And with that, he walked past her and out the door of the lecture hall. It was the first time she’d seen him express an actual emotion. He was frustrated; she saw hints of how sad he was below the surface. He was a dragon shifter. She’d never met one before. The only shifters she knew were Trish and her family, all wolves. She was left standing there, staring at the wall at the back of the lecture hall with a gaping mouth and wide eyes.
She couldn’t tell if she felt incredibly guilty for what he said or wanted to get even angrier. She’d heard bullshit like that before, that the non-allies of shifters couldn’t possibly understand or help a single thing. She’d seen it at protests and rallies. Now she faced it in her own classroom, from a man who spouted it right to her face, telling her she wasn’t only useless to the cause but a detriment to it all.
She wouldn’t take that at face value. He couldn’t stop her from running her discussion sessions. He couldn’t stop what she did outside of class and no matter who he was or what he went through, he didn’t have the right to hinder her education because he believed one thing about her without ever giving her the chance.
He wanted to make a challenge for her? She’d answer it.
Chapter 5
She sat in the Starbucks the following day, waiting for her students to arrive. She probably should have picked a slightly less crowded place to meet at three p.m. on a workday afternoon, but it was the only café nearby that had reliable Wi-Fi and wouldn’t glare at them when they didn’t buy anything while sitting there for several hours. The baristas were too busy rushing Frappuccino orders and stressing about whatever midterm was already on the horizon to worry about a couple of students using up the table in the corner.
“Well, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
It wasn’t one of her students. It was Erik. Earlier today in the seminar, they’d gotten into a heated debate about whether milestone strides were enough for the shifter movement or whether they should be instead looking to achieve huge successes. It had lasted so long that the proctoring professor stepped in and told them both to be quiet the rest of class to let someone else in the seminar have a turn. And now, here he was, standing in front of her once again with that smirk across his dark eyes.
“Can I help you?”
“You look deep in thought.”
“Yes. So I’d love it if you left.”
Naturally, he did the opposite. He pulled out one of her chairs and sat down across from her.
“That’s for my students.”
“What students?”
“I’m holding office hours.”
“In a Starbucks, impressive.”
“Let me guess, you bring your students back to your bong-infested apartment and get them high so they can like, totally talk about the shifters and the universe, man.”
“I don’t hold office hours.”
She rolled her eyes. She took a sip of her cooling coffee. It was 3:10 and no one had yet to appear. She told them she’d wait for anyone who needed to stop in by three thirty before calling it quits on the day. Before she’d been happy with herself just to say she was doing this at all, she was there in the Starbucks, ready and waiting. But now, with Erik as her audience, she wanted someone to show up, just so she could prove a point. It was probably bad show for a teacher in training, using your students as trophies or an I-told-you-so moment but she really wouldn’t care if it knocked the smirk off Erik’s face.
“So, how is the demon professor? I heard Tekkin was an awful piece of shit,” he said, leaning back and throwing his arms lazily over his chair.
“He is,” she said, curtly.
“I’ll give you props for that much, Monroe. I probably would have requested some kind of transfer the second I saw his name on my schedule,” he said. “He’s such a know-it-all, pretentious fuck.”
Erik didn’t know, she realized. How could he know when she didn’t? Dr. Tekkin’s obsessive interest in the shifter studies was something so close to home. This was probably the closest he got to exhibiting any kind of emotion. He’d made a career out of trying to convince students why his existence was valid without the students ever seeming to know. She had the brief urge to defend him before she remembered the look on his face as he told her she’d never be good enough to effectively teach a class of her own, effectively protest the horrors that the world wanted to level on shifters.
“So is he really—”
“Excuse me, Miss Monroe? I’m not too late, am I?”
A young woman from the class stood there. Alessia recognized her as the small, mouse-haired girl who constantly sat in the back, likely to avoid Tekkin’s snake-like eyes. She looked only slightly less nervous standing there, her books pressed to her chest.
“No, of course not. Take a seat,” she said, a little too excited, shoving her things out of the way. The girl looked over at Erik. “This is Erik. He was just—”
“Getting ready to help you. I’m her teaching assistant,” he said, smiling and then offering a wink at Alessia whose blood began to boil.
“Okay. Cool,” the girl said in a small voice. “I was wondering if you could help me with the reading? I’m having trouble understanding it. My name is Chaya, by the way.”
“Well,” Alessia said, pulling out her own copy of the reading that was covered in notes and highlighter marks. “The first thing to know is that this is a manifesto. That means it’s a proclamation of intentions for a specific group. So you want to look at it more as a speech than a written piece. It will have those bombastic, emotional qualities. It’s not a research paper or a dissertation.”
“You also want to keep in mind,” Erik said, leaning into the table so his voice couldn’t be ignored. “Karl Marx was a huge supporter of the shifter status in Europe and thought it was crucial to the decay of capitalism and the rise of communism. Here, the shifter status in society, as far as he’s concerned, is tied to the economic status of the government. He was the first one to propose something like that. It’s the reason you’ll find a lot of shifters identity as what the right wing government would call ‘party extremists.’ A lot of them identify as socialists, according to the 2010 census.”
