Next came the chants.
“We are here. We are human.”
Over and over, they moved in a line, masks of their shifting animals, Alessia guessed, covering their faces. Other than that, they were dressed in black and moving like a dark cloud of danger. Several people around her ran, screaming, as the chants continued. It wasn’t in Alessia’s nature to run from anything, so instead, she moved towards the mass, specifically towards a freshman girl who tripped on the ground and was in real danger of being trampled by the oncoming march.
“Up. Let’s go,” Alessia said, rushing over to the girl and grabbing her by the arm, pulling her to her feet and running along with her quickly.
As she turned back to gauge how far away she was from the danger, she spotted him. At least she was pretty sure it was him, at that moment. A man with a large build, made even larger by the black clothes hanging off his body. His mask was that of a dragon, his eyes met hers and she knew them instantly, dark and burning like an ember. They held eye contact for a few seconds, but it was too long for him. He turned away and kept moving. Someone tried to pull her along, screaming for her to follow. Then someone else was right next to her. Next thing she knew, she saw nothing around her vision by black.
Chapter 7
When she woke up, she was lying and her eyes were still closed. She was afraid to open them, afraid of what pain would come with letting her vision in and the light along with it. She’d been hit in the head, she knew that much from the dull ache at the back of her skull. So she resisted opening her eyes. The other advantage to this wasn’t having any idea where she was. Instead of a torture chamber or prison cell, she could imagine she somehow found her way back into her apartment, or in her mother’s living room. It didn’t smell like either of those places, but while her eyes were still closed to the truth of the world, she could pretend.
She heard noises around her, people moving, people talking.
“We have no idea that she knows who you are,” a man said. “This was completely idiotic.”
“I say we just drop her out on the street before she wakes up.”
“What, so she can get raped?” That was a voice she knew.
“The soft spot is touching, Drake, but we have bigger things to think about than one chick on a college campus. Shit like that happens all the time.”
She kept her eyes closed; if they didn’t know she could hear them, then she had power here. And she was safe. The less she knew, the better off she would be in their eyes.
“I’m not dumping her out on the street,” he said. “When she wakes, we just put a blindfold on her and take her back to somewhere on campus.”
“I bet you’re really starting to rethink that whole no violence policy, eh?”
She heard a scuffle, someone’s fist hit someone else, the loud smack of flesh on flesh. Alessia knew it from the days where she watched as shifters were attacked at school.
“How’s that for no violence?”
She stayed still while others around the group tried to calm each other. She heard more scuffling feet, more shouts, and did everything she could in her power not to flinch and give herself away. She went over what she learned in the past minute in her head. Dr. Tekkin was one of the people in the mask. They’d kidnapped her because she recognized him. They were trying to decide what to do with her. The things she didn’t know: whether they’d be willing to kill her, who they were, how many other people were hurt or attacked, how long she’d been out. It was a lot of dangerous things to not know. But there was no way she would gather facts by playing possum for hours.
She pretended to stir from the noise, making a show of it to get their attention. It worked. The scuffling stopped and she dared to open her eyes for the first time. She was met with darkness, musty air, and the people who marched at the festival, this time unmasked. They all looked at her, but her eyes sought out the one familiar pair she knew, Dr. Tekkin’s. He was looking for her as well; they met somewhere in the middle. For once, his eyes didn’t look so sure and so intelligent and so arrogant. They looked scared, they looked worried. They made him look far younger than he did in class, revealing his true age. She often forgot he was a man of just thirty-three with the way he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, or pretended he did.
“You know her?” someone asked him, jerking his head to Alessia.
“Yes,” he said, his voice husky.
“Who is she?”
“You don’t get to know that.”
Someone grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back, slamming him against the wall, hard. He was a big man but even he could be taken off guard.
“This ain’t a game, Tekkin,” the man said. “Who do you want to protect, your own kind or her?”
“She’s a student.”
“Don’t look like a student.”
“A grad student.”
She wanted to speak up, she hated the helpless feeling of watching people decide her fate right in front of her, like her parents divorcing. She had no say in the matter and it pushed on her anxiety. If she spoke, she knew they’d snap, and she wasn’t sure that Dr. Tekkin could protect her. He didn’t seem to be a leader here. He may not have the power to protect her. The best way forward was to assume he couldn’t, that she was a dangling fish and he was helpless to keep her the sharks from swallowing her.
“We don’t hurt people,” he said, shoving back the man who had him pressed against the wall. “We decided that long ago.”
“One kid already ended up in the hospital, why not keep it going?”
“Why don’t we ask her what she wants?”
Someone else came forward and Alessia knew immediately this woman was in charge. She wasn’t large, she wasn’t tall, but her presence was scary, intoxicating. She couldn’t take her eyes off her and she knew immediately, she didn’t want to be on this woman’s bad side. She stepped forward with such authority, yet Alessia found it hard to look the woman in the eye.
