Page 28 of Darkened Wings
I shook my head but noticed that Callum leaned toward me before I answered. “I heard of them. Was warned that they were after me, I mean, all shifters, but I didn’t come across any, at least, not that I knew of.”
The rest of the class, they pummeled me with questions about humans. I even made some of them laugh a few times.
In this class, an outcast among outcasts, or at least, less-learned outcasts, I was one of them. But even as I felt like I was among peers, there was no way I could let my guard down any more than I already had.
They were pumping me for information, nothing more. I was their link to the world of humans that they were curious about but would never explore.
I didn’t kid myself, even for one second.
The last few minutes of class, the professor went over the test schedule and other points that were there on the syllabus already. I took out my schedule, looking it over and planning my way through the maze of school. Turned out, all of the R classes were in the same hallway, tucked away in the lowest floors of the school, like Ms. Leighton and her testing center.
Didn’t bother me. I was used to darkness and solitary corners and yearned for places to hide and be by myself. Most of the time, I was the best company.
Callum picked up his bag and bounced his knee, waiting for the chance to get out of here, his next move determined by the bell ringing. He cleared his throat and pushed up his sunglasses. “Looks like I’ll see you in Raven Defense,” he murmured so low that I almost didn’t hear him.
“I didn’t even know Raven Defense was a thing before now,” I said. I imagined a raven with a shield and a sword in my head and laughed a bit.
He chuffed and tapped his finger on my desk. “Well, that’s a class you need to pay attention to, sweet bird. You never know who your enemies are around here and when and how you are going to defend yourself. Pay attention. Learn some things. Learn to stick up for yourself.”
The bell rang as his last word left his mouth. His assessment shook me to the core. I didn’t know if he was talking about me defending myself in general or…did he mean defend myself from him. Either way, I shuddered in trepidation.
He scared me and thrilled me all in one.
I needed to know more.
For once, I was glad to share more than class with anyone.
Even a dangerous one like Callum.
Chapter Sixteen
I wouldn’t say Callum was my friend, but it turned out, the students in the R classes were pretty much a solid group. We moved from class to class together, and while they didn’t accept and include me right away, at least they had a lower level of hostility and that made things a little better. The classes were easy. Ridiculously easy. Rather than having to learn a ton of things, I had to pry the information from the teachers, something I stopped doing on day two when I figured out that everything was on the syllabi and study guides, and it was less annoying to read it than beg the teachers to teach it.
They were quite the group. The R faculty. Apparently they considered these classes just one step above babysitting and didn’t exactly go to any trouble to impart knowledge or do anything more. It was sad, but I knew of those classes from high school. I just hadn’t been in them. And being there grated on me now because I knew I could do better.
If you’d asked me whether I wanted to work hard here, before I arrived, I’d have said no. Not unless they had some sort of trade school where I could learn something useful like plumbing or electrical. But no school called the Academy of Ravens would have dental hygiene or medical assistant. I could have gotten into programs like that on the community college level if I had the money or an address to give if I’d signed up. It wasn’t a lot of cash, compared to a university but was far more than I could put together. If I ate every day—even if it was scraps from some restaurant where I’d picked up a shift, I called it a win.
So the fact the classes were so easy, requiring no hard work, should have been a win, too. After all, it wasn’t as if I was going to get a Vegas residency because I could recite raven lore and describe what made our feathers nicer than that of the crows.
I’d started to realize that comparison to crows was going to come up in every class. And, honestly, the one crow I’d met had been a little rough and ready but not too bad a guy at all. And he even called me a treasure. I needed to get that out of my head.
But the classes were so boring, I found my head nodding and eyes closing as I sat there, and only keeping myself from falling onto the desk by propping my chin in my palm. Callum had begun sitting next to me in other classes as well, when he could, and only his snarky comments and funny doodles saved me. Well…he saved me. In classes where the teachers couldn’t be bothered, I’d try to get him to take off his sunglasses. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, but when he did, I enjoyed the view. And even when he wore them, I enjoyed the mystery they gave him.
He spoke with an accent I couldn’t quite place, and I wasn’t brave enough to ask where it was from, but it gave him a mysterious allure that went with the sunglasses, dark hair, and pale skin.
I noticed that few of the other students talked to him much and, if they did, he wasn’t exactly encouraging in his responses. Not rude, and he didn’t ignore them, but just quick, short answers with the minimum number of syllables possible.
When I spoke, he listened carefully and gave me well-thought-out answers of many syllables.
Despite the fact that few people seemed to care if they passed the classes, I got more and more irritated while I watched them goof around and read things on their phones and generally ignore the opportunities given us to learn. Sure the R classes weren’t as challenging as the others, but I was starting to believe that you got out of things what you put in. I waited after classes and asked the instructors where to find more information on various topics. Obviously the Internet was good for some things, but this place was really behind the times and other than the students’ phones they lived on, there weren’t a lot of really modern resources.
There was, however, a huge library that I planned to visit just as soon as possible. Most of what I could find in there wouldn’t be on the Internet anyway. Even though my classes weren’t too challenging, I still was staying busy and hadn’t managed to get to the library yet, but I would.
But I did still have all the texts that had come with the previous classes, and it occurred to me that nobody had told me I had to return the books.
My new classes had only a few books between them, thin volumes with a lot of illustrations mostly. Really insulting considering I hadn’t found my fellow students to be less than intelligent at all, merely lazy. But if they were willing to accept the classes as they were, I was going to learn more.
I even carried extra books with me so, for example, I might be studying Raven Lore in Raven Lore - R, or any other possible combination depending on what I was in the middle of. I sat quietly and studied while the teachers said little or nothing about it. If I wasn’t causing an uproar as some of my classmates were, they were happy to let me bury my nose in a book.
