Page 29 of A Dusk Of Stars

“Alright,” I reply with a sigh, choosing to completely ignore his entire demeanor. “But the answer is still the same.”

When he lets out an exasperated sigh, I rush to add, “How am I supposed to know what it needs if I only sensed the animal a few times when I was already completely distraught?”

He waves a hand in dismissal. “When did you first sense it?”

The image of his eyes when I first looked into them flashes through my mind. “The day before yesterday.”

“Yeah, I gathered as much,” he says flatly. “Whenexactly? What triggered it?”

“I don’t remember.”

He throws daggers at me. “Why don’t you quit being a smartass and answer my question?”

Maybe it’s not such a good idea — to keep this information to myself, but there’s such a strong resistance in me to tell this asshole it washimthat set it off.

So I shrug my shoulders, throwing him a defiant look. “I said I don’t remember.”

For a second, I think he’s going to come stand in front of me again, but he stops mid movement, gritting his teeth. “So you want me to believe that for twenty nine years you walked around thinking yourself to be a human, then one day, all of a sudden, your animal makes its appearance, and ‘you don’t remember’ when it happened?”

He’s talking to me like I’m some half-wit. “Yes,” I grit out, struggling to keep my growing anger contained.

If he keeps going like this, I’m forgetting all about my plan and smacking him across the face.

But he just leans back a little, stares at me for another second and then stands straight, saying, “Well then, why don’t you get started?”

I raise my eyebrows at him.

He gestures at the shelves around us. “Try making a connection with anything in this room.”

The very thought that the interrogation is over makes me breathe a sigh of relief. But when I get up and start walking around the room, the relief quickly turns into the promise of even greater embarrassment.

Because I can sense him following me as I keep failing to see anything in any of the displayed items — a bottle of snake venom, a feather plucked off a raven, a giant white tiger tooth…

Until I come to a stop in front of a piece of stretched hide the color of deep burning red. I frown, something stirring inside me.

“That,” I hear him say from behind my back. “What wasthat?”

I feel his heat and the combination creates this overwhelm of urges that I can’t untangle, and I quickly shove them all down.

“Nothing,” I rush to say, because I know for sure it’s got nothing to do with what my animal is.

Just as I turn around to tell him that, the bell rings.

It surprises him just as much as it surprises me, I can tell from the look on his face.

He’s not pleased.

I, on the other hand… “I guess I’ll be needing more than one class after all,” I say, feeling smug for two different reasons.

One, it seems I’ve managed to do exactly what I came here to do — not let him get to me. Two, things aren’t working out for him as he thought they would, which is giving me a kind of satisfaction that’s impossible not to gloat over.

His lips pressed tight, he stares at me for a second, but he doesn’t bite. “You know,” he says coldly, “if you don’t want to waste my time…” He leans in a little, his eyes narrowing. “You’ll first need to stop lying your ass off.”

With that, he turns on his heel and walks out the classroom, leaving me standing there with his words echoing in my mind.

Chapter 11

Stay cool, Anna, I tell myself as I walk out of B13 and onto the silent hallway. But I don’t get very far. I stop by the first bench I see and take a seat, fixing my unseeing eyes ahead. I’m struggling with controlling my anger and wondering where it’s coming from all at once.

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