“Staying at my place tonight? I get off at two.”
“Umm…”
We hadn’t discussed me moving in again yet. It made sense and seemed inevitable that I’d give up my room at the townhouse shared with my three friends, and to Gabriel’s credit, he hadn’t rushed me to pack up all my shit and bounce.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s silly. I want to ask a bunch of dumb questions like, ‘Are you sure about this?’ but I mean you can’t be more sure after mating yourself to me.”
He smiled. “Really can’t. Everything I got in my place is yours, Sky. I’m not gonna change my mind. Can’t change my mind.” He turned to face me and cupped my chin with one hand. “I really love you, and no matter how much I tease you I’m not really upset that you hog the bathroom for an hour to brush out your hair and put on your eyeshadow. Besides, we have two bathrooms.”
I leaned up on tiptoe for a kiss. “I’ll start sending things over.”
“Awwwwww! How are you two so cute?” a senior bear shifter girl called out in passing.
My cheeks flushed, but Gabriel just grinned wider.
We made our way over to a table. Within minutes of getting our greasy burgers and shakes, I spotted Holly and Ben entering from the other side of the room.
Before I got a hand up to wave them over to join us, Holly rushed over—Barry Allen had nothing on an excited vampire—and grabbed me by the arm, more excited than I’d seen her all year. “Oh my gosh, you’ll never guess what Ben and I were selected for!”
“Um…”
Looking like a kid with free rein in the biggest toy shop ever, Holly bounced on her toes while waiting for Ben to reach us at normal human walking speed. Our bookish pal pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled.
“Hey guys. Did she tell you yet?”
“Not yet,” Gabriel replied.
Ben snickered. “Go ahead, blondie.”
“Alessandro and Tabatha Kosta are here helping research the virus,” Holly blurted.
I stared at her, brows drawn together and lips twisted while I struggled to think if those were names I should have known about. By Holly’s scandalized expression, I should have. Ben looked equally aghast, while Gabe chuckled.
“Sorry, Holls, I’m drawing a blank.”
“They’re only the smartest doctors in the entire world!” Holly exclaimed.
“They’re direct descendants of Hippocrates,” Ben said in a kinder tone, the sort people took when they were explaining something difficult to a dummy.
“Oh…” It took a second, then the weird name clicked. “Oh! He’s the doctor guy in that Assassin’s Creed game I played over the summer. Father of Medicine and the Hippocratic oath, right?”
Holly groaned and dropped into the empty seat across from me. “God, you’re hopeless.”
“That’s mage stuff. I can’t remember all their fancy names,” I said while my mate chortled beside me. He probably knew exactly who’d they been referring to and let me sink. Total foul. “But that’s really cool! Have you met them?”
Holly’s disappointment vanished and her exuberance returned in full force. “Better! Ben and I were picked to work with them in a special group.”
“Us and about five others,” Ben clarified. “Four seniors and a junior from another class.”
“Still, that’s awesome. Congratulations, you two.”
“Yeah, congrats,” Gabriel added. “They haven’t chosen an intern from the school since before I started. From what I hear, people try for years to work with them.”
“All true,” Ben confirmed. He took the last seat and started squirting ketchup on his fries like a heathen. “I had a cousin who applied for ten years before finally giving up. They tend to work alone or with a really small group.”
Holly grinned. “It’s ridiculously exciting.”
“So how does that work?”
“They chose the most advanced alchemists and divided us into three teams dependent on our strengths in the lab. Holly’s working on antivirals.”
“And you?”
“Viral morphology.”
When I stared at Ben, Gabriel offered helpfully, “What the virus does and how it works.”
I grunted. Leave it to everyone to know more about science than I did. Everything I’d learned last year had slipped through my mind like a sieve. “Have you guys been told anything at all about the virus yet that you’re allowed to share?”
