Alpha's Witch Mate, Vampire's Obsession

Chapter Two: The Everdale Effect

Ivy's POV

I did not tell my grandmother about the light bulbs.

Mostly because I didn't know how to phrase it in a way that wouldn't get me a very concerned trip to see Dr. Whoever in a very small town with, presumably, very limited psychiatric options. Hey Grandma, funny story, every bulb in my room hummed for about four minutes at 3 a.m., and I'm choosing to interpret that as an electrical issue and not, like, a sign I'm losing it. Not exactly breakfast conversation.

Instead I ate my cereal in silence while she read the paper, an actual physical newspaper, be still my heart and tried not to stare too hard at her hands, like maybe if I looked closely enough I'd find some clue about what exactly she was so tense about.

"You're doing the face," she said, not looking up.

"What face?.

"The one your mother used to do. Like you're trying to solve me instead of just asking."

I put my spoon down. "Fine. What's the gathering?"

Her hands went very still around the newspaper for exactly one second too long before she resumed reading, perfectly casual, like I'd asked her about the weather.

"Town tradition," she said. "Everdale's had it forever. Harvest festival, sort of. Everyone goes."

"That's suspiciously vague for something you've been dreading for two weeks."

"I haven't been dreading it."

"Grandma. You alphabetized the spice rack out of stress. Twice."

She finally looked up at me, and for just a second, one single unguarded second, something moved behind her eyes that looked almost like fear, gone so fast I could've imagined it.

"It's a big event," she said instead, carefully. "Big events make me tired. That's all this is, Ivy."

I let it go. Not because I believed her. Because I recognized that particular tone, the one that meant I will tell you when I am ready, and pushing will only make me retreat further, a tone I'd been on the receiving end of exactly once before, right after Mom died, when I'd asked one too many questions about a father I'd never met and gotten nothing but silence for a week.

Some doors, I'd learned, you don't kick down. You wait for them to open on their own.

I just didn't yet know how little time I actually had to wait.

School, at least, was providing excellent distraction from Suspicious Grandmother Behavior, mostly in the form of Talia's ongoing campaign to catalogue every piece of Everdale gossip in existence.

"Okay, update," she said, dropping into the seat beside me in the library with the seriousness of someone delivering breaking news. "Professor Voss requested you specifically for his seminar section."

"He what?"

"Requested you for his elective, the one that's already full, that people have been trying to transfer into since freshman year." She leaned in, eyes wide with the particular delight of someone who lived for this exact kind of drama. "Ivy. He doesn't do that. Ever. I looked it up. There's, like, a whole forum thread about how impossible it is to get into that class."

My stomach did something complicated and unhelpful. "Maybe it's a mistake."

"It's not a mistake; your name's literally on the roster. I saw it during registration help hours." She squinted at me like I was a puzzle she was rapidly losing patience with. "What did you do to him?"

"Nothing! I looked at him for one second across the quad yesterday; that's the extent of our relationship."

"One second," Talia repeated flatly.

"One weird, slightly electrically charged second, yes."

She opened her mouth presumably to demand elaboration I did not have when a shadow fell over our table, and I looked up to find myself face to face with exactly the topic of conversation.

Professor Alexios Voss, up close, was a genuinely unfair amount of good-looking, in the specific way that made you angry about it rather than flattered. Pale. Sharp-featured. Eyes shade of grey-blue that looked almost silver under the library's fluorescent lights, fixed on me with an attention so focused it felt like being studied under a microscope.

"Miss Calloway," he said. His voice was quiet and precise, and he did something unfortunate to my pulse that I was choosing to blame entirely on caffeine. "A word, if you have a moment."

I blinked. "I don't think I ever told you my last name."

Something flickered behind his eyes there and gone before I could name it. "Everdale's a small town, Miss Calloway. People talk."

It wasn't really an answer. I filed that away too, on top of the steadily growing pile of things about today that didn't add up.

Talia's eyebrows shot so high I thought they might actually leave her face.

"I..." I started, then stopped, because I genuinely had no idea what the correct response was to a professor I'd exchanged zero words with requesting a private conversation less than twenty-four hours after we'd made unnervingly intense eye contact across a quad.

"It's about your schedule," he added, and something in the careful, deliberate way he said it made it very clear that it was not, in fact, about my schedule at all.

I stood up anyway. Some doors, apparently, get kicked down whether you're ready or not.

He led me to the far end of the library, past the last row of dusty reference books nobody had touched since before I was born; close enough to a window that afternoon light cut a sharp line across half his face.

"I'll be direct," he said, once we'd stopped, "because I don't think either of us has the patience for anything else. Did anything unusual happen to you last night? Around three in the morning, specifically."

My mouth went dry.

"How," I said slowly, "could you possibly know that?"