by Rhea Watson
None of these fresh faces had the stones to make a child bleed.
And I wouldn’t let that happen.
No going back. Only forward.
Add in the fact that I was the youngest headmaster in Root Rot’s history and the pressure increased tenfold. No one thought I could handle it; I felt the eyes of all the former headmasters glowering at me from their portraits no matter where I was in the castle. Rumors claimed my family name had gotten me the job, that my father pulled strings, that I bought my way in.
Fuck rumors.
I had earned this. My crusty predecessor wouldn’t have crafted such a glowing recommendation if I hadn’t.
A gust of cool July air struck the moment I stepped outside, lingering on the hilltop that overlooked the greenhouses and the athletic fields. Being so far north made the summers tolerable, but from the streaks of dark grey stretching across a hazy blue sky, we were in for a storm soon—and there was no telling when it would end, either. Six of the seven days last week had seen the castle hammered with rain: great for the flowers, less so for morale.
With the last classes of the afternoon about to kick off, students scampered to and fro, hurrying to make the starting bell, and I peered down at the greenhouses with a sigh.
Right. Alecto Clarke. Easy to forget about her amidst the administrative carnage hounding me night and day, but as soon as I spotted her with a handful of fifth years in the outdoor vegetable gardens, she came screaming back into focus.
Stop being ridiculous, man.
Notebook tucked under my arm, I marched down the prominent stone stairs cut into the hillside, making my way to the gardens as Ingrid, one of our snowy owl shifters responsible for first and second years, ushered her charges toward their greenhouse classroom. While the fifth years working through the rows of lush green didn’t notice my approach, Alecto suddenly glanced up from her spot in the thick of things. Her cheeks darkened the moment our eyes met, and she picked her way around the oldest of Root Rot’s student population. Only fifteen of the fifty-odd fifth years signed up for herbalism this year, but they had the aptitude necessary for the craft and were responsible for our campus produce.
Hopefully Alecto was up for the challenge of keeping them in line: the kitchens depended on her.
“Headmaster Clemonte,” she greeted, boots clicking sharply over the interlocking stonework. Alecto approached with a nervous smile and cheeks kissed by the elements, looking adorably windswept in an oversized beige jumper and black leggings. She brushed her wayward curls aside, most of them contained in a spirited ponytail that bounced with each step.
“Professor Clarke,” I said in return, voice adopting a husky Dom edge without my consent. I cleared my throat when she slowed in front of me, then tapped my notebook. “Please carry on as usual with your lesson—this is just a cursory review.”
Her throat dipped with a gulp, but she still widened her smile and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Oh. Oh no. Those were fighting words that shouldn’t affect me, but as she jogged back to her fifth years, I could have sworn my traitorous cock twitched with interest. Damn it. Pivoting in place, I stalked into the greenhouse and found an abandoned chair in the back corner to sit in, then snatched my pen out of my jacket, wrenched open my notebook, and scribbled the date, time, and professor in question along the top corner. By the time I’d finished, Alecto had darted in through another door near the front, her hands up to quiet the chatter.
While the other two greenhouses were overrun with plant life, this one had been set up to accommodate lectures. Two-seater wooden tables stretched from the front to the back, an aisle between each side, while potted plants hung from the vented glass ceiling. Cabinets lined the left wall, full of gardening tools and supplies, bags of soil and seed—if I remembered my last evaluation in this space correctly, anyway.
Herbalism was mandatory for first and second years, all those aged thirteen to fifteen required to take it for however long they were with us. After all, plant life played a prominent role in supernatural society, and working with one’s hands, nurturing another life besides your own, had all the rehabilitative qualities that I looked for in my new regime.
Besides that, my mother had always said nature was healing—and if anyone needed to be healed, it was these kids.
Den mother gone, Alecto was on her own with this lot, but she had them from the starting bell. Young, relatable, and, dare I say, cool, she was just the type I looked for with my new hires. While she wasn’t the only one of her kind this year, Alecto stood out as the most confident from the start of her lecture, holding attention and redirecting as necessary with what I considered the toughest age group we had.
Given magic and shifter abilities really ramped up around thirteen years of age, first and second years created the bulk of Root Rot Academy’s population. Not everyone could handle the gifts they were given—and not everyone used them for good. While most communities dealt with them in-house, some preferred to export their troubled young here in the hopes that we would send them back model citizens.
Sometimes that happened.
But if their sentence at a reform school only lasted a month, our hands were tied. My staff were good, but they weren’t miracle workers.
And Alecto was good. Confident, concise, clear, she easily segued from a short round of introductions to a lesson on the magical properties of rosemary, which had pens flying across parchment, one young warlock at the back furiously taking notes on his laptop. I had expected no less from a woman who had her references, her history at prestigious Canadian academies speaking volumes. Even though I had put her off for other reasons, at no point had I worried about her performance.
In fact, I wrapped my evaluation within the first ten minutes of the ninety-minute class, but I stayed, rooted in the back like a lurking shadow, because I liked evaluating her.
