As soon as school was over, I went to the administration offices to find out if Elric was there yet. He wasn’t, and Mrs. Keahi wouldn’t tell me what time he was meeting with Jeb. I didn’t even know if she would give him my note asking to speak with him.
I could have stayed waiting outside in the hopes that he would show up, but I was a teacher. I had a club to run, lessons to plan, and students to supervise. When I returned to my classroom, I headed to my desk to grade papers. Eight girls sat together at the far end of the horseshoe-shaped arrangement of tables. Two boys sat among them.
“Mr. Thatch stopped by,” Imani said.
“He looked pissed,” Hailey said. “More pissed than usual. What did you do?”
“Why does everyone always assume I did something? Can’t it ever be him who does something wrong? He isn’t perfect.”
The girls exchanged knowing looks.
“What?” I asked.
They just shrugged and went back to work on their clay projects. I graded papers until Elric showed up at my door.
“Miss Lawrence, I heard you wanted to speak with me?” He glowed with unearthly beauty. Today he was more Legolas than Lucius Malfoy.
His panty-melting good looks didn’t help my resolve to hate him. He strode into the classroom confidently. He waved to the students, who had all stopped what they were doing to stare. Imani backed away, trying to hide behind Greenie.
“Hello, Imani,” he said.
There it was, that personal acknowledgment of her, the only one in the group he made eye contact with before turning back to me.
“Where is your escort?” I asked.
“Principal Bumblebub? He left me at the stairs. He had some business to attend to. He thought it would be fine for you and me to converse and thereafter for you to walk me out. As long as I’m attended by a staff member, I don’t think he minds which staff member chaperones me.” He laughed as though the idea of him being chaperoned was a ridiculous idea.
Hailey and Maddy stood in front of Imani as if to shield her from his view. They watched him warily. I didn’t like that my students’ safe haven of the art classroom had been broken.
I waved Elric over to the closet. “Let’s have a word over here. Privately.”
“Two minutes in the closet is all I’d need with him,” one of the girls giggled, probably thinking herself clever.
Someone else giggled and said something too quiet for me to hear.
“You think so?” Hailey said none-too-quietly. “He’d do a whole lot more than suck your face off in that game.” She glared daggers at Elric.
I shook my head at her. It was one thing to insult her peers. It was another to verbally attack Fae overlords.
Elric’s smile remained plastered on his face, but I could tell from the way he was purposefully not looking at them that he had heard. Great.
He followed me into the back stairwell and down to my closet.
“Will this be a lengthy meeting? Shall I carry us down some chairs?” he asked.
I unlocked the closet door on the landing below. “You could just magic yourself a chair if you really want one.”
“I could if I wanted to make the principal and your dean angry with me, but I’ve promised to behave. That means always being chaperoned by an adult staff member, never using magic in the school, and leaving my armed guards outside the door. One does what one must.” He leaned against the wall, his silvery skin radiating just enough light that I could make out his amused expression.
I pointed to the bulb in the closet, funneling my affinity out of my core. I pushed my will into my finger and up toward the filaments within the glass. I uttered the Elementia sunlight spell. The bulb glowed, illuminating the closet of dwindling supplies. I sat down on the steps.
Elric took my lead and sat down. “This is nice,” he said. “Like old times.”
I wanted to strangle him, to shout at him, to let him know how angry I was that he would assume this was in any way like old times. He was not my boyfriend. And even if he were, he had no right to accuse Thatch on my behalf. It would have been easy to let my anger consume me and demand to know why he’d put both Thatch and me in danger with his accusation, but I doubted that would get me anywhere with him.
“May I hold your hand?” he asked.
“No,” I said firmly.
His smile wavered. “I take it you didn’t ask to speak with me over matters of the heart.”
“I need to speak with you about something serious.”
He waited, giving me his full attention. His eyes flickered from violet to brown.
“You have accused Felix Thatch of using forbidden magic on me against my will.”
