Circle of the Moon

by H. P. Mallory

  “Oh, don’t pester him, James,” Charlene said. “Look how young he is! This is probably his first posting. Isn’t it, Professor Draper?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “See, James? He’s just a baby; give him some time—he’ll catch on like a cold!”

  And hopefully leave just as quickly.

  “Here we are.” James ushered us through the open conference room door. Disappointment appeared very suddenly on his face. He looked to Charlene as she crossed the threshold, “No danishes.”

  She patted her condolences on his shoulder and promptly took her seat.

  There were eleven other professors already in attendance. They sat in overstuffed leather chairs. It appeared James and Charlene were the youngest teachers among the existing faculty. Well, with the exception of me, of course.

  There are more wrinkles in this conference room than on a hairless cat, I thought, taking my seat in the last of two empty seats by Charlene.

  By the look of me, at least, I was far closer to the students’ age than any of the teachers. Still, they plainly considered me “one of them” and I wholeheartedly resented being “one of” anything.

  The pointy-nosed woman in front abruptly cleared her throat.

  “Thank you all for coming; let’s not waste time on pleasantries, onto the first matter at hand…”

  I leaned over to James and whispered, “Who’s that?” with a nod to the skin and bone brunette at the head of the table.

  “That’s Gladys Philbin,” he said. “She’s the staff coordinator, basically the biggest brass you can be at this school without actually, you know, mattering.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t worry about it too much,” James said.

  Finally, I thought, Some advice I actually want to follow.

  “First thing’s first,” Gladys said. “Coach Kinkle needs the field for practice Thursdays in addition to Tuesdays, so, Professor Matlick, you’ll have to move your cannon blaster presentation to Wednesday.”

  “Should be fine,” a round, little bald man answered gruffly, supposedly the professor of Ancient Witchcraft and Weaponry, according to Charlene.

  “Onto the next matter: volunteers for the upcoming Spring Formal,” Gladys went on. She read from a sheet on the table and only looked up when addressing someone specific. “We’ve got our dorm monitors covered, but we’ve yet to verify the ballroom chaperones. So far we have Matlick, Swanson, Swanson, and... hmm, one vacancy. Tarkington was signed up before he left…”

  Gladys looked up and scanned the table, pointy nose in the air as if she could catch the scent of whatever she was looking for.

  “You.” Her eyes landed on me, then moved immediately back to the paper. “Professor Draper?”

  “... yes.” Uh-oh.

  “You’re Tarkington’s replacement in the Charms Department, aren’t you? You filled his positions in class?”

  “Well, yes, but…” I definitely did not want to have to chaperone a bunch of horny adolescents on my time off.

  “Perfect, then you’ll fill in for him of class as well. No reason not to occupy his absences in extracurriculars. Be at the Fiodorian Ballroom at 7:30 sharp tomorrow evening. Now, then, onto the next…”

  Everything after that was a dull, buzzing drone.

  This is insane, I thought, in something of a private huff.

  I couldn’t think of a worse way to spend an evening than trapped in a ballroom with a load of pretentious trust-fund witches and warlocks and overly friendly coworkers. And then I thought of Emma…

  I’d been trying to keep my distance.

  I really had.

  Distance between us was best. Whatever strange feelings I had didn’t matter; Sinclair had been clear in his orders, and I wasn’t one to slight them. Not after everything he’d done for me.

  But every student in Elmington would be in that ballroom come Friday night, and Emma would be among them. Even if she didn’t have a date (which I didn’t imagine she did), she would be there with Saturn or Pluto or whatever the hell her name was and the redheaded kid. Regardless, Emma would be there and… so would I.

  Better be a big ballroom, I hoped, for both our sakes.

  I detested ballrooms. Castles, mansions, any big collection of brick and mortar that put on airs of being more than a building—and a formal dance was just a kick to the shins.

  We never bothered with such ornate, shallow farces when travelling with the caravan.

