The Artistry of Love

by C. J. Scarlett

  #

  All the students were sent back to their dorms, afternoon and night classes were canceled while police covered the campus, looking for their culprits. Alessia stood in her apartment, her hair wet from a shower and her pajamas on. She looked out the window at the cops below with bomb-sniffing dogs and flashlights. There was no way to tell who sent out the flyers, but there was one word on everyone’s mind—shifters. Alessia always wanted to believe the best in them, everyone had their extremist groups. But the shifter extremist groups made it very hard for normal shifters to go about their lives without facing some kind of prejudice or, worse, danger.

  Purple was the official color of the National Shifter Party. They vowed to get one of their members into a seat in Congress by the next election and took up any sort of resistance to their ideas with outright violence where they deemed it necessary. They weren’t a model group for the shifters at all, nor were they even the largest of their political factions, but they always managed to be the loudest so they were the only ones anyone ever paid attention to.

  She sighed and moved away from the window. She put on Netflix because she couldn’t stand to listen to the news. They weren’t covering the events on campus; the administration had put a gag order on the press contingent that no bomb was found on campus. But that didn’t mean the tone or mode of broadcasts would be any different. It was the world they lived in. Every news segment brought new, angry, and dangerous stories on behalf of shifters.

  She sat on her couch, sipping at her tea, wondering what Dr. Tekkin was doing right now. She imagined him alone in some studio apartment at the edge of the college town. He probably listened to heavy metal music and barely ate while he scribbled out manifestos of his own and buried himself in books. He was an incredibly smart man. That was obvious from the way he spoke in class, but she could also see it in his eyes. There was a dark intelligence there, a dangerous sort of knowing. His mind was probably the most attractive thing about him, even with his awful opinions on non-allies trying to help shifters. She found herself, for once, actually looking forward to class. She wanted to know what he’d have to say about the issue, how he would spin it. She wanted to know what impassioned lecture he cooked up. Now that she knew the truth, she paid attention to more of the nuances of his speech, the way she could tell how deeply he cared when his voice cracked or something seemed to catch him in a pause between words.

  There was a human being underneath all that exterior and grumpy-faced anger. She wanted to see more of it. Not to mention, she couldn’t wait to brag that, although it had been cut short, someone did show up to her study session after all.

  Chapter 6

  Dr. Tekkin didn’t talk about the event at all. He didn’t even acknowledge it happened in class and Alessia wasn’t the only one looking at him strangely during the lecture. An email went out to everyone assuring them the bomb threat had been a hoax, that the campus was the most secure and safe place they could possibly be, and that the culprits would be caught. It felt like empty promises of a place that was, in Alessia’s opinion, truly scared of whatever danger lurked.

  They didn’t call off the fall festival, they didn’t even mention the date corresponded to the festival. Everyone, it seemed, was ready to ignore what was happening. Erik, however, wasn’t.

  “It’s fucking scary,” he said. “And it fucking sucks.”

  “Eloquent.”

  They sat again together in a bar off campus. She had her wine again and he ordered some hipster, hoppy beer. She told him he tried too hard to blend in with the undergrads and he was a twenty-six-year-old man and should act like one, and order some crappy beer like everyone else. He said undergrads couldn’t afford good beer anyway.

  “I mean it, though,” he said. “These groups aren’t what shifters are about. They’re not what anyone is about. They’re in it for themselves, they don’t care who gets hurt.”

  Alessia agreed. But she couldn’t help but wish she could have this conversation with Dr. Tekkin. She hadn’t been able to get it out of her brain. He was a shifter, he lived this life with terrorists claiming to being doing this work for him. How did that feel? She didn’t want to admit that there might be something to what he said about her inability to truly understand a shifter’s life and everything they went through. But talking with Erik, talking about how awful it was and how bad they felt did nothing to help anyone. They were just words from college-educated kids in positions of privilege.

  “What did the devil professor have to say about it?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, shrugging. “He didn’t say a thing. Just kept talking about the shifters’ place in Marxism.”

  “Well, maybe the best thing is to ignore it. Not give them any power.”

  “They killed four people only two months ago. We can’t pretend this isn’t happening.”

  “I know.”

  Another class passed without Dr. Tekkin saying a word. In her study sessions the following week, more students showed up and more than one of them asked questions about the National Shifter Party and their tactics. They asked her if she thought something bad would happen next week, if she thought the party really did represent what shifters were thinking underneath it all. She had no answers for them. But she knew who did.

  “Can I speak with you, professor?” she asked him after the next class.

  “My door is always open,” he said.

  “I’ve had a lot of the students ask me if we’ll be covering any of the events of last week,” she said.

  “Events?”

  “The bomb threat incident and the flyers.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because it’s relevant.”

  He sighed.

  “There is a difference between relevant and topical. You’ll do well to learn it.”

  There it was again, his constant ego just asserting itself whenever possible, from below the surface. He pulled his leather jacket on over this week’s white t-shirt. “If you have nothing else to ask…”

  “I just think we should be responding to student requests and student needs,” she said. “Isn’t that our job as professors?”

