“Besides,” he says darkly, “it isn’tmeyou should worry about. And here I thought you knew that.”
With that, he walks away from me.
I stand there in the snow, and I cannot make myself move.
THIRTEEN
GWENNA
I sleep without dreaming.
The next morning, it's less of a surprise to wake up and see Callahan outside my bedroom door.
Lessof a surprise, but still something of one.
Because in my half-awake state, I walk straight into him and let out an “eep!”, which is extremely undignified.
"Sorry," Callahan says in that deep, rumbling voice of his.
I bounce off of him like a super ball. "I walked into you," I say, yawning. "But, I mean, thank you."
"Breakfast!" Morgan yells from the kitchenette.
I frown. Morgan doesn't strike me as particularly domestic, unless, I guess, brewing potions counts. So I throw a look at Callahan, the only other person there. He blinks, shakes his head.
"She's been at it all morning."
"Wow," I say when Morgan proffers her concoction, in a saucepan under my nose.
"It's a multigrain hot cereal," she says. "I thought you might like it."
"Multigrain," I say.
Morgan shrugs. "Yeah, well, I thought I was making oatmeal and then it turned out it was a brown rice quinoa combo. So I threw the oatmeal in anyway, but it'll be fine."
It all kind of came together, so I chew the inside of my cheek and look down at the blurping pan below me.
It does smell somewhat like cinnamon and other things. "I'm not really hungry," I say, which is pretty much the truth. "I think I'm just going to grab some coffee on the way to class."
"Your loss," Morgan says, and grabs a soup spoon to dig out a mouthful, which she promptly?—
Spits out. "Oh, God, what is this?"
"She scorched the milk," Callahan says under his breath. "It was all downhill from there."
I flatten my lips together because I don't wanna smile. Instead, I check over my satchel for the 50th time and make sure I have all the books for every class, except the one that has no books, per se, Emrys's class with Kingston.
Callahan follows in my steps at a reasonable distance, so precise it seems calculated. Not so far that he couldn't rush to me if, I don't know, a sinkhole opened up and tried to swallow me into the core of the earth, but not so close that it feels like he's breathing down my neck. And unlike Lanz, he doesn't sort of scurry back and forth, reconsidering how far he should be every six seconds, which is nice.
I almost forget he's there until I almost run over him a second time leaving Holy Grounds with my extra large red eye. People are still looking, not as much as they did when I was in the library with Kingston, but it's sort of hard not to notice the girl with a rotating band of stalkers. It's a small campus. Not a lot happens, and all of them are attention-getting, to say the least.
My first class is a survey of Middle French literature for my major, technically, but I've never read Middle French, and despite my attempts to catch up, the class is way beyond whatI'm able to sight-translate. So I end up spending more time flipping through the dictionary than I do actually listening to any of the commentary from the professor.
Art history, the material culture of pre-Roman Britain, which is fortunately just slides in a warm, dark classroom with a professor who speaks in a musical Scottish lilt and rarely seems to call on anyone.
After that, around midday, there's a changing of the guard, so to speak. Ha ha ha.
Because I emerge and find Lanz instead of Callahan. He nods to me, and then for some reason nods to everyone else coming out of the class around me, which would be endearing if it weren't so embarrassing and strange.
