Book 18
Skye
There’re only two types of people who would ever remotely consider calling Lunaria home.
The wolves of the small towns and rural pack territories that dot the eternally icy, always dark frozen wasteland so far north of Crescent Falls that the sun only rises a few inches over the horizon for three months out of the year… and people like me–intellectuals. Researchers. Souls chasing the unexplainable with new scientific methods and theories even magic can’t decipher. People who haven’t been outside in weeks because the daily negative sixty-degree low is cold enough to freeze eyeballs in less than ten minutes. Crazy people. I digress.
I love it here. The darkness. The stars. The endless, flat landscape of ice against the wash of the aurora, painting the sky in shades of emerald and pale pink every night… and day, in reality. It’s fall, a week before the official start of the semester, and already the sun has failed to rise for several days, barely poking above the horizon, giving off nothing more than what the locals call the “blue hour,” where the normally dark sky turns an impressive midnight blue before fading back to black.
After four grueling years of my PhD studies and post-doctoral research, I’ve made it. I’ve done it. I did it. The small but sleek box of glass expanding around me is mine. The whiteboard? Mine. The empty bookshelves? Also mine. The slightly battered desk and ancient computer that will definitely need to be replaced? Mine, mine, mine.
I snap a few pictures of my empty office with my phone, grinning from ear to ear. The group chat with my parents fills with shots of my empty desk, the solid, slate-colored walls, the wall-to-wall whiteboard I’m aching to fill with the theoretical equations I’ve been working on during my free time all summer.
Floor-to-ceiling windows stretch toward the south, giving me all the light available during the blue hour–a true miracle of circumstance seeing as this was the only empty office available in the physics department, and it’s…
“All yours, huh?” Dad’s smile is wide and rich over our video call as I spin the phone in a circle for him and Uncle Ryan to see. Silverhide in all its autumn glory takes up the screen, but both men smile when I smooth my hand over the built-in bookshelf.
“Will you make sure Mom sees the pictures? She’s been asking me for days when I’d get the keys, and I just got them today.”
“I’m sure she’s already showing your aunt and cousins,” Dad replies with a soft, proud chuckle. “I love it. It’s all very–”
“Straight lines and gray?” Uncle Ryan chips in with a hearty laugh. “How long until you see the sun again, Skye?”
I sink into the desk chair and swivel with a creak, adding a new chair to the mental list of things to request from the supply department. “I’ll come back for Solstice, so not long. There’s a bit of a break between classes then.”
“How many classes are you teaching this semester?” Dad walks away from Ryan, and the scene in Silverhide shifts to rain clouds peeking over the valley and a group of muscular, sweaty men carrying harvesting tools while wolves pull carts of freshly harvested grain.
“Uh, two., All lectures. All graduate level.” I smooth my hand over the gray surface of my desk before looking through the drawers to see if the last person who claimed this space left anything behind. I find a few old mints that crumble to dust in their plastic wrappings and a long-dry pen. “The rest of my time is just… research.” Thank the Goddess. I was adjunct faculty during my postdoc and spent all of my time grading undergraduate papers on Physics 101 and answering asinine emails that normally went something like, “Hey Dr. Abbot, I forgot that essay was due today. My fish back in Moonrise died :( Can I have an extension?? TYSM!!!”
I rise and turn to the window, testing the glass against my fingertips. Compared to the icy landscape, the glass is warm and frost-free, offering a crystal clear view.
“So… how’s everything going?” I ask, and Dad sighs heavily, our connection buffering for a few seconds. “Dad?”
“I’m still here. It’s going fine. We’re all headed to the festival grounds tomorrow.”
A pang of guilt whispers through my chest. “I left a wedding gift back in Moonrise for Kieran. He told me his fiancée likes books, so I wrapped up a few of my favorites.”
“They’ll appreciate it. Kieran and Lyra’s bookshelves in that little cabin he finished building this summer are empty as it stands. They’ll be the most well-read wolves in the Emberfyll Pack–”
His image freezes mid-sentence.
“Dad? Dad? Shit.” I hiss out a breath and hang up, setting my phone down. Maybe it was an act of the Goddess that the call dropped during an otherwise uncomfortable conversation. Kieran, my cousin, is getting married in a few days during the harvest festival. His is the first wedding of our generation, and I’m missing it. I have a valid excuse. I’m thousands of miles away and starting my new job, the job I fought tooth and nail for, but I know what the family thinks about my situation.
I turned twenty-eight last spring. I’m single, otherwise thriving, but have undoubtedly separated myself from the way of life set forth by my great-great-grandparents almost a century ago. I have magic in my veins. Real, unfathomable power. I’ve never questioned how to use it. I know who and what I am.
Unlike my family members, I’m desperate to understand why.
A resounding knock on the door is followed by a short, stout woman entering my office. I’m perched on the edge of my desk when she walks in, smiling at me, her hazel eyes crinkling. “Dr. Abbot! How are you liking it? If it’s too cold in here, I can have maintenance check your thermostat. Dr. Kleinhowser liked to keep it near freezing. He was a local, you know, of Aurorium.”
“I know,” I say with a polite smile. “He was one of my professors during my master’s program.”
Maisie Robertson, faculty administrator, grips her clipboard with a grin bright enough to light the night sky–or morning sky, since it’s not even 10:00 A.M.
“Well, settle in, take your time. Classes don’t start until next Monday anyway. You know how to request supplies–”
“Yes.”
