Love of A Dragon (Exalted Dragons Book 1)

by K. T. Stryker

  Of course, Peter thought. He wondered if all this worrying after Ashe was healthy for him. Every scrape, frown, or slightly odd comment of hers made him panic that something was wrong. But if something was truly wrong, she would tell him. He would have to learn to trust her more.

  Before they left the student center Peter ducked into the bathroom. He went into a stall and called Mark.

  “What took you so long?” Mark asked.

  “It’s only been a few minutes since you sent your message,” Peter replied. “I was with someone.”

  Mark grumbled. He wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. “I did some research into the Alilovic family tree, among other things.”

  “And?”

  “You seem to have gotten yourself into a feud with one of the oldest clans in Europe.”

  Peter didn’t believe it for a second. He knew the names of all the great clans and Alilovic wasn’t one of them. “If you’re trying to get out of helping me, you’re going to have to try harder than that,” Peter said.

  “No, no. It would be an honor to end their bloodline. After all, their ancestor is one of the first of our kind to gain any sort of notoriety for killing humans. Have you ever heard of Jure Grando?”

  “In legend, yeah. He terrorized a town in Croatia in the seventeenth century. The townspeople finally ended it by chopping off his head.” Peter hoped Mark would get to the point soon. He couldn’t keep Ashe waiting outside forever.

  “Not just legend, but verifiable fact. Grando had a son who took the name Alilovic and fled the country. He too had the curse, his father’s thirst for blood. He lay waste to towns in Italy and France before settling in Germany to hide from vampires like me who would have put an end to his butchering. His clan then went on to take part in the human atrocities of World War II and then, as far as I know, continued to operate in the dark places where the sentinels can’t find them. That’s why you’ve never heard of them before. They’re shadows among shadows.”

  Peter had no idea what he was getting himself into. He wondered if Landon’s family still maintained contact with their relatives in Europe.

  “How do you suggest we proceed?” Peter asked.

  Mark replied. “We have to cut off the arm before it can tell the brain what’s happening, if you know what I mean. We take out Landon’s branch of the clan in one clean sweep and make ourselves scarce before their friends in Europe can find out.”

  “Okay,” Peter agreed, though nothing about it felt okay. He was committing himself to a war.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Mark said, as if he could sense Peter’s hesitation. “There are plenty of us who are trained to handle this sort of thing.”

  Peter thought about Ashe and his promise to keep her safe. “No, I’ll help you. Tell me what you need me to do.”

  “Right now I need all the information I can get. Keep sending me articles and anything else you can dig up.”

  Peter promised to do so and hung up. His mind felt heavy with everything Mark had told him. Apparently Landon’s evil could be traced all the way back to his ancestors. Peter was glad that his own line had not cursed him to such a fate, but it was still no excuse for Landon’s behavior. Peter should have known from that first day when Landon had tried to crush him with the construction crane that the man was nothing but evil.

  Peter left the stall still thinking about Landon and how close he had been to losing Ashe once already. If he had known at the time what Landon was, he never would have agreed to let Ashe finish her semester here. He would have insisted they pack their bags and leave as soon as they had gotten home. But telling Ashe she couldn’t graduate now would crush her. Peter didn’t have it in him to do that to her. Now the only way forward was to fight.

  The lecture hall was only half-full; the students were clearly taking the professor’s absence as an excuse to skip class themselves. Ashe sat near the back, listening as the substitute, Professor Wheatley, talked about witch hunts dating all the way back to ancient Rome. He was a stern man with thick, dark eyebrows that cast his whole long face in their shadow. He stood in the light of the projector with his hands in his pockets, his back slightly hunched though he couldn't have been more than sixty.

  “Witch hunts actually declined in number in ancient Rome with the advent of Christianity and its acceptance as the official state religion,” he droned. “For many centuries, the Church had no hand in persecuting witches, but once they did, things became quite nasty.”

  He changed the slide to show a sixteenth-century depiction of a witch tied to a rack in the town square.

