Skye
Abby slides down the banister of the staircase in my new house, gaping at the view beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. Toby managed to get the electric fireplace up and running after an hour of trial and error with the little remote we found in one of the kitchen drawers, and now the house downstairs is borderline too toasty warm, but both of them left the lab to help me move, and now I get why.
An hour later, we’re across campus in the apartment towers where all the graduates and postdocs live… where I lived until this morning, when I packed up the rest of my things into boxes, and went back for more of my things. “This apartment is the best Toby and I can get, for sure,” Abby says with a rough sigh. “We talked about it for a while, but I think we’re making the right decision. It’s quieter this high up compared to Toby’s place, and I would have to move!”
“Pivot to the left! Pivot! PIVOT!” I grunt, and she disappears from view for several seconds while I shove my mattress through my old bedroom door, bracing all of my strength against it.
While the new condo came with a bed, the mattress is terrible, and I’m not leaving the specially ordered, high-end mattress my parents sent me last year behind. It cost a fortune to ship it here, for one.
It’s going to take all Goddess-damned day to get it across campus at this rate.
“Wait! I’m squished!” Abby shouts, breathlessly, while banging on the side of the mattress.
I let go and drop my hands onto my knees, panting. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to do this. How are we going to get it into the elevator?”
“Well,” she replies, rising on her toes to peek at me over the top of the mattress where she’s trapped in the corner of our hallway. “How’d it get up here in the first place?”
“I don’t even remember. It was delivered.”
A sharp knock on the door rings out before two sets of booted footsteps and two familiar male voices fill our apartment, which doesn’t take much. Compared to my new condo, this place is only half the size but with a lot more twists and turns–too snug for the amount of people and the mattress. I might have to saw it in half to release Abby from the tight corner we wedged her into.
“Wow. What have you guys done?” Toby laughs heartily as he scans the hallway. I have just enough room to push up onto my toes and peek around the doorframe, spotting him and… Alex, of course, lingering a few feet away.
Alex sighs heavily and scans the mattress, then the hallway, then meets my eyes and gives me that look. The look with a slightly raised brow punctuated by clear… annoyance?
Yeah. Maybe it’s weird I’ve been looking at him this closely. It’s especially weird now that he knows I’ve been watching him because his eyes narrow and that arch of his brow deepens.
I clear my throat, duck back into my room, and let the blush threatening to erupt all over my body spread like wildfire across my cheeks in private instead.
Meanwhile, Toby makes quick work of simply pulling Abby over the top of the mattress by her armpits and depositing her on the other side. I’m still trapped in my room, and therefore, have to stand here like an idiot listening to both men criticize us for not waiting for them to help.
“Well, I didn’t know you were bringing him!” Abby argues somewhere out of sight. “We thought we’d at least get it off its frame and into the hallway….”
“Just move, okay? We’ve got this.”
I step back as the men shove the mattress back inside my room. I’m damn near pinched against the windows when Alex comes inside… my space. My room. The one place on campus I could privately be myself. It’s mostly empty now, but there are traces of me here. The plants I refuse to move until my new condo is ready. The two boxes of rocks and crystals I can’t carry across campus by myself. A few books that didn’t make it into the boxes. Pictures still taped to the wall.
He scans the room, briefly catching my gaze, and drops into a gruff, highly scientific plan of action with Toby about the best way to get the mattress out.
Less than five minutes later, they have the mattress safely outside the apartment on a dolly.
I feel like an idiot. I’m a physicist. Apparently, my skills and understanding in the subject of matter, even in terms of moving a mattress, have their limitations.
“Is that everything?” Toby asks in the service elevator–a much wider space than the elevators we normally use.
Abby and I glance down at the scattered boxes and potted plants and nod, but I meet her gaze and feel a little sad, to be honest. We walk side by side, dragging a cart full of my things into my new condo, in silence, but that silence is deafening.
While the guys swap the mattresses, taking the other one to storage, I sit in the loft with Abby, carefully taking out each of my rocks and setting them along the wall. I’ll organize them later, maybe move a few to my office on campus. Abby’s going through my books, bleeding silent melancholy.
“It feels kind of weird, doesn’t it?” she asks. “We’ve been roommates for so long and… like, I love Toby, and he’s moving in and it’s where our relationship was always headed despite my efforts to pump the brakes, but… I don’t like the idea that you and I had a deadline on our relationship.”
“We don’t have a deadline on our relationship!” I almost laugh, but Abby looks so sad. The furrow between her brows and the deep set of her glistening eyes is new to me. It sets me off, to say the least. My bracelet warms. I want to reach out and touch her, to catch a glimpse of the inside of her mind, what she’s feeling, but she doesn’t know I can do that. If I didn’t have the bracelet, I wouldn’t even need to touch her to see her inner thoughts. “You’ll always be my friend. When I reset the code to my door, you’ll be the first to know. We’ll still hang out all the time.”
“Abby!” Toby calls from below. She rises, dusting off her leggings.
“Dinner in the cafeteria tonight?” Abby asks me, and I nod, then watch her maneuver down the stairs and out the door, but Toby and Alex linger in conversation for a moment.
