Chapter Eight
I had gone over to Keller’s table to tell him off. That had failed miserably. Worse, I was about to get terrible news.
After Cale wandered away, red-faced, I turned back to Keller with my arms folded. I might be all shy in class, but not now. I was going to stand up for myself.
“Oh, right, you wanted to know what I wanted,” Keller said quietly. “I wanted you to know that I’m your new tutor.”
Oh, no way!
Out loud to him I said, “Don’t you have better things to do? Like, sharpen knives or something?”
Keller laughed. “No, and I’m very good at what I do,” he said. “And we have a lot of classes together, so the President thought I could help.”
“I don’t like it,” I informed him.
Keller rose more gracefully than I would have thought possible, and walked over to me. “What you like isn’t the most important thing at the moment. The most important thing is that you be properly trained. I am the best one to help you with that,” he said. He was so close I could see the slight sprinkling of freckles over his nose. I wondered if he used Chapstick, then chided myself for looking at his lips.
“Fine,” I said. “When do we start?”
“Before your date tomorrow,” he said. “In the library. I’ll fit you in before my knife sharpening.” He walked away without another word.
It was bad enough to have Keller as my tutor, but before breakfast? I didn’t like getting up early; I never had. At the normal college I had planned to attend, I hadn’t signed up for any classes that started before noon. The President hadn’t acted like she was punishing me when she decided to let me stay at a paranormal school when I couldn’t do anything paranormal, but she definitely was.
I wandered back to my friends and finished dinner in silence. It was a long time before I could sleep that night. The homework was already piling up. The professors thought that assigning three chapters of reading per class was normal. I wondered if they knew eighteen-year-olds needed sleep too. I gave up halfway through and went to bed more frustrated than when I’d gotten up that morning. I was still going to meet Cale, but I was pretty sure Camilla might try to kill me because of it.
Before I left for the library the next morning I put on a sweater and jeans, wrapped a light blue scarf around my neck, and brushed my hair out.
Outside, the entire campus was empty. There was a thin mist drifting over everything.
The library building was just as ultramodern as all the others. It was four stories high, and through the long, glass-paneled windows I could see stacks and stacks of books on every floor.
The big metal doors opened silently, and I noticed that the first floor was filled with long, dark, wooden tables surrounded by chairs upholstered with black leather. Each table was illuminated, but I couldn’t see where the light was coming from.
Sitting in the middle of it all was Keller, reading a book. He looked quiet and peaceful. It was the first time I had seen him look unguarded. Without the usual furrowed brow, his face was smooth and concentrated.
Not wanting to be caught staring, I walked into the open.
Without looking up from his book, which I could see was titled Adventures of the First Fire Werewolves, he said, “You were staring at me.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said. “I just got here.”
He closed his book and left it on his lap, sitting back and clasping his hands behind his head. “You aren’t a very good liar. Don’t worry. This is supposed to help you.”
I was surprised. Keller hadn’t seemed like the warm and cuddly type, but he was trying to be nice. “You sound like my brother,” I said.
“Wonderful,” Keller muttered.
When I raised my eyebrows he said, “Are you close?”
“Yeah,” I said. I felt a pang when I thought about Ricky. Hopefully I could write to him this weekend. Meanwhile, I ignored Keller’s accusation that I was lying. There was something that pulled me towards Keller, and the more I resisted the stronger it became.
I folded my arms over my chest and glared at him. “So, what are we doing here?”
“You should sit,” he said, indicating the chair opposite him.
Reluctantly, I sat.
Keller leaned forward in his chair. “So, what do you know about paranormals?” he asked. “What has your family told you?”
I shifted. “I don’t know much,” I said.
“Your family didn’t tell you anything?” he asked.
“No,” I said, glaring at the floor.
Somehow, Keller knew enough not to press. “Alright, here’s what you should know,” he began.
“Wait,” I said. “I thought you were going to help me with magic. I’m supposed to be able to do magic.” Maybe if I tell enough people, I thought, it will be true.
He shook his head. “You have to understand the history first.”
“No,” I said. “Just tell me how to do spells and I’ll do it.”
“You’re rash and impulsive. Your life will depend on rational thinking.” He touched his fingertip to his temple. “The demons are getting stronger. We all need to know how to fight, not just blindly walk into trouble. That will get you killed, particularly with the fragmenting of the paranormals.”
