the blood; she was buying time for this girl to get to safety.

  “You some half-breed whore?” he asked. “Some beast lover?”

  Later in life, she’d take those titles on with pride. In that moment, she was petrified, staring at the shine of his knife and the cackle of his friends. She swallowed down a wad of thick spit in the back of her throat. Every second she waited to answer was a moment bought for Trish, but it was also a moment she lost her nerve, his smirk getting bigger.

  “I’ll call the cops.”

  “Go for it. The fuck they care about beast bullshit.”

  She knew that was true; she knew it before she even said it. The cops in these small towns were known to be no friend to the outsider. They often attacked shifters, claimed they resisted arrest, claimed they were about to illegally shift in public and all sorts of other trumped-up lies to get them in handcuffs and behind bars. The media called it brutality but the lawmakers called it necessary.

  In the end, she and Trish ended up running for their lives. She had the common sense not to run home, not to give him the advantage of knowing where to find her whenever he felt like harassing her. Instead, she led him to the one mall in town where they could lose them, her hand in Trish’s pulling her along. It was hard not to end up best friends after that.

  “This is my friend Alessia,” Trish would introduce her in high school. “She saved my life once and won’t leave me alone now.”

  She’d roll her eyes but smile and toss back her drink.

  #

  Alessia tried to think of Trish while glaring daggers at her professor. Two more students arrived and he decided five minutes early was as good as any time to begin. He introduced himself.

  “They won’t give me tenure because they hate me,” he said. “I think they’re hoping I die of liver failure. I’m a whiskey mouth, I’ll admit.”

  He didn’t give her a chance to introduce herself. He rolled right from his own introduction into the syllabus. She cleared her throat several times, but he didn’t budge an inch, never even looking at her. He didn’t hand her a syllabus when he passed them around to the students and she felt her blood nearly boiling in the veins beneath her skin. She was ready to vibrate with heat and anger, wishing for laser beam eyes or some Jedi power to suck the life right out of him.

  Still, she had to admit he knew what he was talking about.

  “In this class, we use the term ‘Non’ to refer to non-shifters,” he said. “There is no ‘human,’ ‘normal people,’ or any other bias language in this class.”

  “Sir?” A boy raised his hand. “Isn’t using Non kind of bias too? I mean you’re suggesting that shifter is the default state and anything else is the outlier.”

  “Yes, it bothers you, doesn’t it? Makes you feel a little bit off, like you might not be welcome? Just imagine.”

  The boy didn’t say a word the rest of the class, shrunk down in his seat in the fourth row, staring into his syllabus with a scowl and a red face. She understood the feeling. She stared a hole into the blackboard at the front of the room for the rest of the class as he explained a piece of paper that was in front of all their faces. Then he said he’d let them all go, but expected them ready to take on the class for real in two days when they met again.

  The students shuffled out to join their peers as they crossed the campus in a mass exodus to their next class, or lunch, or a nap in their dorm.

  “Professor Tekkin?” she asked, stepping up to him, hating the need to address him formally.

  “Miss Monroe?”

  “I w
as wondering what my role in this class might be, seeing as you didn’t introduce me—“

  “That is for you to decide, Miss Monroe. You’re here to learn how to do my job by doing. It’s not like your other classes where you take notes and think in the abstract about all your activism and philosophical standings. This is where the real world begins. It will not be kind to you, so why should I?” he said, swiping his arm across the board to make the words disappear and she tried not to stare at the way his muscles flexed and twitched to accommodate the movement. Awful people weren’t allowed to be hot, she kept telling herself this. “So if you want a place in this class, take it. I am life, Miss Monroe, and I won’t hand you a damn thing.”

  She swallowed, gripping tightly at the binder against her chest so hard she thought plastic might imbed itself in her hands. She hadn’t expected him to have such a point with his completely awfulness. That didn’t mean she liked him any better or the things he said, but at least it wasn’t an outright refusal to do his job. She could pretend he played the part of tough love mentor who was making her better.

  Though somehow, as she walked out, she was pretty sure it was just that he was an angry man.

  #

  “Yep, sounds like a douche,” Trish said from the screen where her face sat in a New York City apartment.

  While Alessia had gone on to fight for rights and pick fights with bigots backed by a college education and a fancy piece of paper with her name and degree on it, Trish had gone on to be the artistic one. She was a born actor. That much was clear when she auditioned for the play in junior year and spent all night a nervous wreck until she looked at the cast list the next morning and saw her name next to Annie Sullivan for the fall production of The Miracle Worker. Even Alessia had to admit she was phenomenal in it, even for a school play, despite all her teasing that Trish was some artiste now.

  It worked out for her, apparently, because she was accepted into Tish School for the Arts at NYU and everyone suddenly realized how serious she was about this career path. She graduated with several auditions waiting for her and agents throwing business cards at her for representation. It was kind of cool, being best friends with a theatre-world celebrity.

  “Stuff like this happens a lot,” Alessia said. “The bureaucracy of the college administration is never in the student’s favor. It’s all always about ego.”

  “Good thing you’re pursuing a PhD in working the rest of your life for said corrupt a-holes.”

  “I don’t have to become a professor.”

  “What else do you do with a Shifter Culture and Studies degree with Dr. slapped in front of your name? That’s like the kids who major in philosophy just to teach philosophy.”

  “I can do public work.”

  “For no money.”

  Trish had always been apprehensive of Trish’s choice in taking the devoted path of activist on behalf of the shifter population. Trish’s experiences in high school had made her wary of being too outspoken, even about standing up for herself. Alessia couldn’t blame her for that. That’s why she had a long hard think one night about her own privilege and the safety she had speaking out where others didn’t. Her parents asked how the hell she expected to pay rent and her student loans back spending her days holding up signs on a picket line and calling herself a Doctor for show.

