Dark Days: Semester 1

by Liz Meldon

  Perhaps I ought to do a bit more research into—

  “Last item on the agenda,” Foster boomed, startling the room out of the warm, sleepy fog that had started to gather after nearly an hour and a half of this never-ending meeting. “Night patrols in the dorms.”

  A collective groan erupted from around the table, and I sat back with a smirk. Given that I needed no more than an hour or two of sleep each day, I had no qualms about monitoring the student lodgings between the hours of eleven and three. However, I could understand the unwillingness from the others, particularly the humans greying around the ears.

  “I know, I know, I know,” Foster continued with a chuckle, settling the room with a wave of his hands. “No one likes it, but it’s a necessary evil. It’s only once a week, and at least you aren’t doing it alone. Speaking of which, Calder…”

  I sat up straighter, annoyed to be singled out. “Yes, sir?”

  “As you’re our newest staff member,” he started, then paused, blinking rapidly, his hollow cheeks tinted pink. “Wait—has everyone met Calder?”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  Mercifully, everyone around the table nodded and smiled, sparing us all from what was bound to be a horrendous introduction speech or some absurd name game. Emma, meanwhile, stared me down from across the table and took a noisy slurp of her ale. I made sure my smile was extra barbed, just for her.

  “Oh, good.” Foster cleared his throat and took a quick sip from his enormous water bottle. “Anyway, since you’re our newest addition to the SIA family, I’ve paired you up with Emma.”

  The little wolf choked on her most recent mouthful. I pressed my lips together to smother a snicker.

  “She was in your shoes last year, so she’ll show you the ropes. Right, Emma?” Foster shot her what could quite possibly be a flirtatious smile, and I noticed a few eye rolls around the table. Emma, on the other hand, appeared to have missed it as she schooled her shocked expression into something more situation appropriate.

  “Of course,” she said tightly, the corners of her mouth kicked up—but her eyes positively livid. “I’d be happy to.”

  Foster beamed. “Excellent. You’re in good hands, Calder.”

  “Oh, I can hardly wait,” I mused. While I had no interest in spending more time than necessary with the shifter who had threatened to disembowel me, her expression, her misery, made it all worthwhile.

  Naturally, I might not be so amused come our first patrol together, but for now, I relished her discomfort, nursing it as one does a fine wine.

  The evening reached its end when one of the apron-clad workers from the kitchen, a local girl with near translucent skin and perfect teeth, knocked at the staffroom door bearing desserts. Miniature tilsorte bondepikers. A plum-topped plommegrateng. Fried klenät balls with raspberry dipping sauce. And a tin of crumbly butter cookies. Eyes widened around the table, and Foster, perhaps sensing that he had lost his people to the native delicacies, conceded that we would pick this up next weekend.

  Next weekend?

  Were we in store for one of these every weekend?

  I looked to Emma to confirm or deny, but she was already happily loading up her practically licked clean plate with a mountain of fried dough. My eyes rolled skyward; I’d forgotten about a shifter’s insatiable appetite until now. It almost made my stomach roil to consider just how much food the woman would pack away in a single meal.

  Yet somehow still fit, trim, and toned despite consuming upwards of eight thousand calories a day—was there really a wonder labs around the world were so interested in studying them?

  With the desserts delivered, and the sweet little kitchen wench insisting in broken English that she couldn’t stay, the staff meeting devolved into a tipsy social hour, the ale flowing freer now to all present, save myself. Still, I could pretend. I could laugh and smile and joke. I could adapt to the shift in mood with ease; if there was one thing shifters and supernatural creatures alike excelled at, it was blending in.

  Seizing the opportunity to get to know my new colleagues a little better, I made the rounds, forcing myself to ask thoughtful questions so I could better understand the cliques. While a few had filtered out over the hour since we had broken for dessert, most remained, showing in that moment what a tight-knit little family the SIA faculty considered themselves.