  “This is the kind of scene that most of you are probably used to seeing. If you notice, the building in the back there is a church and the priest is standing here off to the side. Whereas before the Church had claimed that even the belief in the existence of witchcraft was blasphemy, here they are now doing the very thing they condemned mere decades previous. If we look at this slide...”

  The slide changed again and the professor’s meandering sentences quickly lost Ashe’s attention. She picked up her pen and started drumming it against her notebook, thinking about where she would go for lunch. Peter wouldn’t be free until the evening, so she would have to wait until then to see him. As her mind continued to drift, she hit her notebook a little too hard and the cap of her pen went flying with a clatter into the aisle. She got up to retrieve it.

  Professor Wheatley turned towards the auditorium. “Miss Linfield, if you could please pay a little more attention to my lecture.”

  Ashe’s face felt hot but the lecture hall was thankfully too dark for it to show. She went back to her seat and crossed her arms in front of her chest, hoping the professor could sense the anger rolling off her in waves. She couldn’t wait for Professor Sharp to come back.

  It had been over a week and there was still no word from the professor. Ashe had tried emailing him, but no replies had come back yet. She still had some books she had borrowed over the break that she needed to return to him. She figured she could stop by his office after class and slide them into the mail slot by his door. If she didn’t return the books today, she would likely forget and they would be lost like so many others. Only last week she had found a weathered copy of Sense and Sensibility under her bed that she had lost some time back in high school.

  “...before largely dying out in the ninetieth century. This doesn’t mean that witch hunts are entirely nonexistent today, and these modern witch hunts will be the subject of Friday’s lecture, along with the belief systems that keep such practices alive.”

  The projector clicked off and the lights came on. Ashe rubbed her eyes and closed her notebook.

  “Now, don’t get up just yet,” the professor said to the few students who had already stood up from their seats. He took a stack of papers from the podium. “We still have ten minutes left; just enough time for a pop quiz. Let’s see how many of you were sleeping and how many of you actually managed to learn something today.”

  Ashe flipped her notebook open but today’s page was blank, as they had been all week. Instead of listening to the professor’s dry lectures she had been worrying about Professor Sharp and Penelope and what she was going to do after graduation. All she could remember was that today’s lecture had been on witch hunts and something about Romans and dying on racks.

  She took a quiz and handed the stack to the row behind her. Already she could tell the questions were impossible. She wondered if Professor Wheatley had actually said any of these things in his lecture or if he was playing a cruel game with the class, who clearly wanted their regular professor back. She glanced around at the other students who looked about as lost as she was.

  When time was up, all she had written was her name at the top. The rest of the answers were blank. As Professor Wheatley came by to pick up the quizzes from each row he looked down at hers and clicked his tongue. “I thought so,” he said and continued down the aisle.

  Ashe could faintly hear the cathedral bells ring
ing outside for noon and grabbed her bag before the professor could say anything more. She left the auditorium quickly and followed the familiar path through the hallway to Professor Sharp’s office to return his books. She hated Professor Wheatley and was dreading her first paper for the class. She already anticipated the terrible grade she would receive, along with the scathing remarks written in red in the margins. It was just like last semester, only the professor had this time written her off as a lost cause instead of a student whose attention was worth fighting for.

  The light was on in Professor Sharp’s office when she got there. Ashe shifted the books to one hand and knocked on the door. She tried not to get her hopes up as she waited for a response.

  “I don’t have office hours now,” Professor Sharp said through the door.

  Ashe allowed herself a small smile. “It’s me, Ashe,” she replied.

  There was a creak of a chair and the door opened. Professor Sharp looked tired and his pupils were badly dilated. They were having trouble adjusting to the brighter hallway light. He looked like he had aged ten years over the break.

  “I have some of your books,” she said uncertainly. “But if now’s not a good time I can come back later.”

  “No, it’s good to see you. Come on in,” he said gesturing her inside his office.

  Ashe took a seat in her usual armchair. She noticed that the professor’s desk was littered with books and papers, some of which looked like they had come from a museum and might crumple into dust at any minute.