  If the mood was upon us, we danced in the firelight. If we wanted someone, we told them, we had them (or accepted rejection with a grain of salt), and we moved on with our lives. Why these people put on such productions to do something as simple as dance, I’d never know.

  So much red tape and for what?

  Even the way people treated each other was different, the way they lived and tried to love: this dance, like all the rest, was just another facade, one of many contrived social structures meant only to allow themselves some semblance of human experience amid the monotony of their strict and structured school.

  Why bother with any of it?

  Just live your truth as you willed it. What was so hard about that?

  “Hmmph.”

  I laughed to myself, thinking about how simple life used to be. Charlene gave me a curious sidelong glance, but, otherwise, no one seemed to notice me.

  If only things were that simple now.

  I couldn’t live my truth here, not if I wanted to live to tell the tale. I supposed that was just the nature of people in these tightly wound lives.

  Gorgers—non-travelers—really were a breed all their own. But their habits were infectious. I’d only been at the academy a week, and I already felt like a cog in a soulless machine. How people could live in one place for so long, I didn’t understand. Didn’t they aspire to see the rest of the world? Didn’t they want to know what existed outside of their tightly defined realities? Didn’t they strive to know anything… more?

  So much was hidden, unsaid, buried in protocol. At Elmington, we were all pulling punches no one else knew about. Teachers, students, didn’t matter. We all had secret desires. They needed a way to be expressed.

  These guys have to be getting out their frustration somehow.

  I’d have to keep my ear to the ground, see if I heard anything about a covert-faculty fight club.

  I’d thought of myself as a free spirit, all my life. Nothing burdened me but the limits of my own mind. But that was... well, before all this. Before Sinclair sent me here. Before this ridiculous teaching post. Before Emma...

  And now, here I was, just as tangled in hangups and tactful repression as everyone else.

  “Are you a father, Professor Draper?”

  “What?”

  James’s bizarre, whispered question pulled my attention back to the conference room. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one zoning out.

  “I was just thinking how mature you seem for such a young man,” he said. “I wondered if maybe you were a father—kids tend to speed up a man’s maturity by tenfold. Well, that or halt it altogether.”

  “I’m not a father.” And I never would be, but that was more information than James needed. I knew I’d never have children. That was just life as a vampire. Though, truth be told, I hadn’t wanted them for a long time prior. My old man certainly hadn’t provided much of an example.

  James shrugged and turned back to the meeting, temporarily relieved of his random curiosity.

  Mind drifting still, I thought of my own father. His maturity certainly hadn’t been affected by fatherhood, and if it had, I really didn’t want to meet the before version.

  My father was a man of few words. Gruff, big-bellied, he was a simple man who saw the world a simple way. He thought a good life meant providing for your wife and children, and by that measure, I supposed he’d succeeded.

  He thought it was a man’s job to provide, and a woman’s job to cook, clean and bear children. He thought it was a son’s job to ca
rry on the family name and secure the Romani bloodline. And he thought it was a daughter’s job to marry who and when she was told, no matter what she had to say about it—even if that meant marrying my little sister off to a Romani spice trader at the tender age of fourteen. The spice trader had been at least three times her age.

  I shook the memory out of my head with a vengeance.

  Anger is a superficial fuel, and it leads to ugly ends.

  There was one time though, one talk, where I felt like I’d seen something of my father’s heart. Mum always said that was the whole point of talking—to get to the heart of a person. I always thought it was interesting that, despite believing this with unflinching dedication, she married a man who seemed to have little to no heart at all. Or at least, not one he cared to share.

  But once, he did open up. Strangely enough, my question to him had been about love—hardly the man’s forte…

  “You’ll know the minute you see her,” Dad had said. “But it’s what you feel when you touch her that’s the kicker. Always is—can’t fight it however much you want to.” He looked into the middle distance, drifting away with a memory for a second. “Hits you like a ton of bricks.”

