Outside these safe walls, it was minus thirty degrees Celsius. On the gray days when clouds filtered the sun, you huddled in your jacket and hustled from building to building. But on a day like today, you would turn your face to the sun, not realizing the wind was killing your flesh. During morning announcements, Christian’s incorporeal voice had warned these temperatures froze exposed skin in less than twenty minutes.
She took quiet joy from the fact that even superheroes feared the weather. Like her, the students arrived at class pink-cheeked and huffing on their fingers. Mortal, after all. Except...was Carmina out in that cold? The relentless ticking of the clock weighed on Sadie like the beating of a heart hidden under the floorboards in a Poe story.
The door to the classroom creaked behind her. She turned to see Carmina, standing in front of the blackboard, which was still a clean slate except for Pippa’s handwriting.
A gasp came out of the fifth graders.
She felt her jaw drop. It couldn’t be. She blinked, but the apparition wouldn’t go away.
Carmina was wearing jeans and a pink turtleneck. Sadie’s throat closed. It wasn’t casual Friday. Every eye turned from Carmina to her. Suddenly, they weren’t students, but a sea of plaid skirts and school ties. The dress code was sacred. The dress code must be enforced.
She willed her voice not to shake. “Miss Burana.” Other teachers used the students’ last names when they were serious. And Sadie was serious.
Carmina lifted her chin and folded her arms in exaggerated belligerence, but the color drained from her cheeks.
“Miss Burana, are you sick?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw heads bend together over the aisles between desks.
Carmina shook her head.
“Do you have a hall pass from the principal?”
Carmina shook her head.
“Then why have you shown up for class ten minutes before it’s over?” She felt like an enormous bitch but forced the cutting tone anyway. “And where is your uniform?”
“I don’t like it.” Carmina’s Eastern European accent made her sound like a diva supermodel.
And Sadie understood.
If you give up,
Carmina was telling her,
why shouldn’t I?
She knew she was at a turning point. Carmina was giving her the chance to change. She knew what she had to do. Everyone in the room did. She had to discipline her favorite student in public. If she did, she’d be an authority figure. If she didn’t, the kids would never obey her.
But why did it have to be Carmina? A long moment passed. A moment of opportunity. Sadie just let it go.
She saw her failure reflected in Carmina’s face before the girl turned away.
She took a deep breath. Her voice went soft. “You’ve broken the rules. I’m...”
The air in the room grew dense. The students held their breaths, their backs stiffened.
“I’m giving you a demerit.” When the words were out, her spirit lifted. Strength coursed through her. “And if you’re late or improperly dressed again, I’ll give you another one.”
A groan went up from some of the students—the ones who lived in Strange Hall. Carmina had just cost them a point in the inter-house competition.
“Yes, Miss Strange,” Carmina said, her lips twitching up.
“Go to the principal’s office.”
Carmina obeyed.
Quit trying to control your classroom and just control your classroom, Pippa had told her. Sadie had done something teacherly, and it had worked out. She turned to the class, vibrating with energy. She was bored of sitting here with her books and making the kids be quiet. The students seemed smaller. Maybe, like Carmina, they had been waiting for her to do something.
She couldn’t teach them anything, but maybe they could do something to fill the time. She had nothing to lose. She turned to the blackboard. Suddenly, the blank space offended her. She wrote a question on it. Her handwriting looked like scribbles compared to Pippa’s flawless calligraphy.
She raised the chalk brush and, before she could change her mind, wiped it through Pippa’s words.
She inhaled slowly, but it wasn’t the end of the world. No one would ever forget Pippa, after all.
“What’s the name of the raven?” She recognized Henry’s British accent and turned to see him hanging off the side of his chair in an effort to read the question. “Is it homework?”
“You can ignore it. You have an A,” she said.
Henry bit his lip. In her peripheral vision, she saw him pretend not to write it down in his notebook. The other students did the same, looking at each other with unspoken questions.
The shrill bell signaling the end of period sounded and the students cleared out in a frenzy of activity.
“Sterling.” Sadie reached for him as he passed. “How are you?”