“Well…” Ben paused and looked around, then leaned in closer, lowering his voice. “They haven’t said we can’t tell anyone but they did say to be mindful of who we talked to, if you get what I mean.”
“Makes sense. You wouldn’t wanna spread false gossip and get people all panicked.”
“Right. Also don’t want anyone working for the Hidden Court to know what we’re doing.”
“But you two are totally safe,” Holly said. “Honestly, I think the most fascinating thing about this strain of the virus is that it doesn’t affect fae, vampires, or mages. It’s almost like it could have been designed to do this.”
“A designer zombie virus created to infect the most dangerous of the magical races.” Gabriel drummed his fingers on the table. “It’s a smart play.”
“Think so?” Ben asked.
“It’d make sense,” Holly said, fully immersed in her detective role. “A mindless mage is useless, after all. A zombie vampire or fae is no better than a human.”
“You want a lot of damage done in as short a time as possible, you infect a werewolf, or even a werebear,” Gabe finished.
“Exactly.”
“You saw Blaire in action, Sky. Would you say his strength remained unchanged?”
I shuddered. “Definitely unchanged. He hit me like a freight train. Simon says if I—” Ben snorted back a laugh. I laughed too, in spite of it. Soon, all four of us were wiping our eyes and catching our breaths.
“Ugh, I wonder how much shit he took in school for that name. Anyway, he told me if I wasn’t a sylph, the fall probably would have broken my back. Apparently, we’re made for taking falls.”
If anyone had a talent for killing friendly conversation, it was me. Our shared amusement dissipated like smoke and suddenly I had two pairs of concerned eyes on me, while Gabriel glanced away. The guilt shimmered in his aura.
“I’m fine,” I stressed before either of them had a chance to start fussing. “What we need to focus on is—”
My phone beeped, but it wasn’t the only one. The cafeteria filled with the racket of hundreds of phones trilling, chirping, beeping, or whatever other annoying sound people had set up. What I expected to be an alarm for another attack was simply a notification sent on the campus alert system.
“Oh wow. The city opened a website dedicated to zombie attack procedures,” Ben said, the first of us to click through all the links.
“They already have crap like that up, though,” Holly said with a frown.
“For nosferatu and other darklings, maybe, but zombies were sort of an outdated threat. Which is funny considering how many television shows and movies humans dedicate to them.”
“It’s good that the city is being proactive, but…” Gabe shook his head and shoved the last bit of his burger into his mouth.
“Looks like the SBA opened a hotline for reporting possible zombie sightings. They want humans and members of the magical community to report anyone exhibiting classic signs. They’d rather have false alarms than another incident.”
“They’re also establishing first aid stations around the city with the cure on ice.”
“Human cure,” Holly corrected. “Though with the Kostas on the case, I imagine we’ll have a shifter variant soon.”
“Good,” Gabriel slouched back in his chair and dropped one hand to my thigh, blazing warm through my jeans. “None of us will rest easy until we know there’s a cure for us, too, but we’ll still go out on the job despite the risk.”
It really hit me then that Gabriel was in danger
of being infected. Him and all my other shifter friends. Maybe he sensed my mood because Gabe leaned over and kissed my cheek while squeezing my hand beneath the table.
“I’ve got to get going,” he said, following with a second kiss before he stood up. “Congrats again, you two.”
I rose to steal a third kiss, and hoped like hell the Kostas produced a vaccine soon.
10
Girlfriends
After Gabriel left to report in with Simon and Sebastian, I hung out another hour with Holly and Ben then met up with Radha and other fae friends in the recreation center to play a few rounds of Dance Dance Revolution. Now that Julien had graduated, I’d have to find someone else to compete with, which made me a little sad. Then I reminded myself that Julien would want me to carry the torch and continue to have fun, not mope about his absence.
I kicked my four-day-weekend off with a musical start, signed up for an upcoming competitive tournament, and chatted about innocuous glamours we’d picked up over the summer. After four semesters of busting my ass every waking minute, every second, I looked forward to slowing down and taking some time for myself again.