Alessia couldn’t say he was wrong. That was exactly what was going on in the text. She’d written a paper about it for her history elective years ago when she took Soviet Russian History in her final semester. Marx was the looming villain of the capitalist west, but to the shifters and their allies, he was a champion of their importance, the first person to say they mattered in twentieth-century society. She had no doubt that Tekkin would spin his lecture towards not so much pro-Marxism but total hero worship of the man. She needed to prepare the students for that.
“So was Marx talking about social reform or reform for shifters?” Chaya asked.
“They’re linked topics,” Alessia said. “Marx is often the champion for the disenfranchised because he brought importance to various social statuses and ethnic groups that the ruling elite wanted to ignore. He argues not only are they part of the system, but they will be the ones driving the future of our economies and governments.”
The girl scribbled this down feverishly in handwriting that she couldn’t possibly discern later.
“I’ll type up some notes and send them to you to use as a guideline for your own reading,” Alessia said, taking pity on Chaya’s clearly cramping hand.
“That would be awesome, thank you.”
“Why don’t you get a drink or something and we’ll start by looking at the lecture notes. Tell them you’re here for a study session and it’s 50% off.”
The girl hopped up and got in line behind the horde of blond, white girls waiting to get their vanilla bean, sugar-laden cups of barely coffee. When Alessia turned back, Erik smiled at her. He wasn’t smirking, he wasn’t winking, he wasn’t sneering like he knew something the rest of the world didn’t. He was smiling, honest to God looking like a nice man for once.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
�
�Nope. You’re doing fine.”
The problem was it seemed like he totally meant it. He wasn’t making fun of her in some indirect way. She’d actually managed to impress him and got some kind of human response. It made her a little bit uncomfortable. She opened her mouth to say something, maybe a thank you, or something not completely vitriolic, but she never got the chance.
The sirens went off. White strobe lights started flashing and a long siren whined. Everyone jumped at once when the sound cut through the typical din of the Starbucks. Alessia looked up and Erik turned around to see everyone looking wildly confused. He went over to call Chaya back to the table and they gathered their stuff.
“Fire drill?” he asked as he helped both women shove their papers in their bags.
“That’s not what the fire alarm sounds like.”
They walked warily outside along with the sea of other students and were met with a strange sight. Thousands of purple flyers floated through the air, dropping from somewhere above. The ones that had already made it to the ground coated the quad in a layer of purple. Erik reached down to pick one up, turning it over.
9-21-1017. WE WILL RESIST.
That’s all it said. They all were stamped with these big, bold letters and shouting words. Alessia looked around for any other sign or clue, but there was nothing, just purple flyers littering everywhere.
“9/21… what is that?” Erik asked, flipping the flyer around to see if there was any other writing.
“The fall festival block party,” Alessia said.
“Well, that’s only going to end well.”
#
All the students were sent back to their dorms, afternoon and night classes were canceled while police covered the campus, looking for their culprits. Alessia stood in her apartment, her hair wet from a shower and her pajamas on. She looked out the window at the cops below with bomb-sniffing dogs and flashlights. There was no way to tell who sent out the flyers, but there was one word on everyone’s mind—shifters. Alessia always wanted to believe the best in them, everyone had their extremist groups. But the shifter extremist groups made it very hard for normal shifters to go about their lives without facing some kind of prejudice or, worse, danger.
Purple was the official color of the National Shifter Party. They vowed to get one of their members into a seat in Congress by the next election and took up any sort of resistance to their ideas with outright violence where they deemed it necessary. They weren’t a model group for the shifters at all, nor were they even the largest of their political factions, but they always managed to be the loudest so they were the only ones anyone ever paid attention to.
She sighed and moved away from the window. She put on Netflix because she couldn’t stand to listen to the news. They weren’t covering the events on campus; the administration had put a gag order on the press contingent that no bomb was found on campus. But that didn’t mean the tone or mode of broadcasts would be any different. It was the world they lived in. Every news segment brought new, angry, and dangerous stories on behalf of shifters.
She sat on her couch, sipping at her tea, wondering what Dr. Tekkin was doing right now. She imagined him alone in some studio apartment at the edge of the college town. He probably listened to heavy metal music and barely ate while he scribbled out manifestos of his own and buried himself in books. He was an incredibly smart man. That was obvious from the way he spoke in class, but she could also see it in his eyes. There was a dark intelligence there, a dangerous sort of knowing. His mind was probably the most attractive thing about him, even with his awful opinions on non-allies trying to help shifters. She found herself, for once, actually looking forward to class. She wanted to know what he’d have to say about the issue, how he would spin it. She wanted to know what impassioned lecture he cooked up. Now that she knew the truth, she paid attention to more of the nuances of his speech, the way she could tell how deeply he cared when his voice cracked or something seemed to catch him in a pause between words.