I gather a box of rocks and carry it back downstairs just as Toby crosses the threshold, roping an arm over Abby’s shoulders, and leaves. Alex turns to me, watching me shift the box from hip to hip.
“Where are you going with that?” he asks.
“My office. I want to move some plants there, too. I don’t have a lecture today, so I figured I’d get this done since I need to spend the rest of the week in my lab.”
He eyes me skeptically for a moment. “Is that a box full of rocks?”
I hug the box impulsively, my instincts to hoard and hide my precious collection taking over control. “What of it?”
“You’re a strange creature, Dr. Abbot.”
I throw him a glare, but the amusement shining behind his eyes is palpable. There’s a strange note of incompatibility between us that’s hard to ignore and takes up every pocket of my mind now that I’ve gotten to know him a little better, at least at surface level. Maybe it’s because he’s not a shifter. Again, I don’t know any wizards, but that has to be the reason for this feeling settling into my bones as he takes the box out of my hands and holds it like it doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds.
I like him. Maybe against my better judgment. I’ve been on dates before. I’ve shared a few kisses, although I’ve never really dabbled in attraction. I know how that sounds. It’s not that I don’t find people attractive. I just need more than that to actually like someone. To trust them. To lean toward them.
“Where’d you go?” he asks.
I blink and then meet his gaze. How long have I been standing here trying to reconcile the fact I find Alex incredibly attractive in some weird, exotic way? It’s like I want to study him. I want to find out who he is on a mathematical level just to understand the concept of him.
Maybe I’m just insane and lonely. I have no idea.
“I just have a lot to carry upstairs. I’m debating the best way to do it.”
“You grabbing that potted plant and following me to the elevator seems like the best course of action.”
“You don’t have to continue helping me. I’m sure you have a lot of other, more important things you could be doing.”
He steps into the hallway, where other front doors come into view under the faint glow of artificial lights that dim like a sunset and brighten like a sunrise, depending on the time of day. Now, they’re fading. It’s late afternoon already.
“I actually have something tied up in the lab and have a free evening. I’ll help. You can owe me.”
“Owe you?” I follow him out into the hallway after picking up the sickly Monstera plant I’ve been trying to keep alive for four years. It hates it here in Lunaria, but I don’t have the heart to let it succumb to its natural end just yet. It was a gift from Maeve, anyway. She asks about it every time we talk.
“I may need your help with something that has nothing to do with the university at all.”
“Oh?”
Twenty minutes and nearly two miles of walking from one side of campus to the other, and several staircases and two elevators later, we’re stepping into my office while he wraps up the story about how the Beta of Aurora, the pack that resides within Aurorium, came to him seeking help.
He sets the box of rocks on my desk. “I’ve analyzed the samples, but there’s nothing abnormal about the DNA profiles I found. Trace elements of exotic material, maybe, but my lab assistants are working on that as it stands.”
“So you’re tasked with finding the killer?”
“No, just doing the math for them. I try to stay out of pack business like everyone else on campus.” He picks up a rock and examines it. Meanwhile, my heart leaps into my throat like I’m a child again and someone is touching my things–putting them down where they don’t belong.
I lunge toward him and take the rock. It startles him, and he lets go of a disbelieving laugh. “What is going on with you?”
“These are just very important to me.” My voice wobbles. I grit my teeth. I sound so ridiculous.
He eyes me like I’m about to bite his hand off as he reaches into the box, arching a brow. When I don’t move to stop him right away, he pulls out another rock.
“It’s a–”
“A botryoidal chalcedony?” he says before I can finish. “It’s a rather nice one, too. I like the color variation.” He turns the geode over in his palm to inspect its bumpy surface. “Where did you find it?”
I blush. I can’t help it, not when he seems genuinely interested. People are rarely interested. “The lakeshore in Moonrise. They’re all over the place there.”
“So this is your personal collection?”
“Yeah. I…. It’s weird, but, yeah, I’ve collected a few rocks.”
“There’s at least two hundred crystals and geodes in here.” He corrects me with a wry grin that deepens my blush.
“Do you want to see my favorite?” I enthusiastically reach into the box, fingers grasping for the chunk of raw kyanite, but my bracelet snags on the pointed tip of a hunk of quartz.
It happens in a split second. One moment, I’m here, in my office, my feet grounded and Alex standing a hair’s breadth away, and then the bracelet clasp snaps like a length of thin thread. My powers roar to their full potential without warning.
The room fades in a blink, replaced by whirling sound and darkness. Voices and visions strangle my senses. I fight for control, but it’s useless. I haven’t taken the bracelet off like this in years. The reserves of my powers stored in the charms flood back into my body like a tidal wave, and the moon and stars pull me into the depths, head over heels.
A sharp ache ripples through the voices screaming through my mind. A sudden snap quiets everything–every sound, every color, every distorted vision.
I’m on the ice.
And I’m not alone.
A hooded figure stands only yards away, the wind beating against a dark cloak, his face hidden by shadows. Crimson red eyes hold mine.
“Run!”