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“You bastard,” he said to the man in the mirror.
A knock on the door startled him. His first thought was Skye, but he hadn’t told her exactly where he was staying yet. To find him here, somebody would have had to be following him.
Balthazar tensed. He walked to his small kitchen and looked in the knife drawer; nothing in there was larger than a ten-inch carving knife, but the blade seemed sturdy. It would do. Palming the handle so that the knife lay flat against one arm, he put one hand on the doorknob, took a deep breath, and opened it—
—to see Madison Findley on his doorstop, a coffeemaker in her hands.
“Madison!” He put his hands behind his back, the better to conceal the knife. “Good morning.”
“Sorry to intrude, Mr. More.” Madison didn’t look sorry; her eyes darted around the bit of his carriage house she could see, the gesture of the perpetually nosy. “My dad remembered last night that the coffeepot in here broke and we hadn’t gotten around to putting in the replacement.” She hoisted the coffee maker a little higher in her arms. “Meet the replacement.”
“Oh, thanks. Some caffeine would be good around now.” Balthazar didn’t respond much to caffeine; he just needed something to joke about, so he could laugh to cover the sound of his sliding the knife onto his table.
“They said you took Skye home last night. Is she okay?”
“Fine, I think. It can get hot in the gym, and just after you come in from the cold—you know.” Which made no sense, but hopefully Madison would skip over it. “Just dropped her off at the house. She should be in class this morning.”
“That’s good. Hey, want me to set this up for you?”
She’d taken one step inside before Balthazar’s hands were free to collect the coffeemaker from her. “That’s okay, Madison. I’ve got it. But seriously, thanks for bringing it by.”
“Well, okay.” Madison hesitated a moment before stepping back out again. “See you in class!”
“Don’t be late!” he called cheerfully as he shut the door. That was a teacherish sort of thing to say, right? At that moment he was too relieved to worry about it much.
It never occurred to him to wonder whether Redgrave and the others would really have knocked on the door if they’d come intending to do violence.
He suspected they wouldn’t knock on his door the night they came to kill him.
Balthazar walked into his first class just before the bell, so all the students were in their seats. Though he gave the room a glance he hoped was professional, his eyes searched for Skye first of all—
—and found her. Instead of looking crushed by last night’s events, as he’d feared she would, she gazed back at him evenly. Serene, almost. As if she didn’t have a care in the world. And she’d dressed accordingly.
That skirt … that cannot possibly pass the dress code.
Skye’s outfit wasn’t outrageous; her sweater was slightly oversized, even, and the colors were all blacks and dark grays and plum-colored tights. But he could see a whole lot of the tights, almost all the way up her thighs, because that skirt…
Drooling over one of the students in front of the rest of the class is definitely not professional, he told himself, pulling it together as best he could. “Good morning, everybody. We’ll be diving into chapter one today—though I haven’t had much time to review, I’m afraid. Had to catch the game last night.”
“Where the Weatherman kicked their butts!” somebody said, and most everyone started cheering and clapping. A few people patted the shoulders of a tall, handsome kid in the front row, who hung his head in not entirely false modesty. Balthazar glanced at the seating chart to see that this was WEATHERS, CRAIG… Skye’s ex, he realized. Not that he should care one way or the other.
“Okay, everyone, settle down.” That was definitely a teacherish thing to say. “Basketball is over, and Colonial History Honors Seminar has begun. Let’s see, what do we have here, chapter one is … freedom of religion?”
“It’s, like, about the Pilgrims?” said a cute Asian girl seated directly beside Craig. “And how they came to America so they could create freedom of religion for everybody?”
“Well, that’s not true,” Balthazar said. “Seriously, does it say that?”
Everyone in the class seemed to be glancing around at one another—except Skye, who was now hiding a smile behind her hand. Madison Findley piped up: “Yeah, it does. I mean, that was the whole point, right?”
“No. That was—as far from the whole point as it gets.” He started flipping through that first chapter, which had been written by someone with more patriotism than common sense. “This is wrong. And that’s not—Good God, it’s all wrong. Completely and totally wrong.”
The Asian girl (whom the seating chart called FONG, BRITNEE) said, “Then why did they come?”
“The reason the Godly—wait, let me back up. The Puritans didn’t call themselves Puritans; that was a nickname given to them by people who disliked them—in other words, everyone who wasn’t a Puritan.” Though he’d fallen into the trap of using it himself, in the centuries since: The present always exercised a kind of tyranny over the past, all-knowing, invariably right. “The reason nobody liked them was because they were convinced they knew the only true way to God, the only true way for people to live. They didn’t come to the New World to create freedom of religion; they came to create the kingdom of God on earth. They could worship as they chose, but anybody else who came to that territory—or, in the case of the Native Americans, anybody who lived there already—was going to have to worship in the same way. Even other Christians weren’t welcome. Roman Catholics in particular.”
Some of the students had started to smile, but in a good way, as if they were actually sort of interested against their will. Balthazar decided to go with it. He shut the idiotic book and just went to the board. If the best way to handle this class was to talk about what he already knew, fine.
“The Puritans called themselves the Godly,” he said, jotting it on the board. All around him, students started taking notes. Skye looked down last, though. Their eyes locked for an instant, long enough for Balthazar to realize how good it felt to know at least one person understood that he was telling his own truth.
