Page 26 of A Heart of Bluestone

Dark brown hair with a caramel glisten to it, eyes like pools of rich, swirling chocolate, a deep honeyed complexion—

And a small smile dancing on his lips.

At the sight of Eric Harling, in teacher robes, leaning on the edge of the master’s desk, at the front of the class, it strikes me still for a heartbeat.

A flutter of surprise slackens my face.

It’s a quick heartbeat, and I chide myself for forgetting all about Eric, about his apprenticeship in this class.

I mumble another ‘sorry’ under my breath as I rush to the empty seat beside Courtney. Gaze down, I drop into the wooden chair and dump my books on the table.

The stop at my dorm room means I have only a single pencil, the tome for the lesson, and a notebook that’s already crinkled and warped.

Courtney spares me a cold side-glance, no doubt for my tardiness, but it’s a look that I ignore as I squirm in the hard, wooden seat. Would it kill the school to invest in some cushions?

Eric presses his hand to his thigh. “Open your workbooks to page fifty-four. We’ll be starting with predictions written by the stars.”

A curious murmur crawls over the dozen students. It’s not a response to the lesson, of fortune telling via the skies, but that we all recognise him. He is one of us. A senior.

But he addresses the class as a teacher would.

It does feel a little odd to have him leading the charge of our lesson today. But I’m not complaining, I don’t mind the sight of him in black robes, unfastened enough that I can make out the white of his starched shirt, the gloss of his leather belt, and—by the angle he sits at—a seriously noticeable bulge.

I blink on my own thoughts.

And as though Eric can read them, hear them whisper in his own mind, he glances at me, and a flush of heat burns my cheeks.

I flick through the leather-bound book to the page fifty-four, then flatten it out. Sweeping up my pencil, I dig my elbow into the wooden desk and rest my chin on the heel of my palm.

I risk another glance at Eric.

Patiently, but with a quiet sense of authority, his gaze drifts over the class.

I swear it lingers on me for a moment, and there’s the faintest tug of his lips, as if daring to smile, but I blink and it’s over, his attention has wandered, and it’s as though it didn’t happen at all.

Maybe it didn’t.

Maybe I imagined it.

James leans in from the seat beside me with apsst.

I twist around in my seat.

He pushes the bridge of his thick black rimmed glasses up the shine of his nose. The pinch of worry creases his dull eyes.

“Is there really a poltergeist?” he whispers.

I manage the slightest of nods. “Wandering the corridors around the fifth-floor bathrooms.”

James sinks into his chair. The pallor of his face is as ghostly and grey as the snow forming outside, sticking for a moment before it sludges.

In his sixth year, he was thrown into the flooded basement under the East Quarter. And trying to find a way out, he opened the wrong door. The door to the wrong closet.

Poltergeist got him.

He still has the scar down his arm. Takes years of daily ointments for the scars to vanish.

I turn back to face the front of the class just as Eric waves his hand and mutters a chant under his breath. In his grip, the brass tone of a coined pentacle flickers with light. Not unlike the enchanted one I have for the veils, but his one is for channelling.

---