The Artistry of Love

by C. J. Scarlett

  They took to her to another cell, not unlike her own, but on the other side of the complex. They’d kept them as far away from each other as possible. She was led up to one and made to stand in front of it and wait. The guard unlocked the small gate and called at the person on the inside to wake up, that he had a visitor. She could see the outline of something inside the cell but she wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking at. Diego seemed to be lying down, maybe they’d broken him too.

  But when he rose, she made out the outline of fur. She saw pointed ears that didn’t look human. He was in his wolf form. Suddenly, she rushed into the cell and looked at him closely. She reached out her hands to place them on his body and feel everything she could. He was large, larger than a normal-sized wolf. His fur with messy, almost dangerous looking in the way it stuck out in all directions like in spikes. She wondered if it was from the dungeon or if he always looked so rugged. She wouldn’t know. She’d never known him before now.

  His eyes though. His eyes were exactly the same as she always remembered them. And that’s what pulled her in, pulled her back to the present. She held his head in her hands and he looked at her so tired and so sad that she wasn’t sure how she wouldn’t cry. She needed to be strong, for both of them.

  “Hi,” she whispered. “You’re beautiful like this, you know.”

  Diego didn’t respond; he just kept looking at her, watching with eyes that were far too human. She pressed her forehead against his, letting the warmth from his body touch her own. It would be the last time she ever saw him. She prayed and prayed he’d get to go home, at least one of them should be able to go free, to live life.

  “I think I love you,” she said. “I know I do, actually. Even with everything. I’m just glad I got to see all of you. I don’t think we will see each other after this and I can’t tell you why. But just know that I’m always thinking about you and I’ll always have a part of you with me.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t want to tell me. I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand that, but I want you to know that I forgive you. I’d never blame you for being exactly who you are and I think it just makes you that much more beautiful. I want you to never stop being that gorgeous man I know you are, whether you’re walking on two legs or four.”

  She pulled back to look at him. His eyes were sharp and focused on her and he lunged forward to hook his furry head around her neck. It was a hug and a kiss in the best way he could. She held him as tightly as she possibly could before someone came in and dragged her away to her fate.

  They’d call the bombing several things after that in the news and in debates in college classes. But she’d remember it as the worst day of her life and hoped that, one day, someone could make all of this right.

  TEKKIN

  (Flames of Freedom Series Book I)

  C.J. Scarlett

  ***

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  Chapter 1

  “Reports are coming in now that an emergency session of Congress has been called in the wake of the July attack, better known by sympathizers as the Assault for Freedom—”

  “This session of Congress is expected to address the moral issues presented in the Bill of Protection put forth by Republican senator, Nome Casey—”

  “The bill is expected to pass in both the House and Senate with the Republican majority in strong favor of many facets, including the implementation of a registry for shifters, required medication, and many other precautionary measures—”

  “None of this is about protection,” says the head of the DC Shifter Family chapter David Olsen. “It’s a about fear—”

  Alessia had to turn it off, putting the television to sleep with a flick of a button. It clicked and she watched all the color pull into the center, darkening the screen around it like a reverse black hole. She heard the hum as it slowly shut itself off completely. She rose from the couch and walked into the kitchen. She felt a little ridiculous using student housing. She just passed her twenty-fifth birthday and still lived in a dorm, hanging onto the last year of her eligibility for her mother’s health insurance.

  It was the way things were going. It was the plight of her generation; it had been such a joy to hear about it again and again in several culture classes during her undergrad. All sorts of statistics showed how no one seemed to leave home anymore and everyone born after date X were fucked and would starve to death by the time they were thirty. She was living it now, with her head buried in debt, in a crappy student apartment, listening to talking heads have nothing better to tell the world.

  She didn’t condone the attacks. They’d killed four people, one of them had been a child. It was abhorrent.

  “You still buying that shifter victim crap?” her father asked after the attack during one of his particularly drunk phone calls to her.

  She ignored him and hung up. She’d lost too much time over the years explaining to him all the good shifters had done for society and how no one looked at white teenage boys from low-income families like a threat even though they were constantly shooting up schools. His skull was thick and filled with alcohol. There was no getting through to what was left of the brain, despite what her classes said about trying to educate the prejudiced.

  She walked into the kitchen and poured out what was left from her stained, hand-me-down coffeemaker. She had to use a folded paper towel for a filter after she realized she’d been far too lazy to stop at the drugstore like she promised herself she would. Her mother claimed she could taste the difference when she had to do that back home. Alessia shrugged it off. Who cared? Filtered coffee was garbage anyway. She learned that during her semester in Austria when she had real European coffee and told herself she would never go back.

