More scratched-out text, this time so thoroughly inked over that it had bled through to the next page.
Well, so far this hadn’t told her anything she hadn’t already known. And if there was anything of a personal nature regarding herself or LBB, or whether they were one and the same, it hadn’t been revealed in this entry.
She flipped back through the pages, noting a number of mentions of “LBB” in most of them.
She might as well start back at the beginning.
Chapter Eighteen
LBB
Leo
Leo had planned on being better prepared on the day of the meteor shower, but something—someone—had crashed into his life and derailed everything.
Having passed his qualifying exams during spring term, he had finally been given the right to start his own research rather than simply teaching tutorials and assisting Professor Marin with hers. He had spent the entire summer cataloging and measuring the enchanted objects he’d managed to obtain, fighting with the library over the books he needed, performing tedious calculations by hand, and then repeating the entire thing again the next day.
It had been glorious.
There was hardly anyone on campus. This was part of why Leo had chosen ‘Lectrics in the first place; it was one of the few concentrations not located on the main campus in Norgate. Leo valued the peace and quiet, having never experienced it for himself before leaving his parents’ village. And considering his desire to study magic, these ancient buildings felt like a more appropriate setting than the new construction in town. There was magic in the history of a place, in ancient echoes and forgotten secrets.
It was his: not for the taking, but for the understanding. He sought not to control what he found, merely to observe it. To measure it. Record it. To learn about the principles that made it work.
Then, perhaps, he’d find a way to put those principles to use, but such endeavors, as important as they were to Professor Marin, truthfully mattered little to him.
The quest for knowledge was pure. It was perhaps the only pure thing in this world.
Leo had been in the library again, this time reading historic and religious records of “miracles” and “supernatural events” that happened during meteor showers, when the ‘lectrics had gone out.
It wasn’t a particularly unusual occurrence, although Ms. Redclaw’s absurd overreaction each time it happened made it seem as though it was. Professor Marin had offered to come take a look at the library’s circuits—at night, of course—after Leo himself had failed to identify a problem. (The breaker box had zapped him for his effort, despite the fact that he’d cut power to the main breaker before doing anything else.)
But she hadn’t had the opportunity to do so yet, on account of being busy making arrangements for this solar project that was undoubtedly going to take away from Leo’s time for his research. He tried not to interrupt her too often; doing so resulted in taking on responsibility for some tiresome task or other related to the accommodations of the visiting entrepreneurs.
He'd decided to give it up and take the books with him, which annoyed Ms. Redclaw because books he borrowed had a peculiar habit of going missing before he could return them, only to show up later at the door of the library as if they were cats asking to be let back in, and he figured he’d hit the light switch on the way out in case it decided to work this time, when—BAM!
There she was.
Leo didn’t hit his head when they collided, but it felt like he had.
She was…stunning, and not just in the literal sense.
Growing up surrounded by his nearly infinite number of siblings and his parents’ companions had left Leo with little room or privacy to consider matters of the heart. There had been a woman or two during his undergraduate years, Loegrians that had found his accent and foreign sensibilities charming, but they had moved on to pursue their research with nearly the same fervor as he himself possessed.
That was the trouble with other academics. The pursuit of knowledge was often a lonely and consuming quest, and if two people were on different ones at the same time? Well, there was little to tie them together.
Leo’s immediate interest in Ceri was not purely academic. It was not pure at all.
He had been ashamed of the impulse, the lust that practically knocked him off his feet again as he saw her more clearly through his spectacles.
Gods, had she seen it? Could she see it on his face?
His heart had pounded so hard in his chest he’d felt like it might explode. Could she hear it?
He felt ridiculous. He felt out of control. He had come completely unmoored from his careful, meticulous existence in one single moment.
He spent the next several minutes doing his best to hide it. Going along with her obvious lie about her name, trying to focus on why whatever he was feeling was a bad, bad idea that needed to be put down before it consumed him.
She was too young. That was the key. He was sixty-six, and she was—what, eighteen? Nineteen, maybe?