  “How’s the new professor?” Professor Sharp asked her, starting to stack the books into neat piles, which he then moved to the floor behind the desk. Ashe could see that many of the books had to do with alchemy and folk remedies, and wondered if the professor was planning on doing a lecture on the subject, though it wasn’t in the syllabus. She also wondered how long it had been since he had slept.

  “Professor Wheatley is absolutely terrible,” Ashe replied. “Are you coming back to teach soon?”

  Professor Sharp’s eyes lit up for a moment before the weak flame doused itself again. “No, I don’t know; I’m only here because my books are here. I don’t like being at home all alone. Professor Wheatley is a good colleague of mine. He takes a little warming up to, but you’ll learn a lot from him.”

  Ashe wasn’t so sure. It was hard to believe there was a professor out there that made Professor Sharp look like a lamb.

  “Is everything... okay?” Ashe asked. She didn’t feel comfortable asking him outright, but he looked too pitiful to pretend everything was normal. He was like the shell of his old self and Ashe couldn’t stand it. She missed the sharp, uncompromising teacher she had grown used to.

  Professor Sharp sighed, taking his glasses off and setting them on the desk. Without the frames, Ashe could see the dark, puffy circles under the man’s eyes. “My wife passed away,” he said.

  Ashe felt her heart breaking for the professor. She couldn’t imagine losing the person she loved like that, losing Peter. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  The professor shook his head. “I already knew what was going to happen, but it didn’t make it any easier when it did. My wife had been sick and the doctor told us she didn’t have much time left. I promised her I would take her out to the countryside and spend her last days with her, just the two of us watching the snow falling and enjoying our time together. So that’s what we did. It was nice.”

  He paused, sniffling a little.

  “She always loved nature. The only reason she moved to the city was because of my work. Maybe if we’d stayed out of the city she wouldn’t have gotten sick. I know that cancer runs in her family, but maybe things would have been different.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Ashe said. She didn’t know what to do or how to comfort him. To a friend she would have offered a shoulder to cry on. To a professor, she had no idea. She sat quietly as Professor Sharp wiped the tears from his eyes.

  “You can come back when you’re ready. Professor Wheatley’s not so bad, really,” Ashe said, not wanting him to feel guilty for being absent.

  Professor Sharp smiled weakly at her. “I’ll be back soon, I promise. I only needed some time to adjust to things. As competent as Professor Wheatley is, I have a hunch my students still need me.”

  “We do,” Ashe said.

  She put her borrowed books on his desk and excused herself as the professor went back to his reading. It was terrible that someone could lose his wife like that. Ashe’s own parents were roughly the same age as the professor and though she didn’t have to worry about her father passing away, she knew her mother hadn’t taken the best care of herself these past ten years. Ashe promised to take better care of herself too, for Peter’s sake as much as her own.

  Today there was no snow, but the sky was still overcast. Ashe had no destination in mind so she let her feet wander where they would. She hadn’t known that Professor Sharp’s wife was sick and had never bothered to think about the professor’s personal life. It was so easy to define someone by their set role in her life—teacher, mother, boyfriend. It was much harder to see someone for who they were as a whole. As Ashe walked away from the professor’s office, she thought about Peter and all of the aspects of him that she chose to close her eyes to. She knew nothing of his past or his life beyond how he related to her. Ashe felt she was ready to start asking questions, to start opening these doors, even if she didn’t like the answers that lay behind them.

  But as the days dragged on, Ashe again lost her nerve. She didn’t feel it was fair to ask him to reveal so much about himself when she was hiding things herself. Ashe hadn’t seen Penelope or the others since Christmas, as she was too busy getting back in the swing of classes and her job at the bookstore. Life seemed to settle into something approaching normal, all except for Professor Sharp.