  “What if she isn’t a gypsy?” I asked. My father’s eyes narrowed a bit at the term—he was sensitive about monikers. It mattered to him what was said about our people. To him, it was important what distinguished us from the non-travelers. We were Romani. Those who were not Romani were gorgers, and “Gypsy” was just their dirty word for our people. Personally, I never minded much. Then again, my father and I disagreed on just about everything. Why should this be an exception?

  “What did you say?”

  “What if the woman I end up loving isn’t Romani?”

  He hadn’t actually wanted me to repeat myself. I wish I’d known that at the time, but hindsight is 20/20.

  My father’s eyes narrowed, puffy slits in the middle of his large head.

  “Breeding with a gorger is damn near an act of heresy,” he said, venom in the words and anger in his glare. “It spits on centuries of our people’s heritage, and I, for one, won’t hear another word of it in my house. Do you hear me, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” He sniffed loudly and sat back. The wicker creaked as he shifted, trying to rid himself of the tension. Blood slowly left the pulsing vein on his forehead. Soon enough, he spoke again.

  “Why don’t you call on that Codona girl? I always liked her family.”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. Jilliana Codona was the girl in question. We’d been out before, dancing or drinking. Of course, her story wasn’t particularly unique among the travelling young women of Romani blood. The lifestyle lent itself to living in the moment...

  Suffice to say, I’d been with lots of women.

  But there was a curiosity in me that I couldn’t squelch. I wanted to know what made two people fall in love, what was the difference between a soul mate and a way to pass the time? Whatever the answer was, I hadn’t found it. And Jilliana Codona hadn’t changed that last night.

  “We don’t have all that much in common,” I finished lamely.

  “You’ve got Romani blood in your veins, the both of you.” My father’s angry intensity was back in full swing, though he made some effort to control his volume. “That’s common enough. You should spend some time with her. It’s about time you started trying to find a wife.”

  “But what about what you said?” I argued, not even bothering to mention that twenty-one was hardly the marker of a confirmed bachelor. “You said I’d know when I saw her or when I touched her. Well, I’ve done both and…”

  “We’re finished talking about this.”

  He grabbed a paper from the table and fanned it open, thought it was important to keep up with the news, even if it was just the news of some crap town we were passing through.

  “Don’t ever get too comfortable in any one place, boy,” he said. “You’re quick on your feet or you’re dead in the muck. And no son of mine’s going to let life work him over.”

  No part of me was comfortable at Elmington Academy, so getting comfortable wasn’t an issue.

  But the rest of the old man’s advice held up.

  It didn’t occur to me until years later that, when he talked about the feeling you get with “the one,” he never actually said he was talking about my mother.

  Emma isn’t Romani, I reminded myself firmly. She’s a student. My student. Not to mention...

  For God’s sake, man, she’s Sinjin Sinclair’s niece!

  The thought berated me, twisting the knot in my chest into an even tighter ball. Sinjin had been very clear about what my role with Emma should be. Wilkins women are enchantingly beautiful, he’d warned.

  But there was nothing cryptic in the threat.

  Touch her, I kill you.

  A simple, effective, two-step process.

  Sinclair probably had that approach patented by now.

  I wouldn’t disobey my maker.

  My father might’ve been another story on the obedience front, but the fact remained, Emma was off limits. So why did her touch linger on my skin like the sun’s own fire? I didn’t have answers. Only questions. But they pretty much all centered around Emma and me, touching, and me, getting murdered.

  For what it was worth, I was enjoying the first half of the thought experiment immensely.

  And when I remembered the energy that flowed through me when I touched her, I couldn’t make sense of it. But Dad was right—about one thing, at least—whatever this was between Emma and me, there was no way in hell I could fight it.

  It was wrong. It was stupid. Acting on it would fuck up my life beyond repair. And still, I couldn’t deny that I wanted her. I couldn’t control my thoughts. Much less my dreams.