A lot of students called junior year the calm before the storm when everything moved into double-gear during their final two semesters. We had to squeeze in two hundred hours of field work before graduation to qualify for taking our sentinel licensure examination. Junior year was the time when most completed those requirements.
When I left the rec center a sweaty mess after far too many matches, it was just before midnight and I was full of cookies and sangria—pleasantly tipsy, but sober enough to definitely escape the notice of all professors lacking a shifter’s nose. And most of the ones who could smell alcohol breath at twenty paces didn’t give a damn.
I beelined to the townhouse and found Lia sitting on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea. She glanced up and gave me a fragile smile. “Hello, Skylar. Good time at the rec center?”
“Hey.” I blinked. “I thought everyone would be asleep over here.”
“Couldn’t sleep, so I decided to catch up on Game of Thrones.”
“Ah. Guess that’s why you didn’t join us?”
“Uh-huh.”
Liadan wasn’t a party girl by any means, but neither was she a broody shut-in, so alarm bells went off in my brain. Rather than head up to my room, I climbed over the couch and plopped down beside her.
“Right, who has Dany conquered this time?”
“I’ve lost track,” she mumbled.
“Still not sleeping well?”
Pilar had texted me about Lia’s poor sleeping habits. We all worried, but only time would make her open up. Empaths tended to bottle their own traumas, not always the touchy-feely sort that people made them out to be.
“Lots of tension on campus,” she said, and while it wasn’t an overt lie, I had learned to discern when she was deflecting. “It bleeds over.”
“Oh. Okay…but—”
“Tea?”
A bit of glamour produced Lia’s teapot in a cloud of fragrant gold and pink sparkles. She poured a cup for me, and I joined her to watch blood sports, intrigue, and murder. We were two episodes in before I remembered the reason behind my visit.
“It’s all right,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t mean to keep you.”
“You felt that, huh?”
She nodded.
“I’m not in a rush. Just came to get more of my things.”
“You’re leaving for good, aren’t you? Do you need help packing?”
“Only if it won’t bother you.”
“It doesn’t. Besides, two wands are faster than one.” She tapped the pause button and followed me upstairs into the room I’d leased for the year. I already had ideas in mind for who could take over the rent.
For a while, we worked in silence, tapping drawers and swishing wands. Garments flew from hangers into neatly folded stacks. Lia hummed as she worked, taking her sweet time on the delicate porcelain figures I collected and the wall of Funko Pops on my shelves. I had no idea where to put those at Gabriel’s apartment.
I had no idea where to put any of my shit at Gabriel’s place. Was there even room for all of my clothes in his closet?
“Sky?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Just thinking.”
“Hmm…” Lia sounded like a psychiatrist taking notes.
Her silence lingered for a while longer, looming between us like an elephant in the room until I blurted. “Is it too soon? I didn’t even discuss it with you guys. I’m just leaving in the night like a thief.”
Lia set down the pile of books she’d been carrying over and took me by the shoulders, then guided me to the bed. I hadn’t stripped it yet, since I didn’t exactly need my sheets and blankets at Gabe’s place.
“No one thinks you’re abandoning us, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Maybe one worry. Really, I just hope I’m not, you know, rushing into things. Guess it’s too late to hope about that.”
“It’s okay to be nervous, Sky.”
“I’m not nervous. I’m terrified. I mean, I don’t regret it and I wouldn’t take it back, but now there’s nowhere for everything to move but forward. My parents don’t know yet, but they’re going to want a real ceremony and a handfasting they can celebrate—”
“Do you want a ceremony?”
I hesitated. Did I? A few moments passed as I envisioned myself in a pretty gown, lace and silk and flowers, while Gabriel waited at an altar in a fine suit. I really wanted to see him in a suit. The photographs from my parents’ handfasting had been absurdly beautiful. “I do. Is it silly? We’re already married; we don’t need—”
“It is not about what you need. It’s about what you want. If you want a fae celebration with your friends and family, discuss it with Gabriel. Tell him exactly how you feel, what it means to you, and decide together if it’s worth it.”
