Skye
The lecture hall in the psychology department is big enough to hold every single faculty member and the entire university administration in one place at one time.
But I’ve never seen everyone gathered like this before, and the undercurrent in the room is so thick with unease I can taste it. Dr. Gerralde parts the aisle where I’m seated, sidestepping in my direction, and his pale face and uneasy eyes make my heart leap when I rise to my feet.
“Sit down,” he says under his breath.
“What’s going on?” I ease back into my seat. Everyone else is tittering nervously as well. Murmured conversations lift to the ceiling, but the podium remains empty.
“The president is meeting with the board and the deans as we speak,” he says under his breath, glancing around the room before leaning in to continue. “A student is dead.”
“What?”
The door to the lecture hall bursts open before I can process the impossible news I just heard. An echo claps through the crowd in its wake, abruptly quieting every conversation. The president of the university, a tall, regal shifter woman in her late fifties, steps up to the podium as the doors slam shut behind the deans of the departments–everyone but the dean of the Biology department, James Kanten.
“Good morning. You’re all wondering what the meaning of this is,” President Allaway says gravely, her gray eyes creased and desperately serious. It’s so quiet, I can hear Dr. Gerralde’s heart beating beside me. “Late last night….” She takes a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment, and backtracks, “You’ll notice a presence of Aurorium warriors on campus today. All lectures, classes, and study halls are canceled for the remainder of the week.”
Shocked voices lift, turning into a thunderous murmur that President Allaway lets spread for several seconds before waving for silence again. She steadies herself and continues, “Last night, an undergraduate student was found dead in the clinic.”
Another wave of voices rises in shock, louder this time.
“Please–please, everyone,” Allaway urges.
“Was the student ill?” someone shouts, and more murmurs rise, pulling through the crowd like a wave crashing against a distant shore.
“No, the student was assaulted. Murdered.” Her eyes shine as she grips the podium. “As I said, Aurorium guards are here to investigate. Students and postdocs are being notified of the lockdown–”
“Lockdown?”
It’s pointless. Allaway tries to rein in the crowd as panicked professors and faculty rise from their seats and start shouting questions, talking over each other. I stand, but only to look around. Alex isn’t here. In fact, the entire biology department is missing.
A feeling of dread sweeps over me. Abby and Toby are postdocs. Allaway mentioned a student's death. They’re safe. But if she called us here to tell us the details, it’s a lost cause now.
Dr. Gerralde tugs my arm, pulling me with him down the aisle and up the stairs to the upper entrance, where he closes us into a hallway and the noise from the lecture fades to an electric hum.
I whirl on him. “What do you know? What’s this about a lockdown?”
He waves his hand in surrender, then adjusts his plaid button-up shirt like his collar is too tight. “I don’t know whether what I’ve heard is confirmed to be the truth.”
“I don’t care.” The door opens, letting out a group of professors who walk past us, murmuring rapidly to each other before falling out of sight. “Dr. Gerralde–”
“The student was a volunteer at the clinic, from what I heard. Investigators from the ruling pack in Aurorium are here and swarmed the biology department late last night.”
That would explain why I never saw Alex again. A flash of guilt tears through me, and then we’re interrupted again by another group of professors and faculty.
Dr. Gerralde scratches his head and steps toward me. “Skye, listen. The student was one of Dr. Scarlett’s. She split her time between the clinic and his lab. I heard, but can’t confirm, that she was brutally killed.”
“How?” My voice holds steady despite the thundering of my heart.
He bites his lip, baring his upper teeth. “She was found in the clinic… with bite marks all over her body. It’s bizarre, but she was, apparently, completely drained of her blood. I don’t know if it’s true–”
I’m already halfway down the hallway, running and weaving between the bodies leaving the lecture hall. There’s only one undergraduate student I can think of that Alex works with regularly, only one student that young who has access to the clinic. One person spending time with a vampire without realizing it.
