Exiled Mate, Future Luna novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: First Period

Professor Huddleston drops his chalk when she walks in, and the syllabus he hands her makes the lights flicker. He asks her to stay after.

I drank the second scoop of Mom's tea before sunrise, standing at the dorm window with my back to the north.

It tasted like rain on a hot road, same as always.

By eight my ribs had gone quiet, and I walked into Folklore and Oral History with Dani hooked on my arm.

The lecture hall was a half circle of old wooden seats that went down to a lectern and a green chalkboard.

Dani steered us to the fourth row.

"Watch," she whispered. "He comes in exactly on the hour and doesn't say good morning."

The clock above the door clicked to eight.

The door opened, and I forgot how to sit still.

The pull I had felt all night, the one that dragged north through my chest, stopped dragging and simply arrived.

The man who walked in was very tall, in a grey shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows.

He had black hair, a scar through his left eyebrow, and a leather satchel that he set on the lectern without looking.

He looked up at the room to start, and his eyes found me.

The chalk he had just picked up dropped out of his hand and cracked in half on the floor.

Nobody laughed.

Nobody even breathed, because this was a man who had apparently never dropped anything in his life.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Green eyes, steady, and not at all calm.

Then he bent, picked up both pieces of chalk, and set them on the ledge.

"Good morning," he said.

Dani grabbed my wrist.

"He said good morning," she mouthed. "He's never said good morning."

I couldn't answer her.

My skin felt hot from the neck down.

Every part of me, every bone, had turned to face the lectern.

I had felt this once before, two days ago, when Dalton walked past me on the training yard, and it had ended with my back against a tree.

This was different.

This pull asked me to come, and Dalton's had only held me still.

"I'm Professor Huddleston," he said. "This is Folklore and Oral History, which means we study the stories people tell and the ones they leave out."

His voice was low and rough, and it carried to the back row without any effort.

"I'll take roll. Answer with your name, and tell me one story your family told you that you've never been able to prove."

He started at the front of the room.

A boy in the front row said his grandfather had outrun a bear.

A girl beside him said her aunt had met a ghost in a laundromat.

Dani beside me was fidgeting.

"Danielle Normington," she said when her turn came. "Dani. My mother says she once sat next to a famous actor on a plane and he cried through the whole flight."

A few people laughed.

He didn't, but his mouth moved.

Then he looked at me.

"And you?"

"Sierra Ellsworth."

Something crossed his face too fast for me to read.

"Ellsworth," he said, very quietly.

"My family says..."

I stopped.

For a second I had no story at all.

I had a family who had stood on the edge of a torchlit yard and watched me walk away.

"My mother says I was born a month early, on the coldest night of the year," I said. "And that I never cried."

He looked at me for a very long time.

"Thank you," he said.

He moved on to the next name, and the next, and the roll went on.

I didn't hear any of it.

I sat with my hands flat on the desk and tried to keep them from shaking.

I had a mate.

Every wolf is taught that a person only gets one mate.

I'd already lost mine.

Whatever this was, it couldn't be that.

He lectured for fifty minutes on the oral history of the northern ranges, and every time I looked up he was already looking somewhere else.

At the end he stood at the door and handed out the syllabus himself, one page at a time.

I came to the front of the line with Dani behind me.

He held out the page.

I took it.

Our fingers touched, a half inch of skin against skin.

The overhead lights flickered all down the hall, and every window in the lecture room hummed.

A girl behind me said, "Whoa, did the power just go?"

"Static," Dani said, looking at both of us with huge eyes. "It's the carpet."

He did not let go of the page.

"Not here," he said, so low that only I could hear it. "Not yet."

Then he released it, and said in his lecture voice, for everyone, "Miss Ellsworth. Stay after."

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