Just another sign that I needed a playmate, but it was almost impossible to convince a paid submissive to move out to the middle of nowhere, especially when I would barely have time for one, maybe two playdates a month. Beyond that, if news leaked that I had a sex worker at my school, I could kiss my lifelong ambitions goodbye, dreams in tatters. It just wasn’t worth the risk—but I needed a release. If my mind drifted toward dominance and submission, to games of consensual nonconsent and pain, every time I looked at Alecto Clarke and her pouty mouth, her eyes like liquid gold and her curls begging for a fist, I was fucked. Fucked.
Forty-five minutes in, the lecture wrapped—seemingly right on schedule—and Alecto moved her students on to the practical half of the lesson. Seeds, pots, and soil distributed, each student worked on their own individual herb garden, rosemary and its protective properties the first in their arsenal. A pleasant buzz descended over the room, conversation permitted as Alecto wove through the rows of tables, stopping to chat and give tips as she saw fit.
And I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Not until hers flitted to mine. My heart skipped a beat when she caught me staring, just as I imagined her gut bottoming out under my scrutiny, and, panicked, I offered her a ridiculous thumbs-up and a stupid smile that would haunt me. Tucking a curl behind her ear, she grinned back and ducked her head, then returned to her students.
Gods.
From the back row, a lanky thirteen-year-old warlock—James Sanderson, here because he used an illegal memory hex on his human bullies—arched an eyebrow at me, then looked pointedly at my lingering thumbs-up like I was the dimmest dullard on the planet.
And I was.
If the ivy creeping down the wall at my back could just strangle me already, that would be brilliant. Jaw clenched, I stood and slipped out the door—if only to avoid any further episodes of public idiocy.
Ugh.
I needed a nap—stat.
That would have been the healthy thing to do, a flicker of self-care in a storm of constant self-degradation. Instead, I returned to my office and buried myself in the never-ending paperwork that was always wai
ting for me in the in-tray at the right corner of my desk, then planned for an evening run after dinner.
The former was an exceptional distraction.
The latter a punishment—something I foresaw a great deal more of in the future if I couldn’t get my thoughts under control immediately.
8
Alecto
Two weeks at Root Rot and I had finally rediscovered my sea legs. Starting over at a new academy was scary no matter how many years you had been in the game, but once you adjusted to the routine, the students, the classes, once you fell back into curriculum you knew like the back of your hand, it was just like riding a broomstick. A little shaky at first, but then muscle memory kicked in and things got a whole hell of a lot easier.
Sort of. The students at Root Rot were a challenge; collectively, they were more emotional than any of the kids I had worked with in their age groups before. Unlike previous academies, it wasn’t my responsibility as a professor to deal with the teenage turmoil. Den mothers were not only required to escort new arrivals around campus and patrol the towers after curfew, but they absorbed most of the emotional labor as well. They had a handful of students from each year assigned to their brood, and in theory, they became their surrogate parents. Patient, thoughtful, considerate, strong in their own right, those ladies put up with all the worst tantrums and bursts of raw, untamed magic.
I just had to teach.
Of course, I could never just teach… So much of this job happened outside the classroom. Not only that, but I liked getting involved. I liked fixing problems and guiding kids toward solutions—all the while making them think they had stumbled onto it by themselves.
Now, if only I had my own emotional support shifter every time I bumped into Benedict Hammond—then life at Root Rot would really be a breeze. As it stood, I had stopped having mini heart attacks whenever I saw him, but the first two weeks of the school year were so chaotic that I barely had time to consider him. Always on the go, bouncing from student to student, class to class, collapsing into bed each night totally wiped out. Occasionally I caught him leaving the dining hall just as I arrived, and I had no choice but to look at him during last Sunday’s staff meeting.
Tough to concentrate on anything else when my parents’ killer was sitting less than ten feet away from me, but I did my best.
I tried to act normal.
I really did.
Bjorn still tapped my heartbeat in those instances, but he seemed to be under the impression that I thought our headmaster was a hottie. And he was. Jack Clemonte was unattainable gorgeousness that I could drool over all day long, and Bjorn had me all figured out in that respect.
But I’d take that and all the light teasing that came with it over my vampire roomie knowing the truth.
So, while I had the professor thing down, a few hiccups anticipated in the next few months but otherwise relatively smooth sailing ahead, Benedict Hammond was another story entirely. Around him, I fell apart—inside my own head, of course. Quiet breakdowns behind closed doors and internal freak-outs and struggling to breathe. All that fun stuff.
I still had no idea what to do about him. The djinn swore to me this was the man who had destroyed my family, and given the reputation of djinn as a species—even better than crossroads demons at getting what you wanted for the right price—I had no reason to doubt him.
So, this was the guy.
And we were just… coexisting.
And I hated that.
Worst of all, I had no one to talk to about it. No one to unload this burden on. Grandma and I used to send letters while I was away at academies during the year, the old witch staunchly against any human tech despite acknowledging it was ten times easier to send an email.
Only she had died two years ago—hit and run. Grandpa surrendered to the beyond four years before that, still so heartbroken about my parents and never able to fully drag himself out of that hole. The pair had raised me after everything, and Grandma really stepped up after her husband died.