My heart is in my throat when I pop out of the psych department’s tower into a skybridge, then my heart tumbles into the pit of my stomach when guards come into view, blocking access to the elevators.
I move with the crowd across the wider, main skybridge connecting us back to the library and cafeteria. Guards are everywhere, some of them in wolf form, patrolling.
I cut to the left, taking a narrowing skybridge toward the biology department tower, slinking past a guard directing a group of nervous students to use the elevators in the library to access their dorms beneath campus and explaining that the department towers are now under restricted access.
Murmurs of worry and confusion fill the air. My mind reels over what needs to be done. The emails I need to send to my students alerting them to canceled lectures. The phone calls I need to make to my family, who will no doubt hear the news as soon as tonight, maybe earlier if the Alpha King of Lunaria is roped in. I reach the skybridge to the biology tower and find a thick tangle of guards arguing with a crowd of students demanding access, but the crowd is a blessing in disguise.
The service elevator is unguarded.
I scan my badge. The doors open. I slide inside and slam the button to close the door. The doors begin to close right as a guard notices me and shouts, but he’s too late.
Silence sweeps through the elevator. I slam the button to the floor where Alex’s office is located. If he’s not there, I’ll risk going down to the lab, which I’m sure has been cleared out for hours now. And I’ll–I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do.
He couldn’t have done this. He wouldn’t have, but if not him, then who?
I flex my fingers, my powers riling and warming my skin, and the doors open.
A hallway identical to the corridor outside my office expands before me, the lights dimmed and the glow of the aurora casts hues of green across the shallow blue carpet. Several doors stand ajar, offices empty, and an unnerving quiet envelops the hallway. I walk toward Alex’s office, my breath caught in my lungs, and turn to his door, which is shut tight.
I don’t knock. I turn the knob, and the seams pop, the door opening silently, the amber light of a lamp in the corner of the room spilling over the toes of my boots.
He’s standing near the window with a cellphone pressed to his ear. He braces a hand against the glass and hangs his head, mumbling something that sounds a lot like, “Please, let me know if there’s anything your family needs,” and brings the phone away from his ear. The screen goes dark, but he remains facing the window.
I close the door behind me and slide the lock into place. He flips the phone over in his hand a few times before sliding it into his pocket, his reflection in the glass hazy and dappled with starlight, but his expression is clear.
“It was Laney, wasn’t it?”
He sighs heavily and slowly turns around.
I edge away from the door, my heart refusing to beat as I take in his appearance, looking for that warm glow he had after feeding on me.
He scans my face, deciphering my expression like my inner thoughts are loud and clear, spread across my cheekbones like text.
“Are you going to ask if I did it, or is there another reason why you’re here?” he asks so coldly that the temperature in the room drops by ten degrees.
“No.” My voice breaks, and his eyes sharpen, a look of dread so deep it guts me, turning his eyes an icy blue. It’s a trick of my mind, I’m sure. A play on light. But still, hurt floods off him, drowning the space between us. “But a vampire did it. Right?”
He turns to the side to hide the expression carving lines of stress across his face. “You need to return to The Pillars and stay there.”
“Alex–”
“Did you hear me, Skye? Have you listened to a goddamn thing I’ve said the past week since you found out my dirty little secret?” The vitriol in his voice has frost spreading across the glass behind him. “I understand your curiosity. Trust me. I was standing where you stood once. Desperate for answers to every question I’ve ever had. I stood there and faced a man who paved a forward trajectory for me, making me his heir–head of the biology research department. Me, a stupid fucking kid who killed someone and ran to prevent another bloody, useless war, stood there with forged papers in my hands. A fake name. A fake background.” He scrubs his hand over his face and into his hair. “I have worked my ass off to stand where I stand right now,” he snarls, but not at me. Tears glisten in his eyes when he meets my gaze. “And so did she, but Laney deserved to be here, and I was supposed to keep her safe.”
