Page 16 of Libra Dragon

His heart was pounding sickly in his chest. When Kaya had told him her past was complicated, he’d assumed that those complications were mostly to do with the mages chasing her. He hadn’t realized half of her academic references were falsified. “All those guards, turning her room upside down, just because she lied on her resume?”

A faint smile creased the Dean’s face. “I had hoped that that was all that was going on, too. She wouldn’t be the first enterprising young scholar to exaggerate her credentials here… and her work was good enough that I’d have been willing to forgive the oversight. But when I asked her for an explanation, she disappeared. And since then… well, suffice to say, we’ve begun to realize that whoever has been teaching here for the last term and a half, we know nothing about her. Including her name.” The Dean must have read some of Callan’s shock on his face, because his expression softened. “Again, Callan, we’ll ensure that none of this has any effect on your grades.”

“Where did she go?” he heard himself asking, surprised by how calm his voice sounded compared to the storm in his chest.

“We suspect she’s fled the insula altogether.”

The Dean talked for a long time after that, but Callan found his voice blurring and disappearing into the background, drowned out by the dull, roaring thud of his own heartbeat. She was gone. She’d fled the insula. He’d known that there was a chance of something like this happening, of course, since she’d told him about the people who were chasing her…

But he’d at least thought she’d give him a word of warning before she left.

Chapter 16 - Inota

As dire as the situation was, Inota had to admit that she was enjoying the freedom. Being trapped in one body for months—how did regular people stand it? She lost herself effortlessly among the student body that first day, flitting from place to place, face to face. She was almost reckless with those first few transformations, stretching magical muscles that had been atrophying for what felt like years, a glow of warmth emanating from the pendant around her neck with every transformation. She even considered changing into one of the security guards who were discreetly searching the university for her, but decided against it in the end. She could allow herself a little bit of fun, but there was no need to be stupid.

Finally, once the thrill had worn off a little, she chose a face and set about putting a more coherent plan into place. As much as she was enjoying the certain knowledge that the mystery of Kaya’s disappearance was going to remain unsolved, the fact remained that she was in a difficult spot. On any other insula, she could have walked straight into the Fog and vanished, but Sanguine didn’t allow for that, not if you weren’t willing to take a long and dangerous swim. There were boats, of course, but at this point in the term, the only trips being made tended to be for very specific purposes. When everyone left at the end of the semester, she’d be able to lose herself among the crowds on the little boats, but until then, she’d most likely need to stay here.

That was for the best, probably. At the very least, it would give her a chance to figure out where she was actually going once she was able to get off the island.

It was easy enough to find somewhere to sleep. She found an unoccupied dorm room in the student quarters fairly quickly, and in the guise of a staff member liberated some clean bedding from the laundry facilities. While she was there, she grabbed a few uniforms, too, reasoning that their owners would assume they’d been lost in the wash. Inota made her way back to her dorm room with her armful of stolen laundry, grinning down at her hoard with triumph once she’d laid it out on her neatly made bed. In a pinch, her power of transformation could extend to clothing, but she generally found it easier to steal what she needed than to manifest it along with a new face, a new voice, and a new body.

Part of her had hoped that with the dissolution of the self she’d been wearing for months, she might find some easing of the feelings she’d been developing about Callan. In all the excitement and distraction of her successful escape, she even believed that to be true for a little while… it had certainly taken her mind off him. But late that night, when she was settling into her little bed alone, she felt a familiar pang and gritted her teeth against the darkness. What must he be thinking, she found herself wondering. Was he lying awake right now too, wondering why she hadn’t given her lecture that morning? Did he even know what was going on? There was no way of knowing, not unless—no, she told herself firmly. Seeing Callan wasn’t a priority right now.

The days crept by. She left it a few days before she visited the Dean’s office, first making sure that he was otherwise occupied on the other side of the university. Then, wearing his face, she slipped into his office and wasted no time in going through his papers. What she read confirmed what she’d suspected—her falsified references had finally come back to bite her. The Dean had really done his due diligence here, too, she noted with a raised eyebrow, making secondary contact even with the references he’d already interviewed about her. She knew exactly how those interviews had gone, of course, because she’d been the one giving them. Lucky for her that he’d let her take advantage of the confusion.

Nothing in the notes seemed to indicate that there were any suspicions about how she’d done this, though. They knew she’d given a false name and that her employment history was imaginary, but there was nothing to suggest they knew that she wasn’t a dragon, or about her ability to shapeshift. She breathed a sigh of relief as she slipped out of the office again, letting the Dean’s visage go before returning to the throngs of students. She’d been a little worried that the staff of a magical university might be a little more clued-in to her deception, but so far, so good. She’d keep monitoring the situation, but so long as she played it safe, she should be able to avoid detection entirely. From the Dean’s notes, it seemed they were mostly convinced she’d fled the insula altogether.

The downside to that particular triumph, of course, was that it freed her mind up to worry about Callan. She managed to avoid seeing him for nearly a week, unconsciously or otherwise, but eventually her luck ran out and she glimpsed him across the Dining Hall. He was sitting by himself, clearly lost in thought, staring unseeingly down at a book open on the table in front of his meal. The pang of pity she felt in the pit of her stomach was strong enough to make her stumble, and the student in front of her steadied her with a worried look in his eye. She felt her face flicker, saw the student recoil with surprise—then fled the Hall with a murmured apology, resolving to steer clear of him.