“I didn’t say ‘against your will.’ He made you too complacent for you to know it wasn’t your will. Therefore, I left that part out.”
Ugh. He could be so pedantic.
“Do you understand what you’ve done? He’s going to be investigated. They’ll find out what he is and that he was teaching me pain magic.” Thatch hadn’t denied what he was when Elric had accused him previously.
“Yes. Your point?” Elric asked.
I tried to put it in terms he might care about. “Someone will find out about my affinity.”
“No, they won’t. I’ll make sure of it.”
I couldn’t suppress the anger in my tone. “Have you thought about the scandal this is going to bring down on the school? Jeb is having a hard enough time getting donations as it is. He’s afraid he’ll have to close the school down.” And now I would be the cause.
Elric leaned against the wall, a smile tugging at his lips. “Fae love nothing more than a good scandal. The attention will do the school some good. The money will start pouring in, assuming he allows Fae to attend the auction. He’ll thank me later.”
I could see this tactic wasn’t going to work either. Even if Elric was right about this bringing more funding in—which I doubted—he was so arrogant, he couldn’t see the danger his actions brought down on us.
I forced myself to stay calm. I knew what Elric wanted. He wanted to talk about us. A Witchkin couldn’t work with Fae unless we played by their terms.
“You could have warned me. You could have asked me. Instead, you charged forward like an unwanted white knight and performed good deeds that made you happy, not me.” I touched the stones of the amulet, a reminder of the last deed.
Elric crossed his arms, his expression petulant. “I tried for months to make you happy, and I thought you were, but nothing I did ever equaled his deeds. He never tried to make you happy. He made you miserable. You believed his claims that he was keeping you safe. Even after he lied, used you, and used your affinity against you, you want to stand up for him. He proved his point that you loved him more than you loved me. And so it continues.”
My throat ached. I felt bad for Elric. He had loved me. I didn’t doubt it. I just didn’t love him in return. Only my magic had.
Elric went on, “I wooed you and tried to protect you from Felix Thatch and the Raven Court. But I can’t protect you when you’re here, so far away from me, while he lurks in the shadows.” He lifted his chin. “I’m done trying to make you happy. Now I must settle for keeping you safe.”
“I’m tired of you and Felix Thatch and everyone else I know trying to keep me safe.” My voice rose. “When I was a kid, it was my adoptive mom. She kept me safe by hiding from me what I was. When I came here, Thatch hid the truth about my biological mother from me and what she was doing with her experiments. You kept me in the dark about your wives because you didn’t want to hurt me. Well, you know what? I am tired of people trying to protect me. I want to protect myself.”
His brows drew together. “I’ve upset you?”
“Yes, you and everyone else. I’m not a child. I’m not a porcelain doll. I want people to treat me like an adult, like an equal. Is that too much to ask for?”
“No. It’s perfectly reasonable. You deserve
independence and sovereignty.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was being agreeable because he wanted to placate me or he actually believed that. More than anything, I would have liked to shove him out the door, but Jeb depended on Elric’s funding, and as such, that meant I needed to behave professionally.
I swallowed the growl and curse words wanting to rise from me and instead used my sternest teacher tone. “If you have any respect for me and for my wishes, you will drop all allegations against Thatch and tell Jeb you made a mistake.”
“I do respect you. That’s why I can’t do that.” He cleared his throat and held himself taller. “Vega told me the reason she thinks you preferred Thatch over me is because I’m a pushover and far too agreeable. I try to make everyone happy, even at my own expense. I allowed you to walk all over me, have your way with me, and throw me away. Anything I wanted, I let you talk me out of. Anything I felt strongly about, you forced me to change for your happiness. I have seen the error of my ways. I’m not going to be that man. I feel strongly about this, and I’m not going to let you talk me out of it.”
Craptabulous. Not only was Vega on his side, but Elric had now grown a backbone. There was really no way to win this war.