“I—um,” she said, her throat dryer than she realized as it cracked under the weight of using her own voice. “Where am I?”
“Classified.”
“Fangs in, Kyle.”
“Great, now she knows my name.”
“She’s not a threat.”
Dr. Tekkin stepped forward, speaking now with a little more authority.
“She’s the teaching fellow in my class; her PhD program is in shifter studies. She’s an ally,” he said.
It didn’t seem to settle anyone, but it got a smile out of the scary woman. She warmed up at that.
“We can always use friends.”
She offered Alessia her hand and she wasn’t sure if she should take it, afraid of one last trap awaiting her. But Dr. Tekkin seemed earnest. Even if he couldn’t protect her, he would still try; that much she was sure of. She took the woman’s hand and allowed herself to be pulled to stand. Her head spun, just a little bit, from the effort and she fought to get the colorful dots out of her eyes and not pass right back out again. The dull ache in her head turned into a full-fledged pounding now that she was standing and moving. She tried not to sway on the spot, focusing on her balance.
“There, no harm, no foul,” the woman said. “We can all be adults about this and civil.”
Alessia was perfectly ready to agree to those terms, though she wasn’t sure her companions were. Dr. Tekkin still seemed on edge and hovered closer to her. The woman took a breath and sighed.
“I think this child is more scared than anything else,” she said. “And while you may not trust motives, Kyle, trust fear. The instinct to keep oneself alive is incredibly strong. So I will trust that she won’t do anything stupid. She wants to preserve herself. Tekkin seems to trust her well enough. I’m more than willing to let that be enough—”
“But, ma’am—”
“Enough. Matter closed. Get her out of here; she’ll stay quiet,” she said. “Dr. Tekkin, she’s your responsibility.
Everyone else, back to the boardroom.”
The room cleared out. The angry one, Kyle, stayed a few seconds longer than everyone else. His nostrils flared as he took in breaths like he was getting up on his hind legs to get ready for a fight. But eventually turned away with a glare and marched out, slamming the door behind him.
She was left alone with Dr. Tekkin who, as per usual, didn’t look happy. He let out a breath of relief, dropping to sit on a milk crate. When he opened his eyes, it wasn’t relief on his face. He scowled in the kind of way a parent might at a child. She felt herself bristle at that. He was only older than her by a few years, even if he wanted the world to think him so much wiser and older with the speckling of gray hair in his stubble. The lines in his face had less to do with years of world wariness and more to do with how many hours a day he spent frowning at the world.
“What the hell were you doing?” he asked.
“What the hell was I doing?”
She seemed to have found the voice she lost in the room moments ago, feeling a fire kick up in her belly.
“We found you on the ground. Do you know how many bruises you’ve already got working over your body?”
“Of course I do. I can feel them.”
“What the hell were you doing?” she asked. “Is this why you didn’t bring up the protests in class? Because you dropped the flyers yourself.”
“You’re going free right now under the good graces that Veronica thinks you will drop all of this, which you will,” he said, moving to stand. “The innocent, scared act worked well, but I’m not above doing what I must to protect my friends.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m telling you to drop it. You were the only one hurt today. It was a demonstration, not an attack.”
“Well, you managed to terrify a lot of people, no matter what you intended.”
He sighed and rubbed at the deep lines in his forehead. He paced for a minute. “Let’s just get you out of here and back to your apartment.”
“You going to blindfold me or roofie me?”
“We move our meeting spots every month. You knowing about this one is hardly dangerous.”
When she crossed her arms and didn’t move, he gripped at the bicep of her right arm and pulled. She wasn’t prepared and her legs stumbled forward, falling into his chest. It was hard as a rock beneath her splayed fingers. She gulped, staring at the black t-shirt that hid the strong muscle beneath. She looked up at him but he was already turning away, pulling her down the hallway. She followed after, her hands feeling cold where they’d moved away from the warmth of his chest. The phantom shape of his pectoral muscles was still there, lingering like a buzz at the very tips of her fingers. She heard once that women had more nerve endings in their hands and fingers than men did. She was willing to believe it right now.
They walked out into the night air together. She didn’t recognize her surroundings. It was somewhere on campus. She could tell that much from the red brick building nearby that read the name of some dorm. Good to know shifter anarchists chose a meeting place so close to the residential home of students. She rolled her eyes.
Now that they were out in the open, he let go of her arm but stayed close to her, not trusting her not to run off completely. Not that it mattered at this point. But she could feel him bristling with energy just behind her, his eyes likely trained on her as she moved. They started to move towards areas where more students gathered and she wondered if they’d notice. But he put distance between them and if anything, it made her feel even more uneasy. He tried to make their interaction look casual, normal, which made it that much more obvious that something was wrong with the whole thing. She didn’t necessarily feel like she was in danger. She felt safer than she’d been moments ago, locked up in that cell, but she didn’t exactly feel right other.