  “One, only one of us here is a professor; don’t get ahead of yourself, Miss Monroe,” he said. “Two, my job is to instruct. I’m passing along my knowledge, not jumping at every bandwagon opportunity the news presents.”

  He moved past her and walked out, and she felt like she wanted to scream. She wanted to take the textbook and just hurl it at his head. She settled for marching back to her apartment and slamming the door behind her, throwing back one of the few beers she had in her fridge.

  “Uh oh, what happened?” Trish said from the computer screen when she spotted Alessia throwing back a beer during their Skype call. “You only drink beer when you’re exceptionally pissed.”

  “I am,” she said. “Drake Tekkin is an awful human being.”

  “You know for someone who hates him, you sure do talk about him a lot.”

  “Because he’s horrid.”

  She drank more of her beer, listing off the events of the week and his refusal to instruct the students in anyway on what had happened.

  “Well, maybe ignoring it is the best way to deal with it,” Trish shrugged. “I know I wouldn’t want to draw any more attention to it.”

  “Which would be fine if that was his reasoning,” she said. “But he thinks everything inside his brain is perfect and intelligent, and the only thing anyone needs to know. He won’t listen to what the students want to hear. He just wants everyone to be impressed with how smart he is.”

  Trish let her rant more until she was red in the face. She giggled at her and apologized when Alessia glared at her for it. She took a breath when she was done and slumped back in her couch.

  “Have you noticed,” Trish said. “You’ve done nothing but talk about this guy for weeks. Is he hot?”

  “Not the point.”

  “So he is.”

  “He’s an asshole.
He’s the worst kind of egotistical professor only concerned with his own agenda.”

  “Fair enough, but maybe you should focus on something else,” Trish said. “Like with these threats. You’re only making it a bigger thing by constantly talking about it. Ignore him, make him go away. Boom.”

  She knew there was a very real chance that Trish’s hesitance was rooted in her own desire to forget these threats, and other things like them, were happening. She couldn’t blame her. Each time something like this happened, the more people turned against shifters at large, not just the terrorists. Alessia thought to that audition that Trish didn’t get because of her status. She wondered how many times that happened and Trish didn’t tell her, for the reasons she obsessed over it now.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” she said but didn’t mean it.

  Trish changed the topic to something else, some Broadway opening that she got tickets to and how she almost slept with the director once while in college, and all sorts of other things. Luckily, Trish was a night owl and a talker. She could keep Alessia entertained and awake for hours with all the stuff she rambled on about. It helped to pull her mind away from things. She didn’t know what bothered her more, the meaning behind the campus-wide silence on the threats or the chance that Trish was a little bit too close to the mark when it came to her opinion on Professor Tekkin.

  #

  The day of the fall festival was the day that Alessia, later in life, would mark as the period of twenty-four hours that changed the course of her life forever. She always knew she would work for shifters’ rights and study shifter culture. That wasn’t news. What did change was how embroiled, how close she would come to the fight, and what she’d one day be willing to do to get the goals they wanted.

  She decided to go to the fall fest. That wasn’t a question. Though many students talked about avoiding it and some professors hinted heavily to the younger undergrads to stay away, she had to go. She was faculty, she was an adult, and this was exactly what she studied to combat. She had to go, whether Tekkin would acknowledge it all or not.

  It was a fine day. The sun was, for once, not shining, which should have been the first sign that something would go a little bit wrong. It wasn’t raining or storming, but the sun was behind a thick cover of gray clouds and the air was chilly enough that she had to put on a denim jacket. She brought sunglasses, even though she wouldn’t need them, and blended in with the crowds that did decide to show up. She moved through the festival, taking in some of the vendors, the student publication tables, the advertisements for the local bands they got to play at the concert later.

  It was boring, more than anything else. It was greasy fair food and a sea of undergraduate students drunk from several beers and wandering around, looking for any deep-fried Oreo they could find.

  Everything about it seemed normal. Until it didn’t.

  The chaos started when someone set off a fire cracker, setting off a sharp blast that got a few jumpy kids screaming. The firecracker, however, wasn’t the real threat. It was a prelude to something else entirely when something actually dangerous went off. Alessia wouldn’t call it a bomb; that made it seem dramatic. A boy did end up in the hospital with some projectile debris lodged in his arm and back, that would never be removed.

  Next came the chants.

  “We are here. We are human.”

  Over and over, they moved in a line, masks of their shifting animals, Alessia guessed, covering their faces. Other than that, they were dressed in black and moving like a dark cloud of danger. Several people around her ran, screaming, as the chants continued. It wasn’t in Alessia’s nature to run from anything, so instead, she moved towards the mass, specifically towards a freshman girl who tripped on the ground and was in real danger of being trampled by the oncoming march.

  “Up. Let’s go,” Alessia said, rushing over to the girl and grabbing her by the arm, pulling her to her feet and running along with her quickly.

  As she turned back to gauge how far away she was from the danger, she spotted him. At least she was pretty sure it was him, at that moment. A man with a large build, made even larger by the black clothes hanging off his body. His mask was that of a dragon, his eyes met hers and she knew them instantly, dark and burning like an ember. They held eye contact for a few seconds, but it was too long for him. He turned away and kept moving. Someone tried to pull her along, screaming for her to follow. Then someone else was right next to her. Next thing she knew, she saw nothing around her vision by black.