I didn’t need to ask to know Gabriel’s response. “He’d do it if I asked.”
“Of course he would. He loves you. And wanting a traditional handfasting in the way of our people is only natural. Doesn’t mean you don’t respect his ways or treasure the private moment you shared any less.”
I breathed for what felt like the first time in days. “Thanks, Lia. I swear, you make every decision so easy.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” she said breezily, smile sunny as ever.
But her eyes were still dark and haunted.
“Maybe I can do the same for you. What’s wrong, Lia?”
“A little difficulty sleeping is all. Must be all of the scary things happening lately. Zombies and revived viruses.” She shivered. “Changes the energy on campus and makes it difficult to rest at night.”
“There are tonics at the student medical center.”
“I’ve tried them.”
Holly stepped inside and squinted at us. Half of her makeup was heavily smudged, her mascara smeared around what had probably been a flawless smoky eye. “Could you both not storm around like a pair of knockers in a mine? Some of us would like a little peace.” Despite her words, a faint smile twitched on her lips.
I hadn’t realized we were making so much noise, otherwise Pilar would have busted in to chastise us. “Sorry.”
“Sorry, Holly. Did the date go poorly?” Lia asked.
“Holly had a date?”
“Awful date,” Holly corrected.
“How bad?” I leaned forward, putting on a serious face. “Bad enough to bust out the Lemonscato?”
“Or the whiskey?” Lia asked.
“Both. I need both.”
“Why the hell are you three up at this hour?” Pilar demanded from the doorway. “And so loud at that?”
A brief flash of guilt struck me, until the moment I turned around and got a good look at her. Instead of pajamas and messy bed-hair, Pilar had glammed up for a night on the town.
“I think the real
question is where the hell are you going at one—” I glanced at my watch. “Yeah, one in the morning. Where are you off to?”
Pilar froze. “Nowhere special.”
“You look ready for the runway.”
“I filmed a tutorial video for my YouTube channel.”
“Well we are about to get drunk so put your hair up and join us,” Holly said. “I need all my girls on deck.”
Three shots, two glasses of wine, and an episode of Game of Thrones passed before we got Holly to open up about her abominable date with a sophomore mage on the university’s lacrosse team.
“He wanted me to bite him.”
“Okay? Free sips,” I said.
Pilar wrinkled her nose at me. “Gross, Skylar. Her fangs do not exist for his fetishes.”
“Sorry, sorry. Was just trying to lighten the mood.”
“It’s appreciated.” Holly sighed. “It wasn’t the biting that bothered me, per se, but where he wanted me to bite him.”
“Oh no.” Lia covered her mouth.
“Ew,” Pilar and I echoed.
“Casual sex is all right. I mean, Tinder and I were good friends before I met Victor. I might have granted his wish if it wasn’t the first date. Anyway, he just felt really oily and sleazy, and my intuition said it was time to haul ass.”
“So what happened? Judging by your jacked-up makeup, he didn’t take rejection well.”
“I need a lot more booze to repeat what he called me. Long story short, I ended up walking a couple miles until I could get a cell signal and call an Uber.”
I frowned. “You should have called one of us. I would have come to get you.”
“You and what car?” Holly shot back.
Touché. “Gabe would let me borrow his baby. I think. I’m allowed off-campus now, remember?”
Holly sighed. “Yeah. He would. Perfect Gabe and his perfect abs.” She held out her shot glass, which Lia dutifully refilled. “I really miss Victor’s abs.”
“Maybe…” Pilar chewed her lower lip. Her gloss didn’t budge. “Maybe it’s time to call Victor to ask for a second chance.”
The Plague Doctor: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 3 Page 8