That evening, I found Vega dressed in a glamourous cocktail dress covered in beads and sequins. I gave her a piece of my mind.
“Why would you do that? You gave a Fae love advice, and now he won’t back down. He is set in his ways and is convinced the only way to save me is by getting rid of Thatch.”
Vega applied crimson lipstick in the mirror, not deigning to look at me. “I had to do something. He was being all mopey and acting like a moron. Now he’s empowered to have his own opinions, not yours.”
“You’re supposed to be on my side, not his!”
“Why? You aren’t offering to buy me dinner or go dancing with me. You didn’t fill my supply closet with notebook paper, pencils with erasers, or a new guillotine.”
“Do you want me to go dancing with you?”
She lifted her nose up at me.
“What do you want? I offered to get Josie to trade rooms with you, but you didn’t want the tower. You prefer to spy on me so Elric pays you.”
“And your point is?”
I flopped onto my bed. “Just shoot me now. Seriously, you might as well.”
“Did you try offering yourself for sacrifice to Elric like I suggested originally?” A sly smile curled the corners of her mouth upward.
“Why? Do you get a commission out of it if you convince me to marry him?”
She laughed. “Not marry. He’ll settle for being engaged. I bet he’d settle for dating again, but I told him to hold out on you and try to play hard to get.”
“Vega! No! This is Thatch’s career you’re toying with. Can’t you see how wrong that is? You are helping Elric try to coerce me into marrying him so he’ll let Thatch off the hook for something he didn’t do.”
“Actually, I’m helping Elric coerce you into marrying him so that he’ll give me a vintage nineteen twenties desk.” She put away her lipstick and spritzed herself with perfume. “And a new coffin. By the way, you should consider talking to Jeb about inviting Elric’s friends to the charity auction.”
“Why?” I crossed my arms. “What did he promise you if you convinced me to persuade Jeb?”
She cackled. “You know how I’ve always wanted the beating heart of one of my enemies? One of those.”
I shouldn’t have told Vega. She made everything worse. These secrets were eating me up inside. I broke down and told Josie after making her promise not to tell everyone. Over cookies and tea in her room in the tower, I told her everything I dared to. I hardly touched more than a drop of my tea, but I ate the entire package of cookies and a bag of granola she’d purchased from Clarence Greenpine’s in Lachlan Falls.
She listened with wide eyes, only occasionally interrupting to clarify a detail like, “What? Vega sided with Elric, not you? Does that mean she believes Thatch tried to use forbidden magic on you? Or is she doing this to annoy you because she’s a bitch?”
Some questions I didn’t have answers to, like that one.
Tears filled my eyes when I told her about my conversation with Elric. Vega had turned him into a monster.
Josie scooted her chair closer to me and circled an arm around my shoulder. “You’re getting awfully worked up about this. Forget about the school and the scandal for a minute. Let’s think about what’s good for you. Wouldn’t it be for the best if Thatch didn’t work here? You wouldn’t live in fear that he might manipulate you into falling in love with him again.”
“I don’t live in fear!”
“Of course not. You are a strong, courageous woman. You are very brave.” She squeezed my hand. “But let’s reframe this in a different way so you can consider what might be in your best interest. You don’t know if Thatch was using magic on you or it was your own imagination, right? You don’t know if those dreams of him are your subconscious or he’s trying to mind-rape you.”
“He isn’t mind-raping me. He isn’t like that.”
“Notice how quick you are to defend him. It’s like you have Stockholm syndrome or something.” A spider glided on a string from her hat and drifted down to the table.
I wanted to shake some sense into her. “You aren’t listening to me at all!”
“Do you want me to use active-listening skills? Or you talk, and I’ll just listen.”
If I wanted to talk and for someone to listen, I could have borrowed Priscilla, Thatch’s pet bird. I wanted my best friend to understand. I needed someone to side with me and help me figure out how to fix this.
