Yet somehow, instead, silence followed.
A long silence of the sort that built and built until she had to break it. She had to see what was happening. Her head was too full of all the terrible things he could have been doing to not. She imagined a fireball aimed at her head, and turned jerkily, breath caught in her throat, heart hammering.
But there was nothing.
Just him staring at her with this strange, almost flummoxed expression on his face. As if she’d said something so wounding he couldn’t quite recover. He just had to sit there, bleeding, instead of firing back. Even though she knew that couldn’t be the case. It wasn’t possible to stab someone with their own scorn.
And even if it was, she didn’t have the skills or the weapons to do it.
She had no skills here or weapons at all, full stop. It was thereason she looked away from him and at Professor Hargreaves the second she swept into the room, as brisk as a January morning, all hard angles and sharp bones. To gain knowledge, to hear something of use. To drink in every drop of possible armor that this professor could impart.
Despite how hard looking away was.
All she could feel or focus on was his gaze, burning into the side of her face, as a woman who should have captivated her took to the lectern at the front. She was all in black, and thin as a witch’s finger, and so immaculately coiffed it almost looked as if someone had set a swirling iron-gray helmet on her head instead of a hairdo. And then there were those eyes—like flint frozen inside a glacier. You could practically feel the icy sting of them, every time they slid over you.
Yet still she squirmed over the asshole sitting next to her. Still she missed the start of the professor’s introduction, because her concentration was elsewhere.
It was maddening.
She only managed to listen when Hargreaves got to the good stuff. The magic stuff that made a bunch of other students sit up straighter, too. She saw one girl open her notebook, ready to take down every word this iron lady said. And only then realized that she hadn’t even gotten out her own.
She’d been so distracted she had left it in her bag.
She had to scramble for it, with the professor’s voice going on over the top.
“Now,” she thought she heard her say, “can anyone tell me what the five basic forms are?” But by the time she sat back up, breathless and flushed with her fists full of pens and paper, someone had already answered.
And Hargreaves was on to the next thing.
“Indeed, that is the most important thing to remember,” she said. While Mina sat there, boiling under the heat of the freezing sun sat next to her, wondering what on earth the most important thing had been. Then just as she was ready, pen poised in her hand, eyes on the professor as she turned her back to write on the actual honest-to-goodness blackboard, something nudged her hand.
A slip of plain paper pinched from her own bag. Neatly folded in four around the writing she could just about see—like a dark ghost through the layers. All of it familiar from the thousand times this had happened to her in high school. But so absurd to experience here that she doubted her own instincts.
Surely, she thought, he wouldn’t.
Surely, he was above something like this.
And she opened it, all in a fumble, and found exactly what she should have fully accepted would be there.I know I am utterly fascinating, but if you want to stay alive, you had better start paying attention to something other than me, it read in script so lovely it was almost a work of art. Though of course she couldn’t appreciate those densely packed curls on every curving letter, or the swaying slide of eachLinto whatever letter came next. She couldn’t wonder why someone so brutal could make something so pretty. She was too busy crumpling the nasty note up into her fist, as if she could make it not be a thing somehow. She wasn’t supposed to endure this kind of torment here. Here was meant to be brutal and frightening and full of pitfalls, true—but not those ones.
Not sad, mundane, petty little things like passing mean notes.
She wanted to spit at him for it, and only managed to not because the room had suddenly gone silent. Hargreaves was regarding them all gravely, and it seemed as if everybody could feel the change in the air. Then the woman spoke, and Mina could hear it, too. Something in her voice—a certain new vigor. As if she was getting to the portion of proceedings that she actually enjoyed.
And not in a way that was going to be good for them.
“Now, one of the most important things most of you here today—the new students, not the lazy, useless, arrogant ones who’ve found their way to this basics class because of their own foolishness—must do is begin the process of sorting the mythical from the not. Because the likelihood is, being in a class such as this, that you were not born into magical communities, and therefore may not possess the necessary knowledge to determine the difference between stories you were told, and facts that exist. And even if you are aware of what is fact, there may be various details and intricacies that you are simply not privy to, in the world outside Harrowhall. So I like to begin by asking you all to identify whether any creature or being I mention belongs in either the real column, or otherwise,” she said, and as she did, she slashed four lines onto the blackboard with a piece of chalk. Simple, really. Until she added, “And of course, should you guess incorrectly, there will be consequences. If the creature is real and you tell me they are not, they will appear and try to kill you. If the creature is not real and you tell me they are, the sucking void of their nonexistence will attempt to drag you in and eat your soul. Good luck, one and all. If you do die, try to do so with the minimum of fuss.”
After which, there was quite a bit of laughter. It rolled over the lecture hall in a fairly brash wave, at first. But when Hargreaves didn’t join in or break, it began to slowly dwindle down to nothing. A few nervous titters were all that was left, by the end, andeven they dissolved under that unrelenting stare. It swept over the room, clearly waiting for silence.
And in the middle of it, Anaya caught her eye. She mouthed something, expression tense and eyes shot through with the same kind of unsettled light Mina had seen in the maze.Can you shield yet?Mina thought she said.
But she couldn’t answer.
Harker’s smirking face was in the way.
Say no and he would know it. Show fear and he would see it. And all while he didn’t seem the least bit bothered. “Oh, this old trick,” he groaned, as if he’d seen it a million times before. As if it was nothing, really. Instead of something that made some jug-eared lad in the fourth row bluster and stutter when Hargreaves said the wordwerewolfand then pointed at him.
It took the lad an age to get a “no” out.
