Page 7 of Shadow Caster
Except instead of the usual murmur of conversation, there was dead silence, and instead of Barnaby at the desk, there was a man I’d never seen before.
He looked up as we entered.
“You’re late.” He glanced down at the register in his hand.
In all the weeks I’d been there, I don’t think Barnaby had touched that register once.
Harmon and Thomas grinned from their seats. Fuckers had beaten us there.
“Name,” the man asked.
“Minnie Faraday and Indigo Justice,” Minnie replied for the both of us.
The man tensed. It was a fraction of a second and then gone. He looked up, his expression smooth, and then his gaze fell on me and remained there for a little too long. He wasn’t old, probably the same age as my father. But whereas my father’s hair was graying at the temple, there seemed to be no gray woven into this man’s thick head of golden hair. Gray eyes regarded me steadily. Okay, this was getting weird.
“Do I have something on my face?” I touched my cheek.
He blinked sharply as if snapping out of a trance. “Sit.”
Wow, okay. We took our seats as he vacated his. “Master Decker is on leave for the next week, so I’ll be taking this class. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Carter Payne, and I’ll be your tutor for Defense Against Weaving next term.” He picked up Barnaby’s notebook. “Let’s go over what you’ve been learning.”
Someone snickered.
“Something funny, Samuel?” Master Payne snapped.
The feyblood in question snapped his mouth closed.
There was something imposing and commanding about this tutor. I ducked my head and focused on the grain of the wood of my desk. The sooner this class was over, the better.
“Looks like you covered history of supernatural species,” he continued. “You’ve touched on the history of the mist. Good. So, what can you tell me?”
There was silence, and my scalp prickled in awareness and foreboding.
I raised my chin, and sure enough, his gaze was zeroed on me.
Three
“Miss Justice. What can you tell us about the mist?” Master Payne asked.
Minnie cursed softly under her breath, probably worried I hadn’t been paying attention. But me? I was like a sponge.
I sat back in my seat and straightened my legs out under my desk. “What would you like to know?”
He offered me a close-lipped smile. “How about you start from the beginning. What is the mist?”
“Um, Master Payne,” Minnie interrupted. “May I?”
Carter Payne didn’t even look at her. “No, you may not.”
I smiled thinly before replying to his question. “The mist is a phenomenon caused by the tear in the fabric of our reality and cuts our world off from the fomorian realm. A long time ago, an ancient race called fomorians came into the human world and shacked up with supernaturals, sowing their wild oats.”
Someone snickered—probably Samuel.
Master Payne glared over my head for a beat. “Please continue, Miss Justice.”
I traced a pattern on my desk with an index finger. “They hoped to take over our world. To birth an army right here under our noses. But the males born with the fomorian gene decided they liked this world as it was, and when the tear appeared and the war was imminent, they turned on the fomorians and formed the order of the shadow knights. Together with the Nightwatch, they fought back the threat. We won. The fortress and Academy were built here, to train the next generation of enforcers to police the supernatural world in the mortal realm and to find the next generation of shadow knights.”
When I finished speaking, the room was deathly silent. Shit. Had I gone all eloquent?