Questions swim through my head, but my body propels me forward. I take a single step toward him, and he bares his fangs, holding out a hand in a motion to stop.
“This isn’t your fault,” I cry out, my voice shattering.
“Tell me, Dr. Abbot, how another vampire being in Lunaria isn’t my fault?”
I shake my head. “I–I don’t understand–”
“They’re here for me, whoever they are. They’re here for me. Laney was leaving the clinic to return to the lab last night when she was attacked by someone looking for me.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“Who else leaves bite marks?”
“I don’t know anything about vampires or your people because you won’t tell me anything!” I shout, and his arms drop to his sides. “I don’t know anything because you won’t tell me. You’re treating me and my feelings for you like I’m a fucking child! You’re a vampire. I kept you from starving, Alex. I have never once even acted like I am afraid of you. I trusted you, and you should trust me. I want to know these things because I–I want to know you, not because you’re a vampire. I want to know you.”
He stares at me, dumbfounded, I think, by the force of my voice.
“I want to know about you,” I repeat, suddenly desperate. “And you won’t let me.”
“You want to know me?” He seethes, stalking away from the window. “The kind of monster who just drained a twenty-year-old girl just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? I just spoke with her father, Skye. I found out that he and his mate lost their only child and found out the news through a fucking email from my dean. A vampire did this, yes, because we are predators. When we are hungry, our first and only instinct is to eat–nothing else matters. We kill blindly and without remorse. You want to know about what I am? I’ll barely age from this point forward. My time here, everything I’ve built–” He waves a hand toward his desk and the framed diplomas and publications resting in frames along the walls. “I have another decade, maybe, before people start to notice, and then it’s over for me. And you–”
“What about me?” I snarl, and he takes another step toward me, then another. “Huh? What about me? Me, who you kissed last night in the library after giving me the cold shoulder for days–”
“I wasn’t–”
“What else could it have been, Alex? You don’t trust me. You see me as a bright-eyed, eager child looking for answers to the very questions you won’t answer.”
“We are not compatible,” he says sternly, and the distance between us feels like a gaping void–a sudden drop-off neither of us can escape.
“We aren’t compatible, or you’re just afraid of what you are?”
His phone rings in his pocket. He ignores it, but the sound slices through his office like a death knell.
“I’ve been wondering what I did wrong,” I admit, shaking my head. “I know I’m different, that my brain and emotions don’t mesh–I know that. It’s because I see too much and understand very little. I’m a mystic, for fuck’s sake. That’s what I am, and I’ve never once been afraid of it. You can bite, sure. You can kill someone if you lose control. I can level entire cities if I will it. I can turn your mind inside out without even touching you. I can take away your name and the memories of your childhood. I can manipulate death and bend it to my liking, and yet,” I hiss, my eyes filling with hot, bitter tears, “I never let that get in the way of how I was starting to feel for you.”
He exhales deeply, nostrils flaring.
“You think you’re some monster. Maybe you are. Maybe you saw something in those blood samples Laney took from me that scared you, and I’m the dumbass here. But I think you’re just a weak man. I think you’re scared. I think you’re standing here blaming yourself for the death of your student. I think you’ve spent a decade hiding because you’re ashamed of something you’ve never had to open up about, and now I’m forcing it. Am I wrong?”
His phone rings again. He closes his eyes, refusing to answer me.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” I say, sucking back my emotions, pulling up that practiced mask of neutrality I learned from my father, a master of his craft. “Laney didn’t deserve to die. And I don’t deserve… this.” I motion to my chest. “You said it's a bond from being fed on. Maybe you’re right, and what I was starting to feel wasn’t real. Or, maybe you’re wrong, and we just fucking liked each other.”
“Skye.”
His phone rings a third time. He looks at me, and I look at him. Two scientists searching for the same answers to almost identical questions… for the same reason. Immovable. Stubborn. Stupid. The works.
I turn for the door.
“Wait.”