Juliet Dark - The Angel Stone

When Duncan Laird was gone, I closed the door and sagged against it, my anger and outrage leaving me drained and deflated. I didn’t have time to recover, though; I was already late for my class. I’d have to talk to Frank later. I rushed down the stairs and into the lecture hall …

… where I was greeted by a round of applause.

The last time that happened was when I’d canceled the final after being attacked by a liderc.

When the clapping stopped, I smiled and gave the students a puzzled look. “Gee, I’m excited about today’s reading, too, but I really think Bruno Bettelheim deserves the lion’s share of the praise.”

“No, Professor, that’s not why we’re clapping,” Scott Wilder objected. “It’s because you schooled those Alpha dudes. Epic!” Apparently epic was the new awesome . I kind of liked it, but still …

My eyes flicked guiltily toward Adam Sinclair, who was leaning back in his seat, surrounded by empty desks. His ostracism was no doubt a result of my stink-bomb spell. His eyes were hidden by Ray-Bans.

“Did something happen at your party last night?” I asked innocently, taking out the folder of corrected papers.

“Nah,” said Adam. “Some girls got scared because they saw a mouse.”

“Ah,” I said. “Rodent infestations can be bad around here. That must have been the odor I detected coming from Alpha House this morning.”

“No worries,” Adam said, showing a lot of white teeth as he smiled. “We’ve put out traps.”

I smiled back at Adam, despite the chill I felt at the implicit threat. I’d have to keep Ralph from going over there.

“Well, if that’s all, let’s turn our attention to Bruno Bettelheim. What did you think of his assertion that the Little Red Riding Hood story reflects Oedipal conflicts during puberty?”

Nothing galvanized students more than a good sex-symbolism debate. Half of them thought that reading sexual content into their favorite bedtime stories was heresy. The others were delighted to be talking about sex. The lively discussion took their minds off my supposed heroic exploits. Ruby Day took part enthusiastically, declaring that she liked the Little Red Riding Hood in Roald Dahl’s version, in which Red takes out a gun and shoots the wolf. Adam Sinclair remained quiet through most of the class period, until it was nearly over, when he said, looking straight at Ruby Day, “Little Red Riding Hood got what she deserved. You don’t go walking in the woods alone if you want to avoid wolves.”

I was about to say something in response, but Nicky Ballard did it for me.

“You could say that about the wolf, too. If you go around attacking defenseless girls, you can expect payback.”

A good note to end class on! I saw that Nicky wanted to hang back to talk to me, but I told her it would have to wait because I needed to go see Professor Delmarco.

“Sure, Prof,” she said with a sly smile. “I think it’s really great you guys are, like, fighting the man together.”

“We’re doing no such thing, Nicky!” I said sternly, but she just kept smiling.

I went upstairs to talk to Frank. I found him in his office, feet up on his desk, the sports section of The New York Times spread in front of his face.

“Hey,” I said without preamble, “did you know that the whole campus knows about our exploits at Alpha House last night and they also think we’re a couple?”

Frank lowered the newspaper and looked at me over the rims of his reading glasses. “Let me guess, you tried a memory-expunging spell on Ruby Day?”

“Yeah, how’d you … I mean, it had the opposite effect.”

“Don’t you remember what Soheila said about what happened when Dean Book tried to erase the tunnels from campus memory? It drove the memory into the subconscious, where it became lore. You and I are legends now. Frankly, I would have preferred to have become mythic for my athletic prowess, but being a badass counterrevolutionary’s not bad.”

“But how are we going to protect the students if Laird knows what we’re doing?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Frank replied, folding his newspaper. “And as much as I hate going to them, I think we need to enlist the help of the creatures with the most practice in keeping a low profile. It’s time we went to the vampires.”

Frank was right: the vampires were our best bet for protecting the students from the Alphas. Still, it felt wrong somehow to entrust the welfare of a bunch of young people to bloodsucking creatures of the night—even if they were tenured college professors. Maybe especially since they were tenured college professors. Frank assured me, though, that in the eight years he’d been at Fairwick and keeping a close eye on the three Eastern European Studies professors, Anton Volkov, Ivan Klitch, and Rea Demisovski, they had never fed from a student or an unwilling adult. And even though the vampires had secretly joined the Grove, they had not supported closing the door to Faerie. Anton had explained to me that the upyr, the ancestors of the vampires, had originally dwelt in Faerie, but had become so enamored of humans that the Fairy Queen banished them and commanded a witch to curse them to an eternity of darkness and living off human blood. (A story not unlike the nephilim’s origin story, it occurred to me now.) Anton had admitted that his kind had taken their anger at the fey out on humans but that a few more-enlightened vampires had come to Fairwick, seeking a different kind of existence. When the door to Faerie closed, the vampires could not be banished to Faerie, but Anton knew that the nephilim despised his kind. It was only a matter of time before the nephilim drove the vampires out of Fairwick or destroyed them, so the vampires were motivated to help us. Still, I always felt a little uneasy around Anton.

The first meeting of the campus safety committee was called for the end of the week, but when the time came, I sent Frank and Soheila an email saying that I had a migraine and couldn’t make it. Let Frank and Soheila handle the vampires, I thought, settling onto my library couch with a stack of books on Scottish folklore. I planned to spend the weekend combing them for any mention of or reference to the hallow door. I found none, but each night, as soon as I closed my eyes, often with a dozen old books of folklore sprawled across my bed, I was back in the Greenwood in the shadow of the ruined door in the arms of this new incarnation of my demon lover, William Duffy. I had the same dream every night for the next two weeks, waking up each morning with a bed full of heather and feeling as if I’d spent the night making love. It was all I could do to keep up with the demands of the new semester—learning my new students’ names, getting my classes used to my policies (yes, I really would dock them a grade for late papers; no, it wasn’t all right to text in class), and the added responsibility of protecting the female students on campus from the Alphas.

For the most part, my students were polite, well-mannered young people. The biggest challenge was getting them to think outside the box and speak up in class, but they were soon all chiming in. The fairy-tales class worked especially well for the freshmen. They were, after all, venturing out on their own for the first time, leaving the safety of their childhood homes and setting forth into the unknown, much like Little Red Riding Hood heading into the woods for Grandmother’s house or Beauty embarking for the Beast’s castle. By the end of September, most of them had identified some topic to explore in the term’s final research paper. Surprisingly, it was Nicky Ballard, a sophomore and one of my best students, who came to see me with a problem one late September evening at the end of my office hours.