by Maria Amor
“We might be able to narrow it down,” he suggested. “There aren’t that many of them. Do you think all of the new professors are involved in this thing?”
“I don’t think so,” Julia said. “But probably all of them know about it. Why?”
“Well, I was thinking,” Dylan explained, “that there might be something in the fact that only a few of the professors have pushed students to accuse the air-aligned people at the school of stealing from them.”
“Oh! That’s a good point,” Julia said. “But that still gives us—what—like four professors, doesn’t it? Maybe five?”
“You don’t think all of them are involved?”
“I have no idea. This is obviously a pretty big operation—I mean, if someone on the council is involved, it would have to be; right?”
“But at the same time, the more people who are in on the opportunity there is for leaks to spring.” Dylan raised an eyebrow. “If there are that many professors in on it, then we might be able to get lucky.”
“But we can’t follow all of them,” Julia pointed out. “Even if we could separate without being noticed, that still only makes two of us.”
“I think you need to make some friends with the fire-aligned students,” Dylan suggested. “Other than like, Keegan. Obviously, she’s not in on it.”
“I hope the hell not,” Julia said. “I don’t feel like dealing with Ellis anymore. Maybe Ariana?”
“And some of the professors who pushed kids to come forward were earth-aligned,” Dylan pointed out. “Maybe I should talk to them.”
“They’d be more willing to open up to you,” Julia admitted. “And more vulnerable to any kind of psych attack you made.”
“We’re not doing that to any more professors,” Dylan told her. “I know I promised not to wet-blanket, but that kind of thing could get us expelled.”
“I know,” Julia said. “I know. Ruth read me the riot act about it one of the times you were outside.” Dylan grinned.
“She’s the one who taught me how to do it,” he told her. “But she did say that as long as I didn’t use it on professors I should be okay.” He shook his head to himself. “No more asking professors about anything. At least, directly.”
“Obviously,” Julia agreed. “They’re already ready to close ranks and keep us ‘safe’.” She rolled her eyes. “We’re going to have to figure out a way to get the information without asking.”
“Do you really think following people around is going to do it?” Julia sighed.
“Not really,” she admitted. “We can’t get caught outside of school hours, snooping around. We’ll have to find a way to get into places officially, and do it that way.”
Dylan thought about that; there weren’t many ways that they could get to any of the professors’ offices, or, more importantly, their living quarters on-campus, without getting caught. There were fewer ways for them to legitimately follow the professors around. “We’re going to have to get in good with people who are on the professors’ good sides,” Dylan suggested.
“And hope that someone will let something slip?” Julia raised an eyebrow. She sighed and closed her eyes, scrubbing at her face. Dylan hadn’t seen her as frustrated as she’d been by the mystery in front of them in their entire time as friends. Of course, there was that two-year span when you didn’t see her at all, Dylan reminded himself. It was entirely possible that she’d been just as frustrated by something while they’d been apart.
“If we can narrow it down amongst a few of the professors—or down to even just one we’re pretty sure of—we can get some kind of evidence,” Dylan told her. “I just don’t know how we narrow it down.”
For a few minutes, maybe as many as fifteen, the two of them sat silently, and Dylan could feel the pulse of Julia’s intense thinking, the pattern of her energy rising and falling as she worked hard at the problem in her mind.
Ruth had given Julia more of the potion she’d made; Dylan had definitely noticed that even though it didn’t fully do its job of pushing down her energy to an acceptable level, it at least gave Julia the ability to sleep a little better. That, alone, had helped; some of her temper had diminished and her irritability wasn’t as pronounced. He was worried about how it would go in a few more months; Julia was getting closer and closer by the day to the time when she would have her full abilities as a Guardian, and the energy would only increase.
She’d been making an effort to keep her abilities, her power contained and controlled, Dylan knew; he also knew from experience that there would be moments when no amount of control, no amount of self-containment, would work. She would just have to get through it—and for the first time, he actually felt something like pity for the girl he’d been set to act as a guard and companion to.
His own transition had been frustrating, occasionally painful, and sometimes unpleasant—but he had maybe half, at most two-thirds of the power that Julia had coursing through her. He hadn’t had to worry about creating a natural disaster; the damage from his power surges was mostly limited to wherever he was, specifically, at the moment when they’d happened.
“Okay,” Julia said, cutting through his thoughts once again. “Here’s the way I see it: we’ll pick some of the people who are in good with the professors that Dimitrios seems to like the most.”
“Makes sense,” Dylan agreed.
“We’ll use them to get sort of an ‘in’ with those professors,” Julia continued. “And then…” she shrugged. “That’s kind of the part of this that I have no idea what to do anything about.”
“We need to talk to some of the witches in the school,” Dylan suggested. “If anyone would know how someone might duplicate the relics, it would be them.” The witches had a slightly different course load from the Guardians—more of an emphasis on direct magic, as opposed to manipulation of elemental energies. While Dylan knew spells and incantations, and had learned how to brew some potions, the witches who attended Sandrine spent their entire time there doing magic at least a few times a day as part of practice. It was their best bet.