She led the way back to her apartment and considered, for a brief second, leading him to a completely different part of campus, unsure of whether or not she wanted to let him know exactly where she lived. But she figured he’d have ways of finding that out no matter what. She was in grad student housing. She’d be easy to locate on a register. So she marched to her home, thinking about her bed and blanket, and getting a long, hot shower to burn off all the grime and the places where she’d likely been touched by strangers as they carried her to their little clubhouse.
“This is me,” she said when they got outside the apartment building.
“I don’t need to tell you that all this goes away. You forget it, I forget it. We go to class on Monday like everything is fine,” he said.
“You know you refusing to bring up the demonstrations in class doesn’t exactly make you seem innocent,” she said. “I’m not the only one who can see it. The students asked an awful lot about it in last week’s study session.”
“I told you to knock it off with the study sessions.”
“You can’t control what students do outside of class. We meet in a public forum to talk about the material,” she said. “You can’t control every single part of everything. You don’t own the information you’re imparting on your students in class. You’re just the messenger. You feel like you have ownership, whatever, but you don’t.”
With that, she turned and walked into the building, hearing the door click behind her as the auto lock kicked in, keeping him out and cutting whatever lecture he had prepared for her short.
Chapter 8
Despite the shower and the comforts of home, she didn’t sleep that night. At least not well. She tossed and turned in her bed. She didn’t dream but every time she looked at the clock, the time had moved a little bit farther into the night and closer to morning. She was thankful that tomorrow was Sunday and she had nothing to be awake for. She had papers to write and worksheets to grade from Tekkin’s class and she wasn’t sure she even had the energy to get that done, but she had to try.
When the sun finally brightened the edges of her window that peaked through her curtains, she got up, feeling the floor beneath her feet and getting an overwhelming sense of gratitude that she was there, that she was safe, and that she had this place to hide away. She made coffee and turned on the TV which, of course, was nothing but the demonstration across all the news channels. She settled for the obnoxious sound of some sitcom laugh track instead while she picked through her fridge for something to eat and tried to pretend that she felt normal.
She wanted to call Trish; she needed someone to talk to about all this. But Trish was too close and too far away at the same time. Her thoughts of shifter rights and shifter protests were skewed, shaped by fear and desire for equality at the same time. Not to mention, she was across the country, practically in a different world. The next person who came to mind was Erik. She didn’t exactly want to grovel to him with her messy soup of feelings on what happened yesterday, nor did she want to endanger the veiled threat from the shifter group that her safety was in exchange for her silence. She had no doubt they would be watching her now. And Erik wasn’t one to stay quiet about absolutely anything that got him riled up.
Still, he was the only other friend she had. Which was a depressing thought in and of itself; she really needed to get out more on campus. But she had to talk to someone.
You doing anything today? She fired off a text to him.
She expected him to be asleep until noon at least; he seemed the type to bargain for any sort of shut eye that he could or work off a hangover. But a few seconds later, her phone dinged. Not a thing. Got something in mind?
I just need to decompress a little.
Brunch?
She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. She quickly typed out a response in the affirmative and sent it off to him. He sent her back a location and told her to meet him there in an hour. She instantly felt better, the idea of getting out of her apartment, which was becoming a different type of prison all on itself. She threw on some clothes and makeup and felt a little lighter as she downed the rest of h
er coffee and then followed it up with mouthwash to get the bitter smell out of her mouth. She threw on a light jacket and stepped outside.
The day was still overcast as it had been yesterday. That proved to be a slight damper on her mood, but she headed along campus regardless. The place he’d texted her was just in town, called Fran’s. It was a big brunch spot for the hungover and drunkenly disenfranchised of the college campus. As she got closer, she could smell why. It wafted down the street with the smell of frying bacon and the sweetness of powdered sugar, likely going over pancakes and French toast. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten anything since a snack at the festival yesterday before she’d been knocked unconscious and taken captive.
Right. That happened. It sounded like something warzone journalists talked about with such nonchalance, not something a twenty-five-year-old graduate student on her way to brunch thought about. If her mother knew, she’d be petrified. If her father found out, she’d never hear the end of how dangerous shifters were and how they all needed to be banned from schooling and public places.
She spotted Erik waiting outside for her. He looked a little worse for wear as well. She imagined he had to be if he was up this early on a Sunday. She knew why she was; she wondered what had him so sleepless.
“I am fucking starving,” he said. “I’m ready to eat the goddamn golden calf.”
She snorted as she stepped into the restaurant under his arm, which held the door open for her. The smells inside were even more tempting as coffee mixed in with the smell of grease and sugar.
“There’s something about brunch,” he said. “That makes all of the food taste better.”
“Are you high?”
“No. Just think about it. You can have lunch, you can have breakfast, you can do whatever. Throw alcohol in there and it’s perfect.”
She rolled her eyes. “Definitely high.”
He stuck his tongue out and held the chair out for her as they were shown to their seats by the hostess.
“Are you a breakfast brunch person or a lunch brunch person?” Erik asked, opening the menu.
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