Skye
Abby slouches in one of the firm, slightly worn armchairs in my office, picking fluff from the seams while I hurriedly answer several emails. She tilts her head, watching me like a hawk, her bright, nearly-white blonde hair falling over her shoulder in a platinum sheet.
I glance at her, huffing a breath, and ask, “What?”
“You’re freaking out.”
I slowly close my laptop, sliding my hands over its outer shell. “I am not.”
“You are. I can see all the arteries in your neck. You’re going to give yourself wrinkles scowling like that. You’ll be fine, Skye. Jeez, you’ve lectured before!”
“Not at the graduate level.” Even the mention of it has my chest tightening to the point of pain. Abby ignores my comment and takes several seconds to swivel side to side in the chair, readjusting her position, the shiny yellow fabric of her parka crinkling with every move she makes. The sound gnaws at my nerves, and she knows it.
I roll my lower lip between my teeth and let it go with a pop. “Can I ask why you’re here? Is it just to annoy me? It’s the first day of the semester, and I’m very busy.”
She shrugs, fishing a chocolate bar out of the pocket of her parka and taking a bite. Her yellow thermals beneath contrast sharply with the slate gray walls and darkened glass windows. Outside, a windstorm is absolutely hammering the icy plains beyond. “You guys have way better snacks in your faculty lounge than the biology department.”
I instinctively reach into the pocket of my cardigan, finding it empty. She smirks, tossing my badge back to me.
“When did you–”
Her watch beeps several times, and she grunts a curse around a mouthful of chocolate, then proceeds to stuff the rest of the bar in her mouth and wipe her chocolate smeared fingers on her insulated pants. My brows are nearly to my forehead by the time she’s done, and she smirks, salutes me, and walks out like hanging out in my very professional office and stealing my badge to get access to the good snacks is going to be her new thing.
“Bye, then!” I call after her, rushing around my desk to the door, which she left wide open, but when I reach the threshold, she’s gone, and a pair of voices fills the normally silent corridor.
“I’ve been going department to department asking if anyone has heard anything about it.”
I slowly peek to the left. Alex’s voice drifts to me before he comes into view, startling in full lab attire. No, he doesn’t wear a starched white coat and goggles, but he is decked out in heavy winter gear, his parka unzipped and dark thermals underneath. He swipes his beanie from his head and runs his fingers through his hair, damp with perspiration, his expression shadowed with frustration.
“What exactly happened?” It’s Dr. Gerralde. He’s standing just outside his office door, stepping closer to Alex. “All we’ve heard is there was an assault in the subway in Aurorium.”
My heart thumps, quiets, then restarts at the scene I’ve been trying to scrape from my prefrontal cortex since Saturday night. All of that blood. The tarp. The obvious body beneath it.
Alex sighs, bracing his hand flat against the wall, essentially boxing Dr. Gerralde in. His lips part, but then he stills and slowly turns to look in my direction.
He straightens and moves with an unnatural stillness I’m just now noticing–a way that makes my heart quicken with alarm.
“Excuse me for a moment,” he says to my colleague and takes a step in my direction.
Alarm bells skitter through my skull. I spin back into my office and yank the door closed, but he catches it, slides inside, and shuts it.
“Hey!” I retreat until my back hits the window with a thud. “You can’t just–”
He turns the lock, his brows raised in challenge. My heart begins to race for an entirely different reason. Fear? Maybe. That’s what I should be feeling. Overwhelming curiosity about his intentions? Definitely.
It’s the slightly panicked look in his sharp, ocean blue eyes that gives me pause. “What happened in Aurorium? What have you heard?” I ask.
“You were there. You tell me.” He shrugs out of his coat and tosses it onto the chair Abby recently vacated, like he plans to stay for a while. His muscles fill the thermal shirt to a T, and for a moment, the thudding in my heart turns into a quiver.
He pauses, his eyes dipping from my face to my chest, before he chuckles and smiles to himself.
“What?”
“Your heart is doing weird things.”
“How–you know what? Get out of my office. You can’t just barge in here!”
“What were you doing in Aurorium?”
“I went to a club with Abby, but you know that, seeing as Toby invited you. He told me.”
“I’m sure he did.”