“Oh, right, you were a postdoc!” She grins again, but it’s a bit strained, her cheeks staining a deep pink. “Anyway, here.” She passes me a flyer, still warm from the printer. “There’s a little meet and greet tonight, nothing formal or mandatory, but it’s strictly for the faculty. The advanced psychology department had a bit of funds leftover from a research grant last year and bought a margarita machine! They promised to bring it. Otherwise, there’s going to be beer and wine for sure.”
I nod along, resisting the urge to mumble under my breath about the fact that a department had leftover money from a grant, whereas I was scrambling for funds to replace dry-erase markers and ended up sketching equations on napkins with pencils I dug out of the trash bins in the physics lab’s break room.
“I’ll be there.”
“Great! Oh, it’s been so long since we’ve had someone so young on staff!” She practically hops out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Silence sweeps through the room, rattling the normally quiet voices that whisper along the shadowed outskirts of my mind. My bracelet barely holds them back anymore. They begin to chatter.
“Not now,” I tell them, folding the flyer into a little crane and setting it on my desk.
* * *
The observatory is a wide, circular room set up like an auditorium. A stage rests under the glass dome protecting observers from the elements, but otherwise, the sky is wide and open. I sink into a chair at the very back. It’s dark, the stars are out and blinking, and it’s only noon. This place? It’s sacred to me–like a church where I pray, but instead of talking to the Goddess, I sit here and look up, trying to piece together the strange elements of my mind that make me who I am and determine what I see in my visions.
I use this place as a lecture hall sometimes. An exterior shield can be brought up over the dome itself, and projectors paint the night sky instead, giving students and staff alike a view of the far reaches of our universe.
But I like it best like this–open, quiet, watching comets whizz across the blanket of navy blue and shadow.
I lean back, my neck draped over the top of the scratchy fabric covering the chair, and almost miss the shadow moving several rows in front of me. A tall, lean man rises and gathers his belongings before moving toward the exit–probably a student using the space for a silent study session.
I close my eyes for a moment and let myself drift through my memories like turning pages of a book, letting my guilt over missing Kieran’s wedding during the harvest festival wash over me in gentle, lapping waves until it fades. A hazy memory I hadn’t thought of in years takes hold, bringing me back to my early twenties, when I’d first come to Lunaria on a tour with my parents to see the facilities and decided, for certain, that this is where I wanted to pursue my graduate studies.
It had been utter madness. I was considered a prodigy back at Wellington, then at the University of Moonrise. When I transferred during my undergraduate studies, I was the star of the physics department, and Lunaria U wanted me. They even threw a welcome party for me and my parents, and I fell into bad habits I thought I’d kicked as a preteen, when the social aspect of life finally caught up to me and turned me inside out.
I have none of the grace and social butterfly gifts of my mom and granny, Leona. I favor my dad and his rigidity, his inability to fix his face to smile when appropriate. I am his daughter through and through, and while that ensured I’d heavily favor math and science, it also meant I spent a great deal of time alone, researching how to make friends and practicing facial expressions in the mirror until I had several trained masks I could wear at any given moment.
The party they’d thrown for me was overwhelming. All the questions, the praise…. My mask started to slip. I got confused about how I was supposed to talk, look, and behave. So, when the professor of advanced experimental physics turned his back, I ran, ducking into a utility closet in the hallway off the conference room full of people who demanded something from me I didn’t know how to bend my body into being and… hid.
Tears blurred my vision. I kept rubbing them away, but more would come, and then it got hard to breathe.
A hand pressed on my shoulder, slightly cold, like the person had been outside recently or holding an iced drink.
“Take a few breaths. You’re having a panic attack.” His accent was strange. It wasn’t anything I’d ever heard before. Deep and rolling like waves against a distant shore.
“Wh-who–”
“In, and out—like this,” the deep male voice explained, but his image was so blurred by my tears I couldn’t make out his face. He sounded young–probably a student, which only made it worse.
I tried to follow his direction but kept choking and wheezing, and all the while, he crouched, only a few inches from me, gripping my shoulder every time I inhaled.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I admitted through a torrent of tears. “I–I don’t like–the fact–that I have to–”
“Talk to people?”
“I thought I could just–sit in a lecture hall, or the library, or–”
“You can. You’re not the only socially-inept creature that's going to haunt these halls. Lunaria U is a hotbed for people like us.”
Us.
That word… it changed everything.
He left before my vision cleared enough to dab my cheeks and go back to the party, but when I did, I noticed everyone in the room, save for a few administrators and my mom, were just like me. Their eyes didn’t match the curve of their lips. Their expressions were strained, like an event like this was painful for them, and when my dad dropped me off for my first semester of my graduate program, and I thrust myself into a full student life, I actually fit in.
Everyone here is like me. Left-brained. Science-minded. Weirdos who like the dark and cold. People who can sit in the silence with each other and call it socializing.
It doesn’t mean we don’t have fun, however.
I leave the observatory and go home to get ready for the get-together. The door to my apartment slams shut while I’m dabbing my lips with deep burgundy lipstick, followed by grumbling and a low, insanely colorful curse. Abby, my roommate, a microbiologist doing her postdoc, strides past my bedroom, red in the face, and it’s not from the cold.
“Hey? Are you okay?”
She backs up, tucking her platinum blonde, perfectly straight hair behind her ears, and glowers, brown eyes shining. “No, I’m not.”
“What’s up?”
“You know, I’ve come to realize that murder can’t be all that bad if it benefits the common good.”