“Exactly,” I said, frustrated. “I need to know how to fight. And did you see me yesterday? I couldn’t even handle seeing a stupid picture!” I didn’t want to think about how embarrassed I was over that.
He waved it off. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does,” I said. “I need to know the magic now.”
“This is the way to understand it,” he said jabbing his finger at the books around us. “You’re too stubborn.” That was something my mom had told me, too. Being reminded of her softened my resistance just enough. Looking at Keller’s set jaw and flared nostrils, I knew I wasn’t going to win this argument. At least not today.
I lifted a shoulder. “Fine,” I said. “Tell me the history.”
He eyed me for a second, waiting for me to resist. For the next hour he gave a brief history of paranormals and demons. He focused on demon power. He talked about how the demons’ power grew: basically, when enough of them combined with hellhounds and attacked, their power increased. One demon or hellhound was never as dangerous as many. And nothing was ever as dangerous as the demons and hellhounds together.
Eventually I asked why the demons cared about the paranormals. Why couldn’t we all just co-exist?
The demons, he said, view the paranormals as lesser. They think the paranormals have to be gotten rid of because they have things like schools and families; they don’t just hunger for power. The demons will get rid of all the paranormals if they can.
By the end of the hour my head was spinning. I now had an extra class to take notes in and study for.
“Are you going to give me a test too?” I asked as we walked out of the library together.
“No,” said Keller. “I have better things to do with my time.” And with that he walked off to join a group of fallen angels. But just before he reached them he turned around. “Have a great breakfast with Cale.”
With a gasp I remembered Cale and breakfast. I was late. I raced off to the dining hall, ignoring Keller’s grin as I hurried past him. As I ran I wondered what good it did me to have a tutor who didn’t like me.
Since Cale and I were meeting early, the place was almost empty. Having found out who Cale’s girlfriend was, I wondered if Cale had suggested the early breakfast time to avoid running into her. If I were dating Camilla Van Rothson, I’d probably do everything I could to make sure she didn’t find out about my having breakfast with other girls too, even if it was in a completely platonic way.
Cale was already waiting for me at a table by the windows. I got my food and joined him, and he stood up and pulled my chair out for me. This was impressive; most guys would have just sort of nodded and then kept shoveling food into their mouths. Cale wore a dark blue
sweater, and his red hair had its usual windblown look. I hoped that my own brown hair didn’t look that tousled. Despite the early hour, there were no signs of tiredness around his blue eyes.
“How’s it going?” he asked, smiling at me.
“Alright,” I said, sliding into a seat across from him.
He laughed. “It will get easier. I promise. I had a really hard time my first couple of weeks too.”
“Yeah, but at least you knew what you were,” I pointed out. “It’s not like you ended up standing in front of the entire school and looking like a total idiot.”
“You’ll get there,” he said. “Don’t even worry about it.”
“Yeah,” I said out loud; I didn’t want him to know just how worried I was inside. It was easy for everyone who already had a place at school to tell me not to worry, but the truth was that no one understood what it meant to feel like they didn’t belong. Plus, Cale was the sort of person to whom everything came easily. I was just the opposite.
“Sorry I didn’t tell you about Camilla,” he said.
I shook pepper onto my eggs before I answered. “That’s okay.” What else could I say? Hey Cale, why are you dating an evil lunatic? That probably wouldn’t sound good.
“She’s really nice,” he went on. “We met last year.”
“Hmm, I’m sure she is,” I said. Clearly he didn’t know that Camilla and I had already sort of met and that she’d been anything but nice to me.
“You have a class with her, right?” Cale prompted.
“Right,” I said. “The History of Hellhounds and Demons since 1700.”
“With Zervos,” said Cale knowingly. “That guy is crazy. He’s a vamp, so he only likes other vampires.”
“He seemed to like the pixies alright,” I pointed out, thinking back to how he had called on Camilla while he was just irritated when Lough tried to talk, and ignored Lisabelle completely.
Cale shrugged. “Yeah, a lot of professors and students who grew up in the paranormal world think there’s a pretty strict hierarchy here.”
“It felt like that,” I told him. “But Cale, we didn’t grow up around other paranormals.”
“At least not knowingly,” he said, smiling.