  “Did you get that part in the Disney musical?’ Alessia asked.

  Trish paused, her lips pulling into a tight line, her face turning somewhat red, even through the grainy image of her on the Skype screen.

  “Trish?”

  “I didn’t get it.”

  “And it’s bothering you this much?”

  She was worrying on her lip with her whitened, perfect teeth. She’d always kept them above and beyond in cleanliness. People always said they could spot a wolf shifter by their gnarled, crooked, and stained teeth, even as a human. It wasn’t true, but that didn’t keep Trish from being incredibly paranoid every time she smiled for pictures and took two hours to decide on a headshot photo.

  “The audition just didn’t go well,” she shrugged and tapped a pen somewhere off screen. “I messed it up.”

  “Damn. That’s not like you. What happened?”

  That’s when Trish let out a long and frustrated sigh, expelling all sorts of breath that Alessia didn’t notice she was holding onto. She leaned back in her seat.

  “The director said he didn’t hire half-breeds and kicked me out.”

  “Trish!” She felt her skin vibrating in anger, seeing red in front of her eyes. “That’s illegal. He can’t discriminate based on race, religion, orientation, gender, or shifter status. It’s the law.”

  “No one cares anymore. The Bill of Protection will pass and anyone can do whatever the hell they want if they claim they’re protecting themselves and their families.”

  “And this is exactly why I followed through on this major and why I’m still here now. This is appalling.”

  “And you’re going to change it from your seat in a lecture or behind your desk in an office with your name on it?”

  Trish’s tone had become sharp, edged over on every side. Her eyes were hurt though, not matching the venom in her tone. Alessia clenched her jaw and tried not to rise to the bait. Trish wanted something. She could be angry at that. She could see, something in front of her face that was real rather than the abstract idea of a bigot.

  “Yes. I’m going to try. Just like I always have.”

  Without having to say it, she called that time, when Trish was backed into a corner with a knife, ready to make her bleed, and Alessia had been dumb enough to step in. It had been her one great moment of action, of taking on something bigger than herself for a cause that was so much bigger than herself. It was an image, a time she constantly clung to. She wrote about in her entrance essays and often recalled when she doubted what she was doing.

  Trish backed down. Her face dropped, the snapping of her gaze and tone disappeared in an instant.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I knew getting dumped from auditions like that was a possibility but now with all this crap on the news… it’s just getting to me a little bit more. It’s like even if I were to try to tell someone about this, no one would care, you know?”

  “Well, I’ll make them care.”

  Trish smiled at the childishness but looked grateful. They talked the rest of the night about things that were infinitely less depressing.

  Chapter 3

  The day between her classes with Dr. Tekkin were a nice relief. She had two classes, both seminars, which meant most the hours spent in them meant everyone was gathered around a table like King Arthur’s knights, debating freedom and justice, and all sorts of other righteous things.

  “The Bill of Protection completely goes against everything outlined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” said a man in the class whose name was Erik. He had fire in his eyes that Alessia often found hard to meet, blinking her gaze away, pretending she had makeup in her eye that she desperately needed to banish. “Shifter rights are human rights.”

  “Not when lawmakers can make the argument that ‘all men are created equal’ refers only to Nons,” Alessia said. “This is why we need to focus on getting more pro-shifter candidates in the Supreme Court where the debate on the meaning of the Constitution can take a national stage.”

  “Congress knows that, which is why they cockblock our every attempt to do that,” he said.

  “Eloquent way of putting it.”

  The first class was meant to be an introduction, like everything else. But a half hour of discussing the syllabus turned into a full hour of Alessia and Erik going back and forth about how best to take on the bias in the branches of the government.

  “You know you’re both on the same side, right?” said the only other boy in the class, after a while. “Stop yelling at each other.”

  It didn’t stop Alessia from staring down Erik the rest of the class a
fter they were finally forced to let others do the talking. She alternated between crossing her arms and taking feverish, angry notes when others spoke. She couldn’t bring herself to pull her gaze into his eyes, however. They were still a little too intense and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of watching her break eye contact first. Others talked about less fiery topics, discussed the need to bring more shifter involvement and activities to campuses and schools for younger kids.

  When Alessia left, she was in a bad mood. She was surrounded by assholes no matter what day of the week it was. Maybe Erik and Tekkin could get together and talk about how they both loved to hear themselves talk and pretend that they were right about virtually everything they said. They could have a group wank over how impressed they were with themselves and their opinions.

  She ate in silence in one of the school canteens, ripping into her sandwich with her teeth and gnashing it down. She wasn’t even so hungry so much as she wanted to punch the nearest breakable object, preferably Erik’s head.

  The next day brought nothing but the same when she walked into Tekkin’s class and took her seat. She managed to get herself a syllabus from his desk when she marched into office hours, took it, and walked out without a word. Today’s topic began the lecture on the history of the Civil Rights movement in America and how shifters had been both included and barred from the topic and the discussion therein. She knew plenty about this; she’d given a presentation on it in her undergrad classes, years ago.

  “Welcome back to those of you that decided to continue with this class. Welcome period to those of you who are new,” Dr. Tekkin said, walking into the room.

  He was dressed much the same as last time. The difference now was that the white t-shirt was replaced with an AC/DC one, torn in some places, and he wore a leather jacket over his clothes, shaking it off as he got to the podium. He tossed it on a chair and took out stacks of papers and binders from his bag, He dropped them on the wobbly desk next to his podium and put them in separate piles.