  She never liked the first day of classes. It was always a bullshit, shortened hour of handing out a syllabus and explaining to a room full of adults to get their homework in and actually show up for class. She never dressed for it. What was the point of making a good first impression to a room she’d be spending only twenty minutes at most? That had always been her mentality during her undergraduate career.

  But now she would be standing on the other side of the room.

  As part of the practicum of her PhD program, she was required to teach at least one class a semester to undergrads. She didn’t get a choice in the class, just handed an empty spot within the Shifter Studies and Culture major with whatever professor was willing to jeopardize his class by letting a teaching fellow behind the podium.

  For her, it was Gender Roles in Shifter Culture with Professor Drake Tekkin. She’d taken the class herself in her sophomore year, under a different professor, at a different school. But it was a reprieve nonetheless. She considered it an easy first go at the practicum. Besides, she was a woman; that automatically got her points in any gender studies class.

  She took a look in the mirror, fixing her skirt and flattening out a fold in her blouse. She tried to dress business casual but somehow always succeeded in looking like some kind of schoolboy librarian fantasy. It was the best she could do; at least it would get them to pay attention to her.

  She slipped on a jacket, put her purse over her arm, and walked out the door.

  #

  She hadn’t expected the protests to start so early in the semester. But several groups were already outside, picketing both sides of the argument. They never seemed to direct their chants at each other, but she caught several glares and sneers directed across the neutral patch of grass that was the only barrier between them and World War III in the quad.

  She walked through them, keeping her head down. She tried not to look swayed either way, like both batches of students skipping their first day of classes were an inconvenience to her. But she couldn’t stop the slight smile on her face at some of the pro-shifter signs outright calling the president a twat and filled with puns. It always seemed those who were on the right side of history in these situations were more clever with thei
r protests. She walked on.

  Other than the chants behind her, the chatter as a student took pictures and tweeted about the incident, the campus was gorgeous on this first day of classes. The grass shined a bright green under the sun and the blue of the sky was practically mesmerizing against the dark brick of the buildings. She was glad she chose a grad school in a warm climate. She’d done four years battling miserable winters in the Northeast and had no interest in doing it again. Here, even her worst days would be brightened—literally—by the gift of good weather. She often fell victim to seasonal depression.

  The school for the Shifter Culture and Studies program wasn’t a highly well-funded institution, which wasn’t surprising, but also said something considering this was the top school in the country for the program. The student body that made up the roster of classes each year was sparse and, more often than not, populated by undergraduates who got permission to take the course to fulfill an elective requirement in their own general education studies.

  Still, it would be home for the next two years; she might as well get used to it.

  She pushed the door open and stepped inside. It smelled of dust and old floor cleaner that was far past its best use date. Old flyers were stuck to the announcement board, dating back several years from when no one bothered to change them out. The hallways were empty.

  “So it begins,” she sighed, becoming the loudest, most alive thing in the building.

  Her heels clicked aggressively against the tile, the sound bouncing off the walls and back at her as she moved down looking for Room 107. It was a lecture hall that seated fifty, but the class roster had only thirteen students signed up, just barely enough for the administration to justify the course and not shut it down before the semester started. She pushed the door open and saw two students already sitting in seats, faces to their phones. At the front of the building, a man in a white t-shirt and jeans stood, back to the audience.

  For a moment, she thought he was another student, readying herself to go up and tell him that whatever profane comment or penis he would draw on the blackboard wouldn’t be tolerated when he turned around at the sound of her heels and she was met with an older man. He was no older than thirty-three, she was sure of it. His hair still had all its color, though the stubble on his chin gave away the flow of a gray tide. His jeans were washed out from years of use. Loose, untied Doc Martens adorned his feet. He looked more like he should be on the cover of Rolling Stone for a story about his Bruce Springsteen cover band than teaching a class about the social context of shifters in society.

  The arms and chest beneath the shirt were defined as it hung on him loosely, clinging to the curves and valleys of his muscles, clearly visible underneath. A sprinkling of chest hair sat at the very tip of the V-neck in his shirt, hinting at more below.

  “And you are?” he asked, looking over and reaching for his class roster.

  “Alessia. Monroe. I’m not a student,” she said. “I’m your teaching fellow.”

  “Right. The administration-assigned glorified assistant.”

  She felt her head jerk back at the comment without meaning to, blinking at him as he turned back to the blackboard, his interest in her gone completely now. He wrote notes on the board from a slip of torn, ratty paper in his hand.

  “I’m student teaching as part of my practicum,” she said, stepping forward, putting herself a few feet closer to him.”

  “Yes. I’m aware. You’re not my first teaching fellow and you will not be the last because the administration does not seem to get the hint.”

  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.