Once it had, my eyes widened, right before I met his gaze.
He jerked his jaw towards the files, and I followed his stare to the pile of paper he’d just tossed in front of me. The stack wasover a foot thick. I set my pen on the quill stand, and reached for the top file.
I was just opening it when a large, pale hand slammed down on top of it.
“Now, now, Shadow,” he tsk’d at me pleasantly. “Don’t get impatient. Don’t you want a high level summary of what I’ve found, first?”
I glared up at him. “How long have you had these?”
“Since last Sunday.” He tossed his head a little to get his white bangs out of his eyes.
“Why am I only hearing about them now?”
“It’s your first term of Magical university,” he said haughtily. “I wasn’t going to get in the way of your precious studies. I’ve a bit more free time than you, since a lot of these early subjects are essentially review for me.”
“Arrogant prick,” I muttered under my breath.
I started to pull the top file off again, but he slammed his hand down harder.
“Don’t be rude, mongrel,” he admonished. He glanced around at the nearby stacks, and lowered his voice. “We shouldn’t look at these here,” he added in my ear.
My eyebrows rose. Without looking back, I lowered my own voice.
“Where, then?”
He bent down from behind me, crowding my space, and sorely tempting me to elbow him, hard, in the solar plexus. Instead I sat there, arms crossed, while he wrote with his elegant script on my notebook under my last set of theurgy questions.
EMS #4 / C1 / 11a?
“That one is ‘by an exponential factor of four,’ incidentally,” he said, pointing with my quill feather at the question I’d written just above his note. “To raise a paired primal a single increment higher on the level of resonant frequency according to Frick’s scale, you have to sustain a higher frequency in your own magical output for a sustained period of no less than a year, with over half of your magical output, minimum six times a day, to an exponential factor of four?”
“I didn’t ask, you absolute twat,” I snapped.
Some part of me was grateful for the answer, as it meant I didn’t have to waste time looking it up, but Eye of Ra, he was maddening. Why did he have to be so disgustinglycompetent,while being such a repellent idiot?
“You’re very welcome, mongrel,” he said, smirking.
It occurred to me only then that he hadn’t moved away.
His face was inches from mine.
I jammed my elbow into his chest, and he laughed, straightening.
He dropped my quill on its stand and scooped up the files he’d brought to tantalize me with. My jaw clenched as I watched him walk out through the stacks. It was infuriating to realize he’d found me so easily, despite my attempt to hide in an relatively unused area of the reference section, on the fourth floor of the library named after his stupid, racist family.
It didn’t help that he was practically whistling as he walked away.
Only after he’d gone did my eyes return to the scrawl of cryptic writing he left in my book. I understood the note, at least. Without the abbreviations, it read: “Experimental Magic Shed No. 4 / Compartment 1 / 11:00AM?”
I frowned, cursing him under my breath.
But I already knew I’d be there.
It was Saturday before noon,and quiet in many areas of the grounds, but the experimental magic sheds were busy, as always. I could already see students and mastery-level student teachers waiting outside shed compartment doors as I walked down the path by Vulcan Lake.
It would only get busier as the day progressed.
I had my second practical of the week for Offensive and Defensive Magic that afternoon in Shed #1. Because the sheds had the most complicated chimeric fields on campus, designed to make them soundproof and virtually invisible on the inside, not to mention heavily shielded against magical explosions?both intentional and accidental?what went on in those compartments was fairly private, and couldn’t be seen on our magical maps.