She hadn’t spoken to him in any personal way since the holidays. Every time she seemed to get close, he flitted off like he was avoiding her. No wonder, since the incident where she’d traumatized him with the Amazon delivery of the atlas.
Sterling’s gray eyes narrowed malevolently. “You shouldn’t be mean to Carmina.” He looked down at her hand on his shoulder with burning intensity. Sadie snatched it away as quickly as she could.
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Gray dumped his elbows on the stack of seventh grade history of alchemy papers and rubbed his temples. So help him, if he had to read one more word about Isaac Newton or Madame Curie...He seriously considered hitting his head on the solid wood of the desk that had belonged to a long line of teachers before him.
Not even a killer migraine would get his mind off her.
The sun streaming in the bank of windows warmed the room and worsened the sharp smell of the acids the tenth graders had wasted in their less-than-successful transmogrifications.
He leaned back in the ancient swivel chair and propped his feet on the desk. Lately, he couldn’t leave his apartment without seeing her. Dining Hall. Staff meetings. The aquatic center. Hmm, was her swimsuit a one-piece or a little bikini...
But he never saw her when people weren’t around. So he could never talk to her.
She never worked in her classroom alone. She spent a lot of time in her apartment by herself. The whole campus knew about her plan to leave at the end of term—almost as if she’d spread the rumor herself. If she still believed she was in danger from her accidents, those were good precautions.
He just wanted to talk. During the holidays, they’d spent most of their time together. Talking. Laughing. The raging hot sex was a close second.
Very close.
A photo finish, almost.
Although the two weren’t mutually exclusive, come to think of it. He, personally, could manage both at once quite easily.
They’d almost had a conversation a week ago, when he’d turned a corner by the supply closet in the Lost Arts Building. She’d been walking toward him, wearing her little black suit and pressing a binder to her chest. No one else in sight.
He’d come within two steps of colliding into her. His mind had been on something else. Her.
She’d looked up at him with startled brown eyes, as if she’d been thinking about something else, too. When she saw him, she got a deer-in-the-headlights kind of look, like she wouldn’t check for oncoming traffic when she bolted away from him.
But she didn’t bolt. She just stood there looking at him.
Every one of the ten thousand things he wanted to tell her went out of his brain when he saw her standing in front of him.
“Gray.” Her tentative voice had made his chest ache. “I want to ask you something. What’s your real na—”
Odd-rhythmed footsteps had echoed down the hall.
Step-thunk
.
Step-thunk
. Parker Klark’s crutches. Gray’s instinct had taken over.
He’d grabbed her by the arm, opened the door to the supply closet, shoved her in, closed the door, and walked away.
Twenty years of training in crisis situations. Magical damn powers. And his response? He threw Sadie in a broom closet.
He ended up dragging Klark to the fake Irish pub in Blanche Neige and drinking enough cheap beer to drown a colony of rats.
A week later, leaning back in his chair in the alchemy lab, Gray still felt like hell. And not from the beer.
The bell rang. He barely had time to get his feet off the desk before the kid they called Henry Nine burst into the classroom, talking to Nikkos and a girl. “It doesn’t have a name.” His ten-year-old voice boomed with authority.
Iphigenia’s heads bobbed along, one on either side of Nikkos’s ears as the kids headed to the cupboards to retrieve the equipment for their experiments. “When the guy asks its name,” Nikkos said, “it says the same thing it always says.”
Shakti piped up. “I don’t find this poem frightening.”
Frightening? He opened his mouth to ask them what they were talking about, but the arrival of a gaggle of girls interrupted.
“Let’s go to the library after class.” Dot, the acknowledged leader of the Junior Coven, was surrounded by bobble-heads nodding. “And find out about the guy who wrote it.”
More students poured into the lab, hurrying to get their workstations set up. Their voices turned to indistinct mumbles as they clanked the delicate Erlenmeyer flasks and desiccators needed for today’s experiment, causing him near-physical pain.
“Mr. Sun,” Gray said. “Those tongs are for crucible lids only, not for pulling Anita’s hair.”
Anita whirled on Lee Sun, her eyes glowing neon red. “I’ll hex you into next week.”