And then some asshole hit her on the country road she liked to powerwalk along every night before bed. Maybe they were drunk, maybe not; no one ever found the driver. But what we knew for sure was that my grandma, my closest ally in the world, had bled out in her flashy eighties workout jumpsuit on the gravel alone—like roadkill.
That had nearly destroyed me.
Grandpa, I understood. Depression was a monster not everyone could vanquish.
Grandma…
I carried her with me to Root Rot, all her jewelry arranged neatly in its own box, some of her shawls and scarves intermingling with mine, getting her old daisy-scented perfume all over them.
Helping the memory last.
But what I really wanted was to talk to her again—vent all this out. She wouldn’t have approved going after Benedict; apparently the Hammond and the Corwin lineages had been at each other’s throats for centuries, and before my parents were found in charred pieces, the covens had found a tentative truce. After, the few Corwin witches and warlocks left were no match for a coven with ten times the members and quadruple the wealth.
Whispers echoed through the family tree all my life, unfounded but understandable suspicions that a Hammond might be responsible for the murder, for my near-death experience, but no one knew for certain. No one had proof, and given it was the first peaceful time between the covens in centuries, supposedly no one wanted to sully that. Stop the bloodshed and all that.
I was the first Corwin witch—the last one, too, the rest married off into new covens, into families without such a macabre, violent history—who decided to do something about it. About anything.
No sense in reopening old wounds, Grandma had always said.
Her death and my looming thirtieth birthday had started all of this.
I needed justice.
I needed closure.
I needed answers… and now that I was here, with him, I just wanted to cry to her about it.
I wore a mask instead. Lived a life of truths, fibs, and outright lies. Bided my time and did what I could to ensure my professional existence wasn’t as much of a waking nightmare as my personal. Already I had a few new friendships within the staff, and Bjorn was both gorgeous eye candy and a solid roommate. We clicked over terrible human television and usually ate dinners together, and tonight we planned to grade papers over a glass of red—wine for me, blood from his vintage stock for him—while marathoning Kitchen Nightmares reruns.
I’d never lived two lives before, but having only done so for two measly weeks, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Because while one life was shaping up well, Root Rot a welcome professional challenge, the other was a disaster waiting to happen, the fire closing in, my heart constantly on the verge of beating right out of my chest.
Fantastic stuff.
Clutching a thick stack of third- and fourth-year research papers to my chest, I scaled the steps from the greenhouses to the main castle. Bathed in night, the sky starless and the wind bitter, I gripped my empty coffee mug tight and briefly entertained the idea of swapping out wine for an Irish coffee to get me through a night of grading.
Already I dreaded it. The first assignments of the year tended to be rocky in most academies as students and professors felt out expectations and abilities. Last Friday, I’d tasked my third- and fourth-year classes—kids who, in theory, were genuinely interested in pursuing an herbalism future—to write reports on the poisonous flower of their choosing.
And the top of the pile was about a nonflowering herb—so, you know, off to a great start.
Dinner an afterthought and evening classes completed, the castle corridors were quiet when I strode in from the evening chill, my boots annoyingly echoey over the stone. I slowed to muffle the click, then stopped completely in one of the courtyard’s arched doorways. Usually I went out of my way to cut through the space, checking on the greenery, every leaf and petal kissed by my predecessor’s magic so it would bloom all year. Simple, really. I just had to make sur
e their nutritional requirements were met and I pruned them regularly, then we were golden.
I loved the courtyard.
And tonight, Benedict fucking Hammond was about to ruin it.
Heart in my throat, I focused on steadying my breath when I discovered him seated on the bench beneath the curly oak—his arm around a first year’s shoulders.
A crying first year.
My eyes narrowed, protective professor mode blasting into high gear, but just as I was about to make my presence known, Benedict smiled.
Warmly.
Kindly.
He smiled and murmured something, then patted the boy on the back.
And the tears stopped. Sniffling, the first year—Arnold Something—wiped at his nose, then scratched at the back of his head and nodded. A minute later, he was up and headed for the opposite end of the courtyard, a little bounce in his step, his tie a disaster and his uniform shirt untucked.
Benedict watched him go, back slightly rounded, black eyes soft, hands on his thighs, then let out a long, heavy sigh—a sigh I knew well. The pity sigh, the one that whooshed out when you really just wanted to help but weren’t sure you’d done enough.
How dare he make the pity sigh.
Just go around.
“Alecto?”
Fuck. I pivoted on the spot to face the courtyard again, then awkwardly waved my empty, coffee-stained maroon Root Rot mug. “Professor Cedar… Hey.”
Gut-clenching terror erupted the second he stood and strode over to me, but I held my ground, clutching everything just a little tighter, research papers crinkling against my chest.
“He’s out late,” I noted with a head toss in the retreating first year’s direction. Benedict meandered to a halt in front of me, his towering frame blocking my courtyard, forcing me to look at him when I just wanted the ground to open and swallow me whole.