“Right, so why is there a paranormal hierarchy?” I asked. I had never wanted to flirt with Cale. Now that I knew his girlfriend was Camilla, I didn’t even want it to look like I was flirting with him. Asking him about the history of paranormals seemed like a good way to avoid flirting.
Cale frowned. “You shouldn’t worry about it too much, and I guess there’s no reason you should just come here and automatically know the hierarchy,” he said, looking around as the dining hall started to fill up. “But it goes by dorms.”
“Right,” I said, “but why?”
“The Cruor, Aurum, and Volans dorms were here second. Astra was here before any of them. Somehow they think that makes them more important. It was elementals who founded the school, but since they’re gone…. They don’t matter now.”
Cale took a couple bites of toast, then continued. “Everyone looks down on Airlee Dorm, since it’s made up of more than one type of paranormal and includes darkness mages when there are any here. Plus, dream giving isn’t exactly a legitimate skill.”
“Lough seems to think it is,” I said.
“I mean, it’s not bad,” said Cale, “but it’s not as useful as being a vampire, let’s say.”
“I don’t know much about any of them,” I admitted.
“I didn’t either when I first got here, but you’ll learn stuff in class,” said Cale. “That’s the first thing your Intro to Para Studies should start with after all the introductory crap gets out of the way. Your professor is going to explain about all the different types of paranormals.”
“That’s what they said yesterday,” I confirmed, nodding my head.
“Who do you have for the class?” asked Cale.
“Umm, let me look.” I still didn’t have my schedule anywhere near memorized. I pulled out the folded piece of paper and scanned down the list.
“Professor Korba,” I said, reading it off. I remembered the tiny man yesterday who had stood at the front of our lecture hall. “He seemed nice.”
“He is,” said Cale. “He’s a pixie. Very old and well-respected.”
It made sense that he was a pixie given how small and delicate he had looked. Of course, Cale was also a pixie and he looked anything but small and delicate. His skin only looked green if I tried very hard to see it. It was more common for pixies to be small like Korba than larger like Cale.
“Are you going to tell me how you ended up here, and why you were one of the ones that came to get me?” I asked. I’d been desperate to know since I’d first seen him at Public, and he still hadn’t told me.
Cale smiled. “There’s really not much to tell,” he said. “I had started feeling sick, and my skin color had started to change a little. Finally my dad told me we were pixies. He said I couldn’t go to Stanford because I had to come here. I told him I couldn’t come here because I hadn’t applied, and he laughed for a week. He was really relaxed about the whole thing. I freaked out. I wasn’t going to be able to play football any more.”
I smiled. “Well, you were good at football.”
Cale beamed at me. “Thanks.”
“It’s cool that your dad was there to explain it all to you,” I said. “We all thought you got some prestigious scholarship and were too busy to come home.”
“I sort of did,” said Cale laughing. “There’s nowhere more prestigious in the paranormal world than Paranormal Public University. And as to the other thing, the President asked me to get you, because we had known each other. She thought it might be easier on you. No one expected you to be attacked before we could explain everything.”
Cale had finished eating a while ago, but he suddenly sat forward and said, “I should go.” I glanced over my shoulder. Camilla had entered the room. Her eyes were scanning around, but I don’t think she’d seen us yet.
“Alright,” I said, starting to get up. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“Any time,” he said with a distracted smile.
He got up and hurried to deal with his tray. Camilla saw him walking and pounced. As usual, three of her friends were with her. I watched Cale give her a one-armed hug, because he was still holding his tray. One of Camilla’s friends, a pixie named Kia who was even smaller than Camilla herself, saw me and glared. As Cale turned his back to deal with his tray, the tiny pixie girl whispered into Camilla’s ear.
I wondered how I could have missed that the two of them were a couple.
When Camilla looked over at me I became very grateful that pixie stares weren’t fatal. She gave me a look of such disgust it left me speechless.
“How was your date?” Lisabelle asked, appearing at my table. Sip was with her.
My face reddened. “It wasn’t a date.” But Lisabelle had asked the question I’d been trying to answer. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Cale. We hadn’t been friends in high school, but it was different here. Somehow, knowing each other for such a long time meant something, even if it was just that I felt like I was floating in a sea of new experiences and Cale was the one familiar thing for me to latch onto.
“Right, because he has a girlfriend,” she said as she jerked her head towards Camilla, who had turned to trail off after Cale. “It explains why she was so bitchy to you from the beginning.”