Although, I had a creeping suspicion I already knew what I would have to do.
Our after-school staff meeting was planned for the third Tuesday in October. I showed up early, intending to get two good seats so Josie and I could sit together. Even though I arrived seven minutes early, all the chairs were full, save for the one next to Silas Lupi. Since his wife hadn’t arrived yet, I figured he was saving it for her. I stood against the wall in the back. Teachers turned in their seats to sneak glances at me. Coach Kutchi, my department head, left her seat and joined me.
“How are you doing? Hanging in there, sport?” she asked with a sympathetic smile.
Never in all my time at Womby’s had Coach Kutchi ever volunteered to talk to me. She went out of her way to avoid me. She talked about me in third person even when I stood right in front of her.
“Um,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m looking forward to the All Hallows’ Eve Open House.”
“That’s the go-getter attitude!” She punched me in the shoulder. I flinched at her strength. It was probably the same playful punch she did to all her athletes, but pain was my weakness. I moved away from her.
Her brows drew together. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, fine. Sorry. It’s nothing.”
Coach Kutchi nodded. She tried to make small talk with me, but the moment I started talking about art, her eyes glazed over.
A spider scuttled across the table, and Vega swore. She lifted a stack of papers and smashed it. Josie walked in, grimacing at Vega. Jeb and Khaba still hadn’t arrived. Coach Kutchi excused herself and took her seat. Probably she didn’t want to lose it to Josie.
Pinky waved to Josie. She hesitated, glancing at the vacant seat next to Silas Lupi before trudging over to say hello to him.
Jasper Jang whispered something to the coach as she sat down beside him. From the way they snuck peeks at me, I took it they weren’t talking about the weather.
I had a bad feeling they weren’t discussing the students who made bongs in my class and who told everyone I taught them how to make pot.
Thirty seconds later, mortification crept over me like a spider scuttling across the table. The moment Thatch entered the room, all quiet murmurs ceased. The entire staff turned to look at Thatch. Faces turned to look at me.
Oh no.
Grandmother Bluehorse’s eyes narrowed. Jackie Frost, who had never been my number-one fan, crossed her arms and harrumphed. Pro Ro lifted his nose up at Thatch. It wasn’t like Thatch ever received a warm welcome with his snarky comments and snooty ways. He consistently played the part of the Celestor snob, pushing away any potential friends. At the same time, he was a highly skilled and competent user of magic. People might not have liked him, but they respected him.
Pinky stood up and joined me in the back. He placed a protective arm around me. Josie flanked my other side as if trying to protect me.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“No one is going to let him hurt you, Clarissa,” Pinky said.
I shook my head. “No. That isn’t—that’s not—” I turned to Josie and nudged her. “Did you tell Pinky?”
Thatch halted just inside the doorway, his usually grouchy expression actually looking wounded. He scanned the unfriendly faces, his brow crinkling in confusion. Every set of eyes glowered at him. He strode over to an empty chair and attempted to pull it out.
Silas Lupi placed a hand on the back of the chair. “I’m saving this chair for my wife.”
“Of course,” Thatch said. “How could I have forgotten?”
I wasn’t sure that would have normally stopped him from taking the chair, but the murderous glare Silas gave him would have made any person hesitate. Thatch didn’t even try to take the chair next to Grandmother Bluehorse.
Thatch slunk back behind the conference room table across from Josie, Pinky, and me. He stood alone, a gray slouching figure looking like he wanted to blend into the shadows of a dingy wall. He looked so sad and lonely. His gaze flickered to me and then away. His resting bitch face was back in place, so it was difficult to tell if he was displeased with me or the world in general.
I nudged Josie. She shrugged and looked away, her hunched shoulders speaking of her guilt. She had told everyone my secrets? How could she have done this to me?
Jeb had been right. Josie was a blabbermouth. This was why I couldn’t trust people with my secrets.
Hex Crimes Page 11