  “Yes, yes, just a moment,” I insisted, slipping out of a rather long-winded conversation with the Howards under the guise of switching to decaf. However, I hadn’t made it more than two feet before I knocked into a certain wolf shifter, who also appeared to be escaping a huddle of her own. Her warm smile dropped the moment she realized who now blocked her path, and in an instant, she was back to glowering at me. I craned my head down to meet her eyeline, the fullness of the small room, all these humans, forcing our bodies closer than either of us wanted.

  “Well, hello, partner.” I flicked up a challenging brow. Surrounded by her colleagues, her work family, Emma was less likely to lash out physically, which gave me the advantage. “So looking forward to our weekly strolls through the long, lonely corridors of the student dormitories.”

  Her glare intensified, as did my grin.

  “For the record, I didn’t ask for this.” At least I could prove to her that I didn’t spend my nights sneaking into dark bedrooms to feed. Maybe I ought to show her my blood stash too, just to quash those thoughts.

  Still, that venomous glare deserved to be knocked right off her face; not only was she being absolutely ridiculous, but she seemed to be under the delusion she could physically overpower me in her current form. Or, at the very least, she thought she stood a good chance.

  Which was preposterous.

  The sooner she got that through her dense shifter head, the better.

  “Let’s look at it as an opportunity, shall we?” I inched closer, her heat whispering across my skin. Her eyes were rather intriguing, like cognac, the outer ring a dark brown but the inner iris flecked with shades of gold and amber. I blinked hurriedly, shattering the allure, and focused on not breathing her in too deeply. Instead, I adopted a leer, the kind of look that always roused an unimpressed woman’s hackles. “Now you and I have the chance to get to know one another better, more intimately. We can learn all each other’s secrets, roaming the darkness together—”

  Still scowling, Emma grabbed the end of my tie—and dunked it in my cold coffee. Heat flashed in my chest as I sputtered down at her. The wolf smirked, her arms crossed, her hands no longer in little trembling fists at her sides.

  “Like you were going to drink it, anyway.”

  “This—is—cashmere,” I hissed.

  Emma stuck out her lower lip in a mock pout, then eased around me, eyes positively alight with mischief.

  “Talk to you later, partner,” I heard her coo behind me, her chuckle making the hairs on the back of my neck rise. Gnashing my teeth together, I stalked to the coffee bar at the far side of the room, then set my mug down more forcefully than I intended. Cold black liquid sloshed over the rim. Fuming, I carefully extracted my tie and squeezed the coffee remnants out.

  And at the sound of Emma’s laughter rising above the rest, I retreated to my private suite without a word.

  Positively fuming.

  September

  4

  Emma

  All things considered, my first two weeks of the new term were a breeze. Not only did I enjoy pretty much all my students, but the seniors selected to participate in the rescue dog program were great, and our weekly class rotation meant I had at least one full day off on top of my weekends.

  Sure, the off day was still spent in the office, working on things like my year-long dodgeball league, dog care, and upcoming lesson plans, but it was one extra blissful day where I wasn’t drowning in the very distinct, very potent stench of thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds. Already there were a few who might need a tactful, subtle reminder that they were at an age where they could, and should, wear deodorant.

  What
I wasn’t thrilled about, however, was wasting my Friday night with SIA’s resident vampire. Since our run-in at the first staff meeting, I had done a halfway decent job of avoiding him—just as he seemed to have a knack for evading me. Of course, there was the occasional eye contact made at dinner, a charade I could barely stomach as Calder pushed food around his plate, pretended to take a bite, and tossed it all out fifteen minutes later citing he was “full”. Then there were the Sunday-evening staff meetings where we glowered across the table for the first few minutes, then went back to pretending the other didn’t exist.

  Mercifully, our classes had nothing to do with each other—we weren’t even in the same building, nor did we live on the same floor in the staff lodgings.