There was a human being underneath all that exterior and grumpy-faced anger. She wanted to see more of it. Not to mention, she couldn’t wait to brag that, although it had been cut short, someone did show up to her study session after all.
Chapter 6
Dr. Tekkin didn’t talk about the event at all. He didn’t even acknowledge it happened in class and Alessia wasn’t the only one looking at him strangely during the lecture. An email went out to everyone assuring them the bomb threat had been a hoax, that the campus was the most secure and safe place they could possibly be, and that the culprits would be caught. It felt like empty promises of a place that was, in Alessia’s opinion, truly scared of whatever danger lurked.
They didn’t call off the fall festival, they didn’t even mention the date corresponded to the festival. Everyone, it seemed, was ready to ignore what was happening. Erik, however, wasn’t.
“It’s fucking scary,” he said. “And it fucking sucks.”
“Eloquent.”
They sat again together in a bar off campus. She had her wine again and he ordered some hipster, hoppy beer. She told him he tried too hard to blend in with the undergrads and he was a twenty-six-year-old man and should act like one, and order some crappy beer like everyone else. He said undergrads couldn’t afford good beer anyway.
“I mean it, though,” he said. “These groups aren’t what shifters are about. They’re not what anyone is about. They’re in it for themselves, they don’t care who gets hurt.”
Alessia agreed. But she couldn’t help but wish she could have this conversation with Dr. Tekkin. She hadn’t been able to get it out of her brain. He was a shifter, he lived this life with terrorists claiming to being doing this work for him. How did that feel? She didn’t want to admit that there might be something to what he said about her inability to truly understand a shifter’s life and everything they went through. But talking with Erik, talking about how awful it was and how bad they felt did nothing to help anyone. They were just words from college-educated kids in positions of privilege.
“What did the devil professor have to say about it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, shrugging. “He didn’t say a thing. Just kept talking about the shifters’ place in Marxism.”
“Well, maybe the best thing is to ignore it. Not give them any power.”
“They killed four people only two months ago. We can’t pretend this isn’t happening.”
“I know.”
Another class passed without Dr. Tekkin saying a word. In her study sessions the following week, more students showed up and more than one of them asked questions about the National Shifter Party and their tactics. They asked her if she thought something bad would happen next week, if she thought the party really did represent what shifters were thinking underneath it all. She had no answers for them. But she knew who did.
“Can I speak with you, professor?” she asked him after the next class.
“My door is always open,” he said.
“I’ve had a lot of the students ask me if we’ll be covering any of the events of last week,” she said.
“Events?”
“The bomb threat incident and the flyers.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s relevant.”
He sighed.
“There is a difference between relevant and topical. You’ll do well to learn it.”
There it was again, his constant ego just asserting itself whenever possible, from below the surface. He pulled his leather jacket on over this week’s white t-shirt. “If you have nothing else to ask…”
“I just think we should be responding to student requests and student needs,” she said. “Isn’t that our job as professors?”
“One, only one of us here is a professor; don’t get ahead of yourself, Miss Monroe,” he said. “Two, my job is to instruct. I’m passing along my knowledge, not jumping at every bandwagon opportunity the news presents.”
He moved past her an
d walked out, and she felt like she wanted to scream. She wanted to take the textbook and just hurl it at his head. She settled for marching back to her apartment and slamming the door behind her, throwing back one of the few beers she had in her fridge.
“Uh oh, what happened?” Trish said from the computer screen when she spotted Alessia throwing back a beer during their Skype call. “You only drink beer when you’re exceptionally pissed.”
“I am,” she said. “Drake Tekkin is an awful human being.”
“You know for someone who hates him, you sure do talk about him a lot.”
“Because he’s horrid.”
She drank more of her beer, listing off the events of the week and his refusal to instruct the students in anyway on what had happened.
“Well, maybe ignoring it is the best way to deal with it,” Trish shrugged. “I know I wouldn’t want to draw any more attention to it.”
“Which would be fine if that was his reasoning,” she said. “But he thinks everything inside his brain is perfect and intelligent, and the only thing anyone needs to know. He won’t listen to what the students want to hear. He just wants everyone to be impressed with how smart he is.”
Trish let her rant more until she was red in the face. She giggled at her and apologized when Alessia glared at her for it. She took a breath when she was done and slumped back in her couch.
“Have you noticed,” Trish said. “You’ve done nothing but talk about this guy for weeks. Is he hot?”
“Not the point.”
“So he is.”
“He’s an asshole. He’s the worst kind of egotistical professor only concerned with his own agenda.”
“Fair enough, but maybe you should focus on something else,” Trish said. “Like with these threats. You’re only making it a bigger thing by constantly talking about it. Ignore him, make him go away. Boom.”
Hero's Bride (Alien SciFi Romance) (Celestial Mates Book 7) Page 38