“We’ll have to be careful about it,” Julia said, surprising Dylan.
“You? Saying we need to be careful?”
Julia grinned wryly.
“I’m capable of understanding the occasional precaution,” she said tartly. “But yeah—with the witches we’ll need to be careful. They’re not the same as people in our own alignment.”
Dylan could appreciate Julia’s distrust of the witches at the school; technically, he and she—and all Guardians—were not just intermediaries for the supernatural in the human world. They also had to deal with witches, who called upon the energies that Guardians aligned with to do their magic. Natural witches, ones who had been born with the innate ability, had loyalty to their own kind—but not as much as many Guardians could wish—to the elements themselves.
Then too, there was an envy that came from the witches: the Guardians, along with the supernatural creatures at the school and in the world, had not just innate ability but an innate energy that manifested itself much more dramatically than anything the witches would ever be able to create.
“We talk to the witches, figure out which of the professors is involved in this theft scam, and hopefully find a way to find out who in the council is behind this,” Dylan summed up. “You know, I’m kind of starting to see why people think you’re eventually going to rule over the element of air.”
“What?” Julia frowned at him.
“You told Geb and Perga and Avani that you’re not ambitious that way, but you’re damn ambitious,” Dylan pointed out. “You’ve got me committing to help you take down a member of the council, along with the dean and a good half-dozen of the professors at the school.” Julia half-scowled, and then smiled.
“Well, if the politics of our people are going to draw me in whether I want them to or not, it’s going to be on my terms,” she said. “And I’m not going to let this crap stand.”
“You’re going t
o get us expelled,” Dylan said. He sat back in his seat. “But at least no one will be able to say it’s my fault.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Julia said, taking out her phone. “They’ll blame you anyway.”
*
Julia looked up and down the hallway, her heart hammering in her chest as she slipped out of the girls’ restroom. She’d only skipped classes a few times in her academic career, and generally only for the sake of a “mental health day” or something of that nature; never to do something that on its own would get her into trouble.
She and Dylan had been working their new angle—their new way of trying to get information they needed to take the dean down—for a few days, and Julia hoped that it was about to bear at least a little bit of fruit. Even a blueberry-sized lead on this would be good, she thought idly as she darted down the hall.
Everyone, or most everyone, was in class or in the office; there were a few students in the infirmary, or in the dorm rooms sick. There was one professor that Julia was interested in, and she’d gotten the lead on him almost by accident. She’d started to hang around some of the fire-aligned girls that Keegan was closer with without telling her long-time friend the reason why, as soon as she and Dylan had come up with their plan of attack. She’d managed to get Brigitte up to her room with Keegan and Adara and another girl named Suchin, while Dylan was supposed to be in his dorm, but was actually spending time with a few of the earth-aligned boys in their common area.
She, Keegan, Adara, and Brigitte had brought together their little stockpiles of treats from home, and sat around talking about the exams that had just finished and about the summer to come. Of course, the strangeness of the current year—and the new teachers—eventually came up.
“Without trying to sound like, ‘poor, pitiful me’, I feel like the new professors definitely play favorites,” Julia commented, keeping her tone as light as possible.
“I don’t think anyone who has a brain in their head would try and say they don’t,” Adara admitted. “I mean, it’s pretty blatant, considering who’s constantly being targeted for the accusation that they’re stealing.”
“Did you ever get to the bottom of that, Jules?” Keegan popped a marshmallow into her mouth after asking.
“Get to the bottom of it?” Brigitte frowned in confusion.
“I was trying to figure out what was behind so many of my own alignment getting accused and punished,” Julia explained. “No, I never did figure out what was going on.”
“There are still like, two months left in the school year,” Adara pointed out. “You could figure it out, maybe.”
“I’ve sort of abandoned it,” Julia said, not wanting to give the girls, including Keegan, anything they might be compelled to use against her. She didn’t think any of them would tattle on their own, or she wouldn’t have mentioned it to Keegan, but she also didn’t trust the professors not to check up on her if they were concerned that she was onto something. “The most I’d ever been able to uncover was that the professors had been the ones to ID the students accused of stealing.”
“Was Professor Ashbel one of them?” Brigitte asked.
“Not that I remember,” Julia replied. “Why?”
“She’s just been acting weird lately,” Ashbel was one of the fire Guardian teachers who had been hired over the summer; Julia hadn’t dealt with her, since she only taught a few Physical Education classes.
“How so?”
“She’s left the class alone a few times,” Brigitte replied. “And she always seems to be doing something during office hours.” Why a physical education professor needed office hours was a question that Julia—curious and inquisitive as she was—didn’t think she cared to get the answer to.
“She and Professor Paytah have that in common,” Adara remarked. “They always seem to be sneaking around, both of them.”
Julia changed the subject shortly after that, but the clues told her that if she wanted to find something out, the two professors mentioned would be a good start. So she’d formed a plan; one she’d only barely told Dylan about, just in case she needed some kind of cover, in case she got caught. Of course, it’s not really all that much of a plan, Julia thought as she reached the door to the building.
The first target she’d decided on had been Ashbel. The PE professor had the easiest schedule for Julia to track, and she figured that it would be better to be caught by her than by Paytah, who had a reputation for stopping just short of attacking students. Of course, Julia knew, there were any number of other professors who might stumble across her as she tried to catch up to the PE teacher; but Julia thought that in the time just after lunch, it would be a bit easier with most of the professors in class, trying to keep their students attentive.
According to what she’d been able to learn—from Brigitte and Adara, along with her own research—Julia was fairly certain that it was one of Ashbel’s few open periods. She might already be wherever she was when she wasn’t in class—her office, or somewhere within the school, working on one of the relics—but Julia could only hope that between dodging the late bell and moving quickly, she could catch the professor in transit to wherever-it-was she went to do whatever-it-was she did.
Julia moved in the direction of the PE offices, dodging the areas she knew were more likely to have monitors—the few teachers who were free from classes at any given time—watching over them. Her heart raced in her chest, and she felt a little lightheaded as she got closer and closer to where she hoped she’d find Ashbel on her way to somewhere else on the campus. Julia didn’t know what she expected to discover, or what she thought Ashbel was doing; certainly, the woman couldn’t be handling relics in all of her off-hours, could she? But Julia was almost convinced that she would at least see something.
Just as she approached the PE offices on campus, Julia saw Ashbel emerge from the building, and Julia dropped down to her knees behind some of the bushes she’d been walking through. Crap! Julia folded in on herself, trying to find a good place to look through the leafy bushes without being seen.
Ashbel looked around, but didn’t seem particularly suspicious of anything going on around her. Paranoia is definitely more of an air-aligned trait, Julia reminded herself. She shifted slightly, balancing her weight, and peered through the branches of her hiding spot, straining her ears and eyes at the same time to try and catch anything at all.
Ashbel reached into her pocket and pulled out three things that Julia took a few seconds to identify: a pack of cigarettes, an old-fashioned lighter, and an iPhone. The woman spent a few seconds unlocking the phone and checking something, and then shook a cigarette free of the pack and lit it. Julia suppressed a groan; after all her anxiety, and all the risk of skipping a class, she’d hit a dead end. Nothing nefarious was going on, Ashbel just had a habit that teachers were more or less forbidden from indulging on campus.
But just when she would have pulled back to hide in comfort until the professor went back inside, Ashbel started, and brought the phone to her ear. Julia listened hard, intent on catching anything, even if it was just a bit of gossip, something she could exchange for more information that might actually help her.
“Yes,” Ashbel said. Julia leaned forward a little more, careful to balance on her whole foot—not just the balls of her feet, which she knew would make it all the more likely that she’d end up tumbling into the bush and maybe alerting the professor to her existence. “Yes, I got the message. Dimitrios is working out logistics.” Julia’s heart stuttered in her chest; maybe she would get something out of Brigitte’s unintentional lead after all. “We’ll get it to him by tomorrow night at the latest.”
Get what to him? Julia thought it had to be one of the relics—but which one? And who was “him”? She tried to breathe as quietly as possible, tried to force her heart to slow down by sheer will. Her blood was rushing in her ears, making it harder to hear. She called on her air-aligned energy carefully, not wanting to stir the wind, but wanting to call on some of t
he abilities that she had along with that energy. Her hearing sharpened—slightly—and she leaned as far forward as she dared, trying to catch every last syllable.
“We need to discuss the operation—someone is likely to figure it out of we keep doing things this way,” Ashbel was saying. “The changelings are demanding proof of the thefts their kids are accused of, and we can’t hold them off for much longer. Not with the air-aligned Guardians feeling so full of themselves in the council.”
There was a pause. “Of course, we can’t let them! They’ll know in an instant that the duplicates are just that, and people will start asking more questions.” There was another long pause and Julia clenched her teeth, wishing that the professor would mention a name other than the one she already knew was involved in the thefts. Come on! Come on!
When Julia was convinced that the PE teacher was going to finish the call without mentioning anyone, Julia finally heard a name. Not one that she knew, but it was something. “Nolan will have it by tomorrow, so tell him to keep his knickers out of his ass.” Who the hell is Nolan?
Julia felt her center of gravity shift, and struggled to keep herself upright, to keep from tumbling; but even as she tried to correct her position, and lean back to keep her balance fully on her feet, her momentum pushed her forward, and she grabbed at the branches of the bush hiding her. Maybe—if she was lucky—the PE teacher wouldn’t hear, or if Ashbel did, she’d just figure it was an animal scampering through.
But Julia’s luck, which had held for a long time, gave out. Her hands were slick, her palms sweaty from the anxiety of sneaking around and then spying on the professor. Instead of grasping the branches, they slid and slipped, tugging leaves free of the sticks. Julia tried to stay as quiet as possible, but she fell forward into the bushes, undoubtedly making a noise.
She bit back a yelp when one of the branches poked her ribcage hard enough to make her seriously wonder if her uniform blouse was torn. It felt as if she’d been stabbed by a fencing foil, but without the padding to protect her.