I take two cautious steps away from the window. Tension seeps between us like molten lava. I’m sure it’s pure electricity causing my hackles to rise. I’ve been lucky. I can readily admit that. My journey through academics has been fair and simple. I haven’t had many run-ins with egotistical maniacs, even in my field of study.
Alex is the exception, and we’ve said maybe thirty words to each other in the few days I’ve been able to put a face to the name.
“Are you accusing me of something?”
“I’m just asking. There’re rumors beginning to swirl in my department, and I need to put an end to it before it gets out of hand.”
“Sure,” I retort, mimicking his skeptical expression even though my feelings betray everything about the slight rise of my brows. Something about him makes me… vicious. I’m not sure how else to describe it. Viciously angry? Intrigued? Whatever it is, it’s giving me the confidence–no, desire–to look him directly in the eyes and say, “Kindly fuck off, Dr. Scarlett.”
“I’m asking a simple question.”
“I answered it. Simply. Get out.”
“I have lab materials stuck in Aurorium because the Alpha shut the terminal down for the next two days. I’d like an explanation, and seeing as you were in Aurorium Saturday night and came back to campus early–”
I take a step away from the window, narrowing my eyes to slits. “Are you stalking me?”
“Why would I waste the time? We live in a glass box, Skye.”
“Dr. Abbot–”
“Skye. We live in a glass box. I see everything. You see everything. All I’m asking is for the truth before I lose my fucking shit on the supply department responsible for the shipment one of my studies is riding on.”
This man is insane. There’s no way around it.
“First of all, you’ll call me Dr. Abbot. I’m not your student. I’m not even your colleague. You and I simply exist in the same place and time.”
He arches a brow, which… enrages me.
“Secondly, I don’t give a shit about your supply request being late. Send runners.” I look him up and down, my gaze sweeping over his tall, well-built frame and catching on the smooth muscles filling his thermal top before I can stop myself. I rein myself in and shake my head. “In fact, you can easily just shift and run to Aurorium–”
“If I had the ability, I would have been there and back by now.”
Oh. Oh. “You’re–you’re not a shifter?”
“I am absolutely not a shifter, no.”
To say I’m perplexed would be the least of it. A witch, perhaps? Male witches, otherwise known as wizards, or sometimes warlocks, aren’t common, seeing as the traits pass from mother to daughter, so on and so forth, but they do exist. I’ve never met one, but there’s a first time for everything, I suppose.
I find myself glancing at his smooth, rounded ears anyway just to confirm he’s not fae.
“Can I help you?” he asks sternly.
“What are you, then?”
“That’s an exceedingly rude thing to ask someone, Dr. Abbot. Should I ask the same of you?”
“Why are you in my office?” I step around my desk and ease into the chair. “Are you here to interrogate me?”
“I am, seeing as you were in the terminal that night. What did you see? That’s all I need to know.”
“Why? Because of your supplies?”
“Because I lecture at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and I have eighteen-year-old students, and their parents are blowing up my email inbox asking if they’re safe and why their only connection to the modern world has been cut off. I have students who live in the underground dorms only a few miles of tracks away from where whatever happened, happened.” His tone is as sharp as a knife.
I grit my teeth, feeling suddenly guilty. In my defense, he did come in with his metaphorical hackles raised. “Someone died; that was obvious.”
“How?”
“How? How am I supposed to know? I was herded onto the train, and that was that. I didn’t see much. Just… Just–”
“Just what?” He edges toward my desk, arms crossed over his broad chest. He’s so still. I find myself looking closely at him against my will again, drawn to him, like those strange powers inside of me I try so hard to keep dormant are clawing to touch him, to study him like I study the stars just beyond the frosted windows. I wait for his chest to rise and fall. Seconds pass. More. More. He just stares at me, waiting, like the time I’m wasting doesn’t matter to him in the slightest.
Odd.
When he finally takes a breath, I reply, “Blood. A lot of it. Everywhere. On the terminal walls, the ground, the benches.” My lungs strain as I suck down air and continue, the memory burning through my brain like acid. “It was fresh, still steaming.”
“And the body?”
“Dead, obviously, and covered by a tarp. That’s all I know. There were warriors everywhere.”
He nods once and turns to snatch his jacket off the chair. “Was that so hard?”
“You are as much of an asshole as everyone says you are.”
His smirk is as sweet as honey. “I’m not that bad when you get to know me.”