  Chapter 7

  When she woke up, she was lying and her eyes were still closed. She was afraid to open them, afraid of what pain would come with letting her vision in and the light along with it. She’d been hit in the head, she knew that much from the dull ache at the back of her skull. So she resisted opening her eyes. The other advantage to this wasn’t having any idea where she was. Instead of a torture chamber or prison cell, she could imagine she somehow found her way back into her apartment, or in her mother’s living room. It didn’t smell like either of those places, but while her eyes were still closed to the truth of the world, she could pretend.

  She heard noises around her, people moving, people talking.

  “We have no idea that she knows who you are,” a man said. “This was completely idiotic.”

  “I say we just drop her out on the street before she wakes up.”

  “What, so she can get raped?” That was a voice she knew.

  “The soft spot is touching, Drake, but we have bigger things to think about than one chick on a college campus. Shit like that happens all the time.”

  She kept her eyes closed; if they didn’t know she could hear them, then she had power here. And she was safe. The less she knew, the better off she would be in their eyes.

  “I’m not dumping her out on the street,” he said. “When she wakes, we just put a blindfold on her and take her back to somewhere on campus.”

  “I bet you’re really starting to rethink that whole no violence policy, eh?”

  She heard a scuffle, someone’s fist hit someone else, the loud smack of flesh on flesh. Alessia knew it from the days where she watched as shifters were attacked at school.

  “How’s that for no violence?”

  She stayed still while others around the group tried to calm each other. She heard more scuffling feet, more shouts, and did everything she could in her power not to flinch and give herself away. She went over what she learned in the past minute in her head. Dr. Tekkin was one of the people in the mask. They’d kidnapped her because she recognized him. They were trying to decide what to do with her. The things she didn’t know: whether they’d be willing to kill her, who they were, how many other people were hurt or attacked, how long she’d been out. It was a lot of dangerous things to not know. But there was no way she would gather facts by playing possum for hours.

  She pretended to stir from the noise, making a show of it to get their attention. It worked. The scuffling stopped and she dared to open her eyes for the first time. She was met with darkness, musty air, and the people who marched at the festival, this time unmasked. They all looked at her, but her eyes sought out the one familiar pair she knew, Dr. Tekkin’s. He was looking for her as well; they met somewhere in the middle. For once, his eyes didn’t look so sure and so intelligent and so arrogant. They looked scared, they looked worried. They made him look far younger than he did in class, revealing his true age. She often forgot he was a man of just thirty-three with the way he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, or pretended he did.

  “You know her?” someone asked him, jerking his head to Alessia.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice husky.

  “Who is she?”

  “You don’t get to know that.”

  Someone grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back, slamming him against the wall, hard. He was a big man but even he could be taken off guard.

  “This ain’t a game, Tekkin,” the man said. “Who do you want to pr
otect, your own kind or her?”

  “She’s a student.”

  “Don’t look like a student.”

  “A grad student.”

  She wanted to speak up, she hated the helpless feeling of watching people decide her fate right in front of her, like her parents divorcing. She had no say in the matter and it pushed on her anxiety. If she spoke, she knew they’d snap, and she wasn’t sure that Dr. Tekkin could protect her. He didn’t seem to be a leader here. He may not have the power to protect her. The best way forward was to assume he couldn’t, that she was a dangling fish and he was helpless to keep her the sharks from swallowing her.

  “We don’t hurt people,” he said, shoving back the man who had him pressed against the wall. “We decided that long ago.”

  “One kid already ended up in the hospital, why not keep it going?”

  “Why don’t we ask her what she wants?”

  Someone else came forward and Alessia knew immediately this woman was in charge. She wasn’t large, she wasn’t tall, but her presence was scary, intoxicating. She couldn’t take her eyes off her and she knew immediately, she didn’t want to be on this woman’s bad side. She stepped forward with such authority, yet Alessia found it hard to look the woman in the eye.

  “I—um,” she said, her throat dryer than she realized as it cracked under the weight of using her own voice. “Where am I?”

  “Classified.”

  “Fangs in, Kyle.”

  “Great, now she knows my name.”

  “She’s not a threat.”

  Dr. Tekkin stepped forward, speaking now with a little more authority.

  “She’s the teaching fellow in my class; her PhD program is in shifter studies. She’s an ally,” he said.

  It didn’t seem to settle anyone, but it got a smile out of the scary woman. She warmed up at that.

  “We can always use friends.”

  She offered Alessia her hand and she wasn’t sure if she should take it, afraid of one last trap awaiting her. But Dr. Tekkin seemed earnest. Even if he couldn’t protect her, he would still try; that much she was sure of. She took the woman’s hand and allowed herself to be pulled to stand. Her head spun, just a little bit, from the effort and she fought to get the colorful dots out of her eyes and not pass right back out again. The dull ache in her head turned into a full-fledged pounding now that she was standing and moving. She tried not to sway on the spot, focusing on her balance.