  All I could do was... well, nothing. And nothing would be the hardest thing I’d had to do for some time.

  Fate, coy bitch that she was, had me right where she wanted me. She and Sinclair made one hell of a team. A sadistic team, but a team nonetheless.

  To think how free I’d been a few short months ago. It was the mother of all ironies.

  If my own mother could see me now, she would’ve offered one of her cliché platitudes to fix the situation; they were a small, consistent comfort growing up, ineffective though they were.

  “Well, that’s just how the cookie crumbles” or “oh, how the tables have turned!”

  Yeah, I thought, rolling my mind’s eyes. Turned, flipped over, and then fucked off right over a cliff!

  How was it possible this was my life?

  An old stuffy room in an old stuffy mansion full of doddering old academics.

  And there I was. Right alongside them.

  Wondering if Emma Balfour had a date to the dance.

  EIGHT

  BRYN

  I walked into Rowan’s bedroom, leaving the door ajar. Compared to the rest of the house, Rowan’s room was extremely cold. By at least ten degrees. She was a witch, not a vampire, but she slept like a creature of the night anyway—completely oblivious to temperature.

  Rowan liked it cold, but the open window let in too much of a chill overnight. She shivered a bit, shaking in the center of her four-poster bed. It was barely dawn. Dim, grey light streamed in through the windows. A breeze blew the white curtains away from the wall. The air smelled like rain. Inhaling deeply, I closed the window and latched it.

  The yellow light from the hallway shone on Rowan’s sleepy face. She blinked, coming slowly awake as I crossed the room. I sat on the bed next to her.

  Pushing the mass of black hair out of her face, I couldn’t help the smile that crested my lips. Rowan slept like she’d been dropped into her bed from a helicopter sixty feet above—limbs askew, hair matted, blankets bunched up and twisted around her. Not a vampiric stance at all: Sinjin’s blankets had always been meticulously folded, and sheets, crisply tucked into corners.

  I was grateful she wasn’t a vampire. She had magic
al skills, like me or Jolie. Her mother was a witch; why shouldn’t she have magic of her own? But, by the other side of the same damning coin, her father was a vampire, and a master vampire, at that: why shouldn’t she have vampiric tendencies of her own?

  When Sinjin had been temporarily transformed into a human, the spell had left him with certain human abilities, including the ability to father children. It made sense that the children he fathered would only inherit his human traits. I’d been so relieved Rowan didn’t have fangs when I started breast-feeding. That had been a major pre-baby concern.

  Rowan always joked that, if she were a vampire, then I wouldn’t have to cook. But, despite her Sinclairian looks and ethereal paleness, she was just as human a witch as I was.

  Still, brokering yourself with magical creatures had its drawbacks. Sinjin’s human-vampire anatomy could sire a human child, but at what cost? There was always something in the back of my mind that kept me holding my breath. For fifteen years, the doubt had festered.

  I remembered holding Rowan’s sweet little head in my hand. Cuddling my newborn close, feeling more joy than I could put into words, but still, I thought, We don’t know how she’ll grow; she’s the first of her kind…

  The thought walked with me everywhere. Like a high-pitched droning sound I’d managed to mostly tune out. There would always be mystery surrounding Rowan and her magic. Rowan herself was a mystery.

  Yet another thing she has in common with her father.

  That thought’s drone was a little harder to ignore.

  “Wake up, Ro,” I whispered softly. “I need to talk to you for a minute. Then, you can go right back to sleep.”

  “Mum…?” Rowan mumbled. “Wha... what’s going on?”

  After another few seconds of squinting, she managed to open her eyes all the way, her icy gaze looking at me in sleepy confusion.

  “I’m going on a little trip,” I said. “I’m… visiting an old friend.” It was a lie but I couldn’t tell her the truth. Well, it wasn’t fully a lie. I did have to visit an old friend but that wasn’t the reason I was leaving. Jolie was.