“Well, seeing as I won’t be getting to know you, that doesn’t matter. Please exit my office, Dr. Scarlett.”
“Severe as always,” he murmurs under his breath, turning for the door.
“Excuse me?”
He folds his parka over the crook of his arm and turns on his heel to face my desk. He apparently took my reply as an invitation to stay, and now I’m seething, doing my absolute best not to show it.
Praying my eyes don’t light from within. Goddess, that would be the last thing I need right now.
I clutch my opposite wrist on impulse, letting the old charms pinch my skin, and feel them warming in warning.
“Do you know that you and I have a similar reputation here, Dr. Abbot?”
“That’s impossible.”
“You’re a theoretical physicist underneath all your advanced studies and titles, so you know nothing is impossible. Far from it.” He sinks onto the armrest of the chair, all sharp lines and space, like the room is suddenly smaller with him in it.
“People like me. No one likes you.”
“People are just as terrified of you as they are of me. I don’t see it as a bad thing in the slightest. I’d rather be feared than loved.”
“I’d rather be respected than feared.” The charms warm to the point that my skin begins to tingle. I ignore it–the warning bells and prickling skin. His eyes are undoing me at the seams. I’m not sure how to describe it, but with his stillness, it’s like looking into a calm pool of crystal clear water so deep I can see the bottom but could never reach it without losing my breath.
Not without drowning.
Just an endless, breathless cycle.
“You’re a prodigy in your field of study. So am I. One day, you’ll be the head of your department, and so will I. Everyone knows it.” He leans forward, casual, rolling his lower lip between his teeth and letting it go slowly. “Our students worship the ground we walk on regardless of how they feel about us personally.”
“Your students think you’re a monster.”
“Untrue. And mean, I might add.” He chuckles, straightening. “The only person I know who hates me like you’re describing is Abby, and her reasons are strictly personal.”
“Abby told me you’re preventing her from publishing her research–”
“Abby doesn’t know what she wants,” he retorts with sudden heat. “She’s a brilliant biologist, but her heart’s not in it, and she knows it, and I remind her of it every single day. She can publish her sea ice research when she actually has something substantial to publish, which she does not.” He rises, and I realize with the mention of Abby I’ve hit a nerve.
Does he… like her? In a…
He rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Do not look at me like that.”
“Like what? What–”
“There is nothing between Abby and me. She doesn’t like me because I’m forcing her to actually use the brain she was blessed with, and I don’t like her because of how she treats my friend.”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” he parrots, shrugging into his parka.
“I–I didn’t know you and Toby were that close.”
“I don’t make friends easily, and he forced the subject when we were roommates during my undergrad. I’ve grown to appreciate his company.”
That statement settles like lead at the base of my spine. I watch him pull his beanie over his thick black hair, his eyes never leaving mine. If he dropped his strange accent and lifted his voice, those words would have been… mine. Something I would say. Something I’ve said before… or at least thought.
“Thank you for your time, Dr. Abbot.”
I rise as he reaches the door. “I never gave you my time in the first place. You took it.”
“Unfortunately, you’ll have to get used to that, seeing as Dr. Gerralde has pawned you off to my department as a consultant.”
“I don’t know anything about paleomicrobiology. I don’t see how I could possibly be of use to you.”
“Then, it’s a good thing I do.” His mouth pulls up into what appears to be an actual smile, and I flinch, caught off guard by the sincerity of it, the slightly teasing glint in his sharp eyes. The smile evaporates in an instant, like he didn’t mean for me to see it, and he says, “Good luck this evening.”
I find it suddenly hard to swallow. “I’ve lectured before. I doubt I’ll need it.”
“Graduates are a different breed. If you thought you were loved by your students, you’ll know you’re not before long.”
He pulls open the door, but I’m already edging around my desk. “What do you mean by that?”
With a sigh, his hand curled around the doorknob, he replies, “Like I said, it’s better to be feared than loved. Undergraduates are infants away from their mothers for the first time. They’ll do and believe anything. Graduates have been through the academic meat-grinder and think they know what to expect… and if I know anything about you, Skye, you’re about to unravel everything they thought they knew about space, or whatever the hell you physicists study for no reason at all. They’re going to challenge you.”
“What? Hey!”
He pulls the door closed behind him when he leaves.