I don’t think Simone would necessarily be able to dig up much even if there was more to glean.
Professor Raith turns to me, his expression etched with an undeniable frown now. I take a breath to give my own report, but he speaks before I can.
“Then it’s particularly surprising that Miss Devine offered up this artifact for the second time in as many months.”
Forget Bigfoot. Let the Loch Ness Monster drown me.
I scramble for an explanation. “It’s the same kind of cream, but this is a new tube. I thought?—”
He doesn’t let me finish my sentence. “You thought you didn’t need to put any effort into my class, so you’d half-ass the exercise. You didn’t settle on this as your artifact until you were already here, did you?”
He must have seen me riffling through my satchel for it. But he doesn’tknow. And he has no idea what an immensely good reason I have for being unprepared.
I can’t even tell him. If he had any idea?—
With a panicked hitch of my pulse, I yank a waft of ephemera from the room around my body. It condenses into a subtle shield so he can’t read more from me.
Exactly the way my Cole taught me. He could never have imagined I’d be using the skill for this.
I speak as confidently as I can manage. “Next time I’m sure?—”
“There may not be many next times if you continue to show such a lack of commitment to our studies here, Miss Devine. No matter what your name is, I don’t tolerate laziness.”
For fuck’s sake, does he think this ashtray is an object of incredible meaning toSimone? As far as I can tell, it’s her mom’s. She probably half-assedly grabbed it off the coffee table on her way out the door this morning.
But he has to lay into just me.
The tug in my chest I’ve been suppressing the best I can cracks something loose that spills onto my tongue. “If you want to talk about laziness, what do you call putting us through the same paces every second week for five years?”
Someone behind me gasps. Professor Raith’s eyes flash, his dismissive expression cracking in turn. “Maybe if I saw many examples of real divination, I wouldn’t need to insist on so much practice.”
He scoops the tube of cream off the table. His fingers tense around it. “It’snotthat new. You got it last summer. You don’t even like the way it smells, which is why it’s lasted this long; you’re just desperate to show off anything with a fancy brand name.”
I’m pretty sure he’s making up that last bit out of conjecture—Other Elodie has seemed like a lot of things to me, but never desperate.
He’s simply looking to humiliate me. Any chance to knock the privileged students—who’d have sneered at him most of his life and still do at Asher—down a peg.
It’s not as if the administration minds our professors heckling us however they see fit. Our parents expect theacademy’s professors to prepare us for all the hostilities we’ll face in our coveted positions in the broader lucent world.
But I’m not the pampered girl he sees me as.
A quiver in the ephemera around his body tingles through my awareness. My Cole always knew how to hold his own energies close, of course, and no doubt this version of him does too, but he wouldn’t bother to shield much around students he barely respects.
And I know enough about him that I only need a hint.
I stare right back at him. “And I’d bet a hundred bucks you were chewing kavish leaf this morning just to perk yourself up enough to do your job.”
The second the words leave my lips, I want to stuff them back in. Too bad sound doesn’t work that way.
If Professor Raith could shoot fire from his eyes, I’d be very crispy right now. He smacks the tube down on the table.
“Be glad I bother to come and attempt to teach you at all,” he growls as he spins on his heel. “Zero points for today’s session, Miss Devine. Failure to complete the assignment.”
Eight
Elodie
For my last class of the day, Professor Perez leads us outside to a grassy courtyard between the two senior buildings. The scorch marks mottling the grass and singed leaves fluttering on the three saplings serve as a reminder of past exercises that didn’t go entirely to plan.