  When the professor finally came back to class, he was nothing like before. The changes were evident to anyone, not just those like Ashe who were actively looking for them. On his first day back at school, he stood at the head of the classroom clutching the podium tightly with both hands as if unable to stay upright on his own. He looked like he had lost a considerable amount of weight and his cheeks were sunken in.

  The curtains were drawn tightly and the projector was going. The professor kept his eyes trained on the lecture notes in front of him, not pausing to look at the students or the slides illuminated behind him. His voice came out in a rasp; Ashe wondered if someone could die of a broken heart.

  The next class was the same and the one after that. The professor’s mind was clearly elsewhere; he was like a zombie, just reading off the notes he had already prepared. He didn’t bother to interact with the students and his office hours were growing more scarce. Eventually he started missing classes again and Ashe began to worry. She never knew on a given day whether it would be Professor Sharp at the podium or Professor Wheatley. Ashe’s first paper came back with notes written in an unfamiliar hand and a barely passing grade written in large print on the last page. Whereas Professor Sharp had always criticized her for not taking the subject seriously enough, Professor Wheatley seemed to think she was taking it too seriously. “Stop believing everything you read. They’re just stories,” he had written on her paper. If only he knew the truth, Ashe thought.

  One day, when Professor Sharp was on campus and looking a bit better than usual, Ashe ran into him outside the bookstore. He appeared to be talking to someone on the phone but hung up when he noticed her.

  “I noticed the grade on your last paper,” he said opening the door for her. “I have to say I’m disappointed.”

  Ashe slung her bag behind the counter and grabbed her name tag from the shelf. She wanted to argue with him, telling him that the only reason for her poor grade was the new professor’s apparent grudge against her. But she knew that would only make Professor Sharp feel guilty about not being able to keep up with his work so she bit her tongue. “I’m still getting the hang of his grading style,” was
all she said.

  “Are you sure it doesn’t have anything to do with you and your tutor starting to date?” he said.

  Ashe almost choked. How could the professor know? She tried to defend herself, “I was doing well. You even said so yourself. Plus it’s none of your business.”

  Ashe’s supervisor came by with a scowl on her face. “How many times do I have to tell you that I don’t pay you for talking,” she said, but when the supervisor noticed Professor Sharp standing at the counter, her scowl faded. The professor gave her a friendly hello. It was the first time Ashe had ever seen the miserable old woman smile. It looked like the wrinkles on her face would crack open from the effort. Ashe shuddered and picked up a stack of books to sort.

  “Sorry, professor,” the old woman said.

  Professor Sharp shrugged it off. “I should be getting back to work myself.”

  “Did you need to find a book?” Ashe asked, wondering if the professor had been on his way in or out of the shop when he had run into her.

  “Oh yes, I nearly forgot,” the professor said. He dug into a side pocket of his leather briefcase and pulled out a scrap of paper.

  Ashe set down the stack of books she was holding and entered the title into the computer, but no entries popped up. “Sorry, it looks like we don’t have it. I can check the nearby bookstores to see if one of them has it in stock.”

  “No, it’s okay,” the professor said. “I’ll check the library again.”

  Ashe handed the paper back to the professor and in doing so sent the precariously-balanced stack of books tumbling towards the floor. In the blink of an eye the professor lunged and managed to save the books from falling, catching them awkwardly between his hands and the edge of the counter.

  “Thanks,” she said as Professor Sharp put the books back on the counter. He looked embarrassed though Ashe had been the one to knock them over.

  “I have to go,” he said. “But I’ll see you in class on Monday.”

  Ashe watched him leave. She was glad to see he was getting some of his strength back. The Professor Sharp she had met weeks ago in his office wouldn’t have been able to save even a single book from falling, let alone a whole stack. Maybe he would be able to stay and teach classes for the rest of the semester. She wondered if Peter had been in to see him recently, she doubted it. Peter had been scarce since they had returned to campus. He seemed preoccupied with his own classes, and on top of that, had accepted a job in the college archives. Ashe knew his family didn't need the money. Keeping busy must have been Peter’s way of coping with everything that had happened last semester, but Ashe needed him by her side.