Assassin's Bride

by C. J. Scarlett

  “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 spo
ke 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 and 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.”

  She knew there was a very real chance that Trish’s hesitance was rooted in her own desire to forget these threats, and other things like them, were happening. She couldn’t blame her. Each time something like this happened, the more people turned against shifters at large, not just the terrorists. Alessia thought to that audition that Trish didn’t get because of her status. She wondered how many times that happened and Trish didn’t tell her, for the reasons she obsessed over it now.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” she said but didn’t mean it.

  Trish changed the topic to something else, some Broadway opening that she got tickets to and how she almost slept with the director once while in college, and all sorts of other things. Luckily, Trish was a night owl and a talker. She could keep Alessia entertained and awake for hours with all the stuff she rambled on about. It helped to pull her mind away from things. She didn’t know what bothered her more, the meaning behind the campus-wide silence on the threats or the chance that Trish was a little bit too close to the mark when it came to her opinion on Professor Tekkin.

  #

  The day of the fall festival was the day that Alessia, later in life, would mark as the period of twenty-four hours that changed the course of her life forever. She always knew she would work for shifters’ rights and study shifter culture. That wasn’t news. What did change was how embroiled, how close she would come to the fight, and what she’d one day be willing to do to get the goals they wanted.

  She deci
ded to go to the fall fest. That wasn’t a question. Though many students talked about avoiding it and some professors hinted heavily to the younger undergrads to stay away, she had to go. She was faculty, she was an adult, and this was exactly what she studied to combat. She had to go, whether Tekkin would acknowledge it all or not.

  It was a fine day. The sun was, for once, not shining, which should have been the first sign that something would go a little bit wrong. It wasn’t raining or storming, but the sun was behind a thick cover of gray clouds and the air was chilly enough that she had to put on a denim jacket. She brought sunglasses, even though she wouldn’t need them, and blended in with the crowds that did decide to show up. She moved through the festival, taking in some of the vendors, the student publication tables, the advertisements for the local bands they got to play at the concert later.

  It was boring, more than anything else. It was greasy fair food and a sea of undergraduate students drunk from several beers and wandering around, looking for any deep-fried Oreo they could find.

  Everything about it seemed normal. Until it didn’t.

  The chaos started when someone set off a fire cracker, setting off a sharp blast that got a few jumpy kids screaming. The firecracker, however, wasn’t the real threat. It was a prelude to something else entirely when something actually dangerous went off. Alessia wouldn’t call it a bomb; that made it seem dramatic. A boy did end up in the hospital with some projectile debris lodged in his arm and back, that would never be removed.