I stopped midway through lifting my fork to my mouth. I hadn’t even thought of that. The first thing Camilla had done when she’d seen me was make fun of me for being on probation, and call me a reject. Now I knew why. She’d been mad that Cale had gone to get me.
I was pulled out of my reverie when Lisabelle said, “I was going to see if you and Sip wanted to explore some of the trails tonight after classes,” she said, starting to eat her toast.
“Where can we walk on trails?”
Lisabelle almost choked on her food and
glared at me.
“Are you kidding?” she asked.
My blank face told her I wasn’t.
“On the east side of campus,” she explained.
“Oh, I didn’t know there were trails.”
Lisabelle made an exasperated noise. “Haven’t you explored campus at all?”
“No,” I said. “When would I have had time to do that?”
Lisabelle didn’t answer. She just rolled her eyes.
“We have to get you out more,” she said matter-of-factly as Sip joined us.
“I’m on probation. I can’t do anything that gets me in trouble or they’ll kick me out,” I answered. Even the thought of the President catching me breaking the rules made me shudder.
“Honestly, they’re probably going to kick you out anyway,” said Lisabelle cheerfully. “You might as well live it up.”
“Lisabelle!” cried Sip. “That’s not nice.”
“No one’s ever accused me of being nice,” said Lisabelle.
Before Lisabelle could answer, Lough joined us and the conversation shifted to other stuff. Lisabelle almost completely ignored Lough, so Sip was left to talk to him. I was too wrapped up in the thought of how I was going to get through the rest of the week to pay much attention to what they were saying.
Right before we left for class Lisabelle leaned over to me and said, “Don’t worry. We’re going to get you a tour of the grounds.”
“That’s what worries me,” I muttered. Lisabelle just threw back her head and laughed.
Yesterday Professor Korba’s class had been mostly introductory stuff, like introducing ourselves to each other. But today I was excited. I wanted to know more about werewolves and vampires and everything else. I hoped that the knowledge would help me feel more at home at Paranormal Public, instead of excluded from everything. It might also help me prove to Keller that I understood enough history so that we could start learning real magic.
Since the class was in the first half of the day, only other Airlee students were in it. Lisabelle, Lough, and Sip were all there. Plus a few others, including the twin werewolves, Katie and Lauren, from the first night.
Professor Korba stood waiting for us at the head of the room. The classrooms at public all had light carpeting, white walls, and dark wooden desks. It looked like the professors had free reign to decorate as they wished, because Korba had his walls covered in drawings of paranormals.
I soon discovered that Professor Korba liked to spend his class time talking – while we listened. Lisabelle literally looked like she might cry.
“The vampire,” Professor Korba began, “is a creature of the night. Vampires can drink the blood of any red-blooded mammal and survive on it, but of course vampires prefer human blood. Some vampires have magical powers that include moving objects and controlling fire. A very few have healing powers. The vampires here who can heal are trained to do so. Their physical characteristics are clear. They are normally tall, thin and strong. They have difficulty going out in sunlight, but may do so if they take the proper precautions.”
Lough raised his hand. “What are those?”
“There is a special mixture they can wear,” explained Professor Korba.
‘“Glorified sunscreen?” Lough offered.
Professor Korba frowned. “Don’t make fun, young man. Most vampires could rip you to shreds in your untrained state if they so desired. Then they’d go find some real work to do.”
Lough paled. “At least I didn’t get thrown into a wall,” he muttered to Lisabelle. She ignored him.
“They can be killed using a stake to the heart or by chopping off the head. They can be harmed with iron and they can be kept away with garlic. The garlic is the weakest of these methods, of course, but it should do the trick in a pinch. It will not hurt them, however. As you know, most of the vampires are on the side of the paranormals, but there are a few who are on the side of the demons. Really, I would suggest that if there’s a vampire attacking you, you should simply run.”
“Great,” I heard Lisabelle say on the other side of Sip. “Be pathetic.”
If Professor Korba heard her he didn’t give any sign. He just continued to talk.
“Now, moving on to how a vampire becomes a vampire….”
“This is going to be the longest class ever,” said Lisabelle, settling back into her seat with a glare at Korba.
“I think it’s interesting,” I informed her, and returned my attention to Professor Korba. I barely noticed when the lights in the room started to flicker.