“Don’t make me regret coming to you,” she grumbled half-heartedly, knowing she deserved his teasing after her accidental gaffe.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he replied, very clearly struggling not to laugh. But then his face turned serious and he stepped closer—almost intimately closer—and lowered his voice to say, “Remember what I told you, Alex. You can always come to me. For anything, anytime. Okay?”
Swallowing around her suddenly emotion-clogged throat, Alex was unable to form a verbal response so she just nodded her agreement.
“Good,” he said, reaching forward until his fingers tangled with hers for a fraction of a second before he squeezed gently and let her go. “You go eat, and I’ll catch you later.”
Fingers tingling, she nodded mutely again. When it looked like he was waiting for her to enter the food court before he left, she spun around and walked through the doors.
As she moved away, it took everything in her not to turn and look back over her shoulder to see if he was still watching.
arin.
Twenty-Two
The next two months passed much faster than Alex would have liked. As November drew to a close, her classes became impossibly intense, with the teachers firing assignment after assignment at their students before the term ended for the Kaldoras holidays.
While the theory-based classes were straining her mind to its limits, Alex’s practical classes also became more strenuous. PE was close to the top of the list and Finn seemed to take particular pleasure whenever one of them had to be carried off to the Medical Ward.
But PE wasn’t the only class that resulted in one or more students having to visit the resident doctor. Alex found herself in the Medical Ward on an almost daily basis—for a variety of reasons—much to Fletcher’s displeasure.
The first time was after she became wedged between her saddle and a tree trunk in one of her Equestrian Skills classes. In her defence, an odd-looking reptilian creature had spooked her horse and caught them both by surprise. She was relieved the torn ligament in her knee hadn’t led to her falling off to become the reptile’s next meal.
Another tree landed her back in Fletcher’s domain when she sprained her wrist getting caught in one of Hunter’s traps during a SAS fake stake-out one night. It was still, clearly, her favourite class.
Not.
The following week she had to see Fletcher after having a violent allergic reaction to something in her Medical Science class. They were looking at the properties of different animal blood when Alex accidentally brushed her fingers against a murky-brown swab labelled with the scientific name, Daesmilo Folarctos. She was rushed to the Medical Ward when she began throwing up within seconds of the sample touching her skin. Fletcher kept Alex in the Ward for twelve hours, all of which she slept away after her energy was sapped from the sudden and debilitating sickness.
Despite her illness, Alex recovered surprisingly quickly, which meant it was straight back to classes for her. And that, of course, led to her next trip to the Medical Ward, when she was knocked unconscious in Combat later that week. She maintained that Zain concussed her on purpose, since he’d deliberately chosen her to help demonstrate a new fighting technique. He’d apparently overestimated her fighting ability. Either that, or he must have expected her to fight like a Meyarin—which was something she was keeping a tight rein on.
On her fifth trip to the Medical Ward, she wasn’t alone. Everyone in Fitzy’s Gamma Chemistry class was treated after a noxious gas infiltrated their laboratory. That, at least, hadn’t been Alex’s fault.
Nor was it her fault when all fourth year students were quarantined for forty-eight hours after coming in contact with a sick Foofoo in their Species Distinction class.
That’s right. A Foofoo.
As cute as the name was, it didn’t come anywhere close to describing the adorable creatures. Alex’s heart had melted when she first saw the multi-coloured little balls of fluff. Like every other girl in her class—and some of the boys, too—she hadn’t been able to hold back her cooing baby-voice when the Foofoos looked up at them with their big puppy-dog eyes, all but asking to be picked up and cuddled. Which is exactly what Alex and the others had done.
By the time class ended, everyone was sniffling and sneezing—Varin included—and after a quick examination by Fletcher they were sent to his Infectious Diseases isolation room. The illness they’d contracted was the equivalent of a twenty-four hour bug, but the doctor kept them for twice that long to make sure they were no longer contagious.
Despite that particularly miserable experience, Alex couldn’t deny that she wanted a Foofoo of her own.
One of the few classes that didn’t land Alex in the Medical Ward was Core Skills. If anything, though, a trip to visit Fletcher could have only helped improve the subject. For Alex, the class was beyond tedious, since her gift was more like an on-off switch than anything else—with it always turned on. She didn’t have to learn control, unlike most of her classmates with their various abilities.
Despite not needing to practise using her gift, Alex was experimenting a little to see if her willpower could progress beyond herself. Professor Marmaduke had put the idea in her head at the end of the previous year, and since then Alex had wondered if she could share her gift with others in a similar way to Jordan’s transcendence.
So far, Alex hadn’t been capable of doing anything different. Then again, she had no way of judging if she actually achieved what she was trying. Which led her full-circle back to believing that Core Skills was a waste of her time, even if she did now understand the bigger picture behind what it was teaching, at least according to Doc’s insight into the reasons for the academy’s ancient curriculum.
If nothing else, she could say that her Core Skills classes remained predictable, unlike her SOSAC class—or rather, the teacher.
Ever since Alex had returned from her SAS weekend ‘adventure’, Caspar Lennox had taken an unexpectedly keen interest in her. Whenever she entered his room, his dark eyes found her. If she looked up from taking notes, his gaze was on her. When she left his class, his eyes followed her. The Shadow Walker was already creepy enough without this bizarre, stalkerlike development.
Fortunately, he didn’t approach her outside of his classroom. She never saw him anywhere else, but she often had to resist the urge to wait behind after his lessons to confront him about his disturbing stares. Her friends claimed it was all in her head and, while she didn’t agree with them, she chose to follow their advice and let it go.
But that was easier said than done.
“Miss Jennings, please remain behind after class.”