“No evil eyes in my lab,” Gray said. “There’s delicate equipment in here. Is everyone set up?”
They weren’t. He started writing on the board anyway.
He hadn’t finished when the medieval public address system crackled to life for afternoon announcements. After ear-splitting feedback that made the hydra burst out of Nikkos’s backpack in a wing-flapping frenzy, Cross’s voice filled the room. “Miss Strange’s classes will be taught by Ms. Yaga for the next three days due to an unfortunate accident...”
With a snap, the chalk in Gray’s hand broke.
Helping out with Jewel Jones’s day program was supposed to ease Sadie back into teaching after her three-day quarantine. But kindergarten-age Metas made Sadie’s fifth graders look like an angel choir. They weren’t malicious or anything. Just...needy.
But for now, they were all mostly occupied, busy with their craft project. The noise level had lowered to a dull roar. They were divided into teams of two or three, taking turns lying on giant pieces of paper on the cafeteria floor, between the tables, making tracings of each other that they would decorate later.
With the kids distracted, it seemed a perfect time to approach Jewel again about returning Pippa’s letter. Currently, Jewel was bent at the waist, leaning over to inspect the work of one of the teams. She was smiling down at them; the boys were smiling up at her. All smiles, all around.
It made a bitter taste rise in Sadie’s throat. An inexplicable tension under her ribs warned her of something off. Something not right. She couldn’t help but remember the way that Jewel had nearly stolen the letter out of her hand, just as she’d been about to search it for clues.
And Jewel had been avoiding her since their coffee weeks ago. It was definitely far past time for her to give Pippa’s letter back. An uncomfortable sensation crept over her, an unease at the idea that this Meta witch was keeping something from her. Not just the physical object of the letter, but something else, some secret...
Putting on an air of confidence she didn’t quite feel, she caught Jewel’s eye. An ice-blue gaze narrowed on her, but when Sadie motioned her over, Jewel came.
“So, Miss Jones,” she said, conscious of using her last name in case the children were listening. “I was wondering about my aunt’s letter, if I could—”
“One moment,” Jewel said.
She held up one long, slim finger. A silver ring glinted under the fluorescent cafeteria lights. That shining spark was truly lovely. Sadie just wanted to look at it forever. She would give up blinking just to savor every second of that striking twinkle. She knew she was supposed to be helping Jewel look after her class, but that seemed far less important than watching the light play off the ring. Or the pressure building in her ears.
Suddenly, an intense tiredness came over her, like a curtain being drawn. A pleasant drowsy weight on her mind, compressing all thought, clearing the way for sleep.
“Miss Strange!” screamed a soprano voice.
She blinked into full awareness, instinctively scanning for Jewel, but finding no one taller than her waist. Shit, her ears had popped. Had Jewel just mojo’ed her and run away?
She bit back a string of inventive curses, and concentrated on the voice that had seemed to come from the area of her hip. A six-year-old boy in a plaid shirt looked up at her with expectation in his eyes. He was one of four kids tugging at her skirt.
“Denny ripped my paper,” a girl in a bubble-gum pink dress complained, her lower lip fat and trembling.
“Miss Strange,” whispered a boy with crossed legs.
“I hafta have some crayons.” Another boy thrust out a grubby hand.
The last girl just seemed to like to hold onto skirts. She held her fist to her mouth, trying not to suck her thumb.
At Sadie’s feet, a chubby girl lay on the floor on a wide sheet of newsprint, her partner tracing around her body with a fat purple crayon. His pink tongue stuck out of his mouth in concentration.
And Jewel was nowhere. I volunteered to help her with her senior kindergarten class, not teach it, dammit.
She took a deep breath. She could handle this. They were just six-year-olds.
“Do you want to start all over again with a new piece of paper, or should I put some tape on the rip Denny made?” she asked Bubblegum Girl.
She sucked her lip a second. “Tape.”
“Okay, I’ll be over in a minute,” Sadie told her.
“I hafta have some crayons.” The demanding hand came out.
“Wait your turn, Josiah.” She turned to Cross-legged Boy.
“I hafta have some crayons,” Josiah shouted.