Page 23 of A Dusk Of Stars

Her name is Raven, but they call her the cuckoo curse girl. Assholes.

Raven catches my glance, stops her rummaging and just keeps staring at me for a second, tilting her head in a way that’s at the same time cute and a little unsettling.

“Excuse me,” she starts in this flat, soft but high-pitched voice, “is the look you’re giving me one of interest or contempt?”

The question renders me speechless.

“I often confuse the two,” she explains, her large black eyes blinking at me in the same odd way in which she tilted her head. “Facial expressions are hard, don’t you think?”

What the… “They sure are,” I choose to say so as not to make her feel bad.

She presses her lips a little, in a way that makes me feel I’ve just been given a smile. It makes me instantly like her so much, I con’t seem to stop myself from leaning to add, “It was interest, by the way, the look I was giving you.”

“Oh,” she just says, her eyes rounding a little.

It makes me laugh, the look of incredulousness in them. I open my mouth to ask what’s with the sticks.

It’s at the very next moment that Raven’s head snaps ahead, the chatter in the classroom dies down, I see everyone scrambling to get to their seats and I turn ahead to see Lorcan walk in through a door to the right side of the blackboard.

“Welcome, everyone,” his voice booms as he marches up to the pulpit and slams his attache onto it. “This is Lycanology One, so if you’re in the wrong room…” He pauses, his eyes sweeping overthe crowd with a grumpy look on his face. “Now’s the time to leave.”

No one makes so much as a sound, except for a few people awkwardly shifting in their seats and the girl going back to rummaging through her bag.

It all brings a smile to my face. I’m sitting in the back, where there’s no chance of Lorcan being able to focus on me. It’s a theoretical, not a practical class, which means I should be able to kick ass, not embarrass myself. It should be a piece of cake, to blend in with a bunch of weirdos like the girl sitting next to me.

***

With a smile on my face, I keep watching Lorcan as he starts pacing up and down the space in front of the benches, saying, “Now, as you all know, in this class, we’ll be dealing with thetheoryrelated to shifters and their powers. It’s in Shapeshifting Studies that you’ll be doing actual training. However…”

He stops, making my ears prick up. He seems to look straight in my direction. “That doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun, does it?”

I swear he throws me that smug smile of his. “You’ll go one by one,” he explains as he goes back to pacing, “you’ll introduce yourself and you’ll tell us about your first gift, demonstrating it along the way. How does that sound?”

Everyone seems thrilled.

After all, a shifter’s first gift from the constellations is the power they’re most used to wielding.

With a smug little smile, Lorcan goes to stand behind the pulpit and a girl from the front row gets up. She says she was first picked by the Aquarius, and when she closes her eyes and her tattoos start glowing, she makes an upwards sweepingmotion with her hands and all the water bottles in the room go flying up into the air, followed by loud clapping and cheering.

Fuck, this will all be stuff the likes of which I could never even dream of faking, let alone executing for real.

Another girl gets up, and she mumbles her name in the lowest possible voice, but then she turns to face us students and — her tattoos glowing, she slams her fists together and I feel such a strong wall of air slamming into me, it’s like a kick in the chest.

While the next guy is demonstrating his gift, I feel this gush of wind come from my left and I hear the door behind me open with a thud, followed by Raven shifting and flying out, carrying her bag in her beak.

My eyebrows shoot up, but no one else seems to pay her any mind. The guy just finishes his demonstration and takes his seat.

Damn it, if Raven’s no longer here, it meansI’mnext.

Lorcan leaves the pulpit, saying, “Very well, thank you, Mister Finnegan.”

He starts walking between the two rows of benches, turning his eyes ontome.

As he’s getting closer, there’s this energy I start registering all of a sudden. I frown.

It’s the energy I felt coming from the Lexarcanum book.

“That leaves only one more student,” I hear him say.