Alpha's Witch Mate, Vampire's Obsession

Chapter Three: Office Hours

Ivy's POV

Professor Voss did not answer my question.

Instead, he looked at me for a long moment, the kind of look that felt like it was cataloguing something, filing me away under some heading I couldn't see, and said, "Walk with me."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

Which was, somehow, both extremely irritating and extremely effective, because five seconds later I was following him out of the library anyway, telling myself it was purely academic curiosity and not at all the fact that when he'd asked, some small, stupid, traitorous part of my chest had gone warm and eager like a dog hearing its name.

He led me across the quad to a squat brick building I hadn't explored yet, up a narrow staircase, and into an office that looked less like a philosophy professor's workspace and more like an antique shop that had given up on customers decades ago. Old books. Older maps. A single window overlooking the courtyard, curtains drawn halfway, like even sunlight was something he tolerated rather than welcomed.

He gestured for me to sit. I did not sit.

"I'd like an actual answer now," I said. "Or I walk out and go find Talia, who will absolutely believe me if I tell her a professor cornered me about my sleep schedule like a psychic weirdo."

The corner of his mouth twitched; not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "Fair."

He moved to the window instead of answering right away, hands clasped loosely behind his back, and for a second, silhouetted against the pale afternoon light, he looked less like a man and more like something carved too still, too composed, like stillness was a language he spoke more fluently than most people speak English.

"There's a particular kind of energy," he said finally, "that moves through this town. Most people never notice it. It hums beneath things—old buildings, old land, occasionally old bloodlines. It's usually faint enough to explain away. A flickering light. A strange dream. The sort of thing you'd forget by lunch."

"Okay," I said carefully. "And?"

"Last night, for about four minutes, it wasn't faint." He turned to face me fully now, and something in his expression had sharpened, gone more careful, more deliberate. "It was loud enough that I felt it from across town. Which should not be possible, unless the source was considerably stronger than anything I've encountered in Everdale in a very long time."

The room felt suddenly smaller.

"You're saying," I said slowly, "that you felt my light bulbs."

"I'm saying I felt you."

I laughed, a short, startled, entirely unconvincing sound. "That's okay, that's a very weird thing to say to a student you met yesterday."

"I'm aware." He didn't smile this time. If anything, he looked almost apologetic, which was somehow worse than if he'd looked smug about it. "I wouldn't have said it at all if I thought there was a version of this conversation where I could avoid it. But you deserve to know that whatever happened to you last night wasn't nothing, Miss Calloway. And I suspect, given how carefully your grandmother has avoided certain conversations since arriving, that you already knew that on some level."

My skin went cold. "How do you know anything about my grandmother?"

"Everyone in this town knows your grandmother," he said. "The question you should be asking is why she never told you what she was protecting you from."

I opened my mouth to argue to say something sharp and dismissive, something to put this entire conversation back in the box of deeply weird but ultimately explainable when the office door swung open without a knock, hard enough to rattle the window in its frame.

Damien Ashworth filled the doorway like he'd been summoned, jaw tight, eyes flicking once to me before locking, hard and furious, onto Alexios.

"You're not supposed to be alone with her," he said, voice low and dangerous in a way that made every hair on my arms stand up for the second time in twenty-four hours. "Not until the Council decides what she is."

The word landed in the room like a dropped glass.

"What she is," I repeated, my voice suddenly very far away. "I'm sorry! what I am?"

Neither man answered right away. They were too busy staring at each other with a hatred so old and so total it felt like it had its own gravity, pulling all the air out of the room.

I was starting to think whatever answer I got tonight was going to make the light bulbs look like the easy part.