  The academy’s campus was large enough that if I tried, I could dodge him for the rest of the year and keep Calder fucking Holloway out of my mind permanently. So far, I was on track for that—excluding the digging I did on him in the first week. Foster had been all too eager to chat about his new hire one night, brimming with pride at the highly sought-after teacher he had poached from some elite private school in Bath. The vamp had a clean record according to our academy database, which I dipped into last Friday night while all the staff were off celebrating their first successful week of teaching.

  Hell, I had even reached out to a friend in the States, another wolf who worked for a tech company that, among many other duties, tracked vampire coven movement across shifter territories. Nothing. The guy was squeaky clean—but that certainly didn’t make him innocent.

  For now, however, it meant I could get a good night’s sleep at the very least, and while I still intended to keep an eye on him, I could ease up, just a little, and get back to my life here. To my knowledge, no student had been spotted with a set of fang marks, and a casual chat with one of our more ditzy nurses confirmed there hadn’t been any sudden cases of anemia from anyone on campus.

  Calder Holloway was still on my radar, mostly because he was a vampire, a predator, a threat, but also because the guy was kind of a pompous ass.

  And come eleven o’clock, ten minutes from now, I would be spending the next four hours showing said pompous ass the very simple ropes of night patrol. When Foster had announced that we’d been paired together, my first instinct had been to pitch a snarling, howling fit—but I refused to give that smug, dead-eyed jerk the satisfaction. So, I would do my job tonight. I’d show him all the spots students liked to congregate after hours, the places they thought us staffers didn’t know about. I’d be civil. I’d be professional.

  I would not ruin another one of his ties.

  My lips twitched at the memory.

  Across the walkway, beyond the well-maintained hedges, the door to the staff residence slammed shut, and I pushed off the railing that sliced up the grey stone steps to the girls’ dormitories, arms crossed.

  Night in Solskinn, even this time of year, was so very dark, and if we didn’t have all the scattered lampposts illuminating the grounds, it would be almost impossible for any humans to catch Calder strolling along the concrete path. Despite the bright white lighting, he seemed to naturally gravitate to the shadows, shrouded in darkness as he glided toward me in a pair of jeans and a thin black cardigan. A gust of cool wind rustled in the space between us, swirling the small clusters of fallen leaves, toying with my hair. I smoothed a hand over it, half my dirty-blonde locks in a braid, the rest spilling down my back.

  The wind tussled Calder’s obsidian waves too, and he speared a hand through them, looking more runway model than stuffy history teacher. I bit the insides of my cheeks when they started to warm; this outfit was a vast improvement from his never-ending array of three-piece suits.

  Actually. I swallowed hard, forcing myself to fiddle with my fingers. The three-piece suits didn’t look terrible either—with a body like that, the guy could wear a garbage bag and make it look good.

  But that didn’t change the fact that he was a dick.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood as his footsteps grew louder, my inner wolf rumbling and my heart dancing just a touch faster when he stopped directly in front of me, a few inches too close, lips quirked.

  “Partner.”

  I crossed my arms. “Partner.”

  Calder’s bright blue gaze swept up and down my figure—nothing more than a quick once-over, but it had the unique ability of making me so incredibly aware of myself. Of the way my black leggings highlighted the curve of my calves, the muscular tone of my thighs—and the way my baggy beige sweater should have hidden the rest of my curves, but my crossed arms hoisted the knit over the swell of my hips and pushed my chest to center stage.

  Like I was serving myself up for him.

  Toes curling in my runners, I dropped my arms back to my sides and took a deep breath.

  “So, go on then,” Calder said, nodding toward the four-storey building beside us. “Show me the ropes.”

  Damn it. I’d wanted to be the one to kick-start things. Squaring my shoulders, I motioned for him to follow me up the steps, pausing at the pair of thick metal doors, my fingers coiled around the handle.

  “Kids need to be in their assigned rooms by ten, lights out at eleven.”

  “Seems lenient,” he muttered as he scanned the main entrance, eyebrows up. “You’d think nine would be more appropriate.”

  I rolled my eyes just as my phone alarm chirped; eleven o’clock, on the dot. Time to get to work.

  “Come on.” I held the door open, cheeks warming when he flashed a quick smile and slipped inside.

  We started the night in the girls’ dorm, making our way at a good clip through the four levels, one for each grade. Given we were halfway through the first month of the new year, most of them knew the drill by now. Yes, I had to shoo a cluster of chatting, giggling juniors out of the third-floor bathroom, and there’d been a senior still studying on a couch in the fourth-floor common room, her enormous headphones on, totally oblivious to time and space until Calder crouched in front of her and tapped his finger on the top of the textbook in her lap. Then, red-faced and apologetic, she had shuffled back to her room down the hall, door slamming, lock clicking, and neither of us heard a peep after. Besides those two instances, plus a handful of lights out, ladies and gentle knocks on the doors, the building was in good shape.

  And I didn’t snap at Calder once. I came close—the guy had a face made for snapping at—but I kept my cool and remained professional. We checked on all the dark, shadowy spots inside the building where the SIA girls liked to congregate after curfew. We ensured all the exterior doors were locked save for the main two. We even checked through the bushes out back, a notorious hangout last year for seniors who liked to smoke.

  All in all, a job well done—on my part. Last year, I’d been left to fend for myself during my “training” for night patrols, which had consisted of the former history teacher bailing on me to call his girlfriend in Romania all night. While Calder sucked for a whole host of reasons, I refused to be that useless.

  Calder, however, didn’t seem the least bit impressed, or grateful, that I had taken the time to do this properly.

  “Wow,” he said, standing a few steps down from me at the top of the north stairwell. His condescending smirk made me white-knuckle the wooden handrail. “Telling children to turn off their lights and go to sleep… I’m not sure I’m ready for something quite this advanced. Perhaps I should have been taking notes.”

  My cheeks buzzed with color once more, only this time it wasn’t because I thought Calder looked scrumptious in those jeans.

  “Oh my god,” I grumbled as I stomped down the first few steps. “Are you always this patronizing, or is it just with a species you consider inferior?”

  I paused briefly, so that despite being on different stairs, we were at eye level, and watched as Calder blinked a few times, his smirk falling away.

  “I… never said that,” he insisted, sounding taken aback by my statement. I stared at him for a moment, then rolled my
eyes.

  “Whatever.” I knew by reputation, from gossip, from war stories, that vampires considered themselves the apex creature of this planet, superior to all supernaturals, shifters, and humans. In fact, it was one of the reasons I had been so instantly suspicious of Calder; given their predilection for holding themselves above everyone else, it was rare to find a vampire in an everyday, normal job. The idea that Calder, in all his vampiric glory, chose to teach teenagers—human teenagers—was kind of insane to me, and I couldn’t imagine a shifter out there who would disagree.

  Biting the inside of my cheek, I stepped around Calder and marched a few steps down, slowing when he followed.

  “So,” he said as we neared the third floor, the staircase wide-set and winding, “how are your students this year?”

  I stalked across the landing and started down the next staircase without breaking my stride. Did he think we were just going to carry on like nothing had happened? Make polite small talk until our shift ended?

  His footsteps fell softly behind me, so much so that I had to strain to hear, but I didn’t need to glance back to know he was there. The hairs on the back of my neck were up again, my inner wolf rumbling but not growling. In fact, the shrieking alarm bells from the first day we met had dissipated considerably over the last two weeks. No, my hackles were up—in response to his voice?

  Palms clammy, I swallowed hard and skipped down a few steps.

  “I’d say only about eighty percent of mine are idiots this year, which is honestly a bit shocking. I was expecting more,” Calder continued, popping into my peripherals abruptly, suddenly at my side. I stopped on the second-floor landing, brows pinched, heart pounding—incredulity rising.

  “What?”

  Calder pushed his sleeves up to his elbows, unveiling a pair of forearms corded with muscle. “What?”

  “Eighty percent…” Just like that, the allure of his silky voice, the appeal of those muscular forearms—gone, replaced with white-hot indignation. “How can you say that?”