But her mind kept slipping back to him as the days passed and it became clear the guards had given up on their search for her. Would it really be that dangerous to check in on him, all things considered? She found herself drifting back to the library at the times she knew he liked to study there, glimpsing him from a distance at first, then growing bold enough even to walk past his table. One day, a couple of weeks after her ‘disappearance’, he spoke to her. The sound of his voice sent a shock racing through her, and she remembered—a shade too late—that she was wearing the face of one of the library staff, one he was clearly on good terms with. He was thanking her for something—a book she’d helped him track down in the deeper archives of the Library—and she nodded along, shocked by how good it felt to see him.

“You look very tired,” she said in the voice of a stranger, knowing it was a risk but feeling suddenly reckless. “Is everything alright?”

A flicker of hesitation, and she caught the sadness in his eyes clear as day. But then that polite mask was back in place, that sincere but perfunctory smile he gave to everyone. “Exam stress,” he said with a shrug. Inota felt a strange urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Didn’t he know who he was talking to? Didn’t he sense somehow that it was her, the woman he’d claimed to love?

She mumbled some excuse and left him there, hastening out of the library before she could blow her cover any more profoundly. What was wrong with her? Ofcoursehe hadn’t recognized her. She was someone else entirely. Hadn’t she spent her whole life priding herself on her skills of deception? Why was she suddenly upset that they had worked on Callan?

As much as she’d hated Haspar for the things he’d made her do and all the other ways he’d ruined her life, she had to admit, he’d been right about one thing. Feelings really did make you weak. And try as she might to resist it, the fact was that she really did like Callan. But was that even a strong enough word? She’d liked plenty of people in her time, even enough to feel a pang of regret when she inevitably betrayed or abandoned them. But those pangs rarely lasted more than a day. This… this was something different altogether.

And as the days turned into weeks, she found herself with an uncomfortable amount of free time to think about it. She found herself becoming more and more familiar with Callan’s schedule, haunting his passage through the school like a ghost with a dozen different faces. She watched him enter and leave classrooms, sat close enough to him in the Dining Hall to overhear his conversations with his friends, even risked a few casual conversations with him herself, now and again. Never anything too complicated that he might think to bring up again with the real owner of the face she was wearing, of course. Just a casual chat here and there about the weather, or the upcoming exams… but no matter how inane the conversations, they always left her heart pounding and her body tingling with adrenaline.

Every time, she promised herself that it was the last time. Every time, she told herself that it was too risky. And every time, she found herself haunted by that word he’d used, the word that had stuck in her mind so hard that she worried she might never be able to shake it loose. Soulmate, her mind kept whispering. Soulmate. The magical bond that shifters shared with the one they loved, their destined partner. Unmistakable, so they always said. A feeling that couldn’t be shaken, couldn’t be ignored. When you met your soulmate, youknew.

But while Inota’s magic may have been similar enough to a dragon’s that they took her for one of them, nothing could have been further from the truth. When it came down to it, she had even less in common with dragons than she did with humans. And strictly speaking, she didn’t belong to either species at all. So why had Callan seemed so certain she was his soulmate? Why could she see such an intense sadness in him, even behind the polite shell he hid his true feelings behind? And why did a part of her worry that it might have something to do with the feelings for him she couldn’t seem to shake?

The full moon fell on the last weekend before exams. Inota couldn’t have avoided that knowledge even if she’d tried—it felt like every single person in the school was talking about it. She couldn’t go, of course. Everyone would be there, all in one place—whose face could she wear without risking its real owner running into her while she was wearing it? Too risky, she told herself, over and over. Too risky to revisit all that. But her mind kept creeping back to that night on the beach last term, though it felt like a memory that belonged to a previous century. Sitting on the rocks with Callan, fooling herself that she was manipulating him into falling for her, when the truth was she’d been developing feelings just as quickly as he had…

She found herself in the forest once night had fallen, peering out through the trees onto the moonlit beach. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to spend a little time peering through the trees at them, so long as she didn’t join the party. She’d been hoping that sitting out here in the woods, alone in the dark while the dragons celebrated, might remind her how much she loathed them, refill her reserves of the seething hatred that had served as fuel for as long as she could remember. But all she could find in her heart right now was a kind of sullen emptiness. What was the point of hating them? What had it earned her, at the end of the day? A long, awful life of running away—from a bad place, to a worse place, to the worst place imaginable, and then somehow to somewhere even worse than that. She gazed out at them, letting their laughter wash over her among the dull, repetitive thumping of the music.

When was the last time she’d been that happy? When was the last time that kind of laughter had emerged from her lips without an ulterior motive behind it? Running through the stream with her brother, feeling him scoop her up to lift her over the deepest part. His voice, reassuring her that one day she’d be tall like him and he wouldn’t have to carry her. The day before the dragons came. The day before everything had been ripped away from her. The day she did her best not to think about—because whenever she remembered that day, she also had to remember everything that had happened afterwards. It would have been better for everyone, all things considered, if her happiest day had also been her last.

And then, as if in answer to that question, she heard a familiar voice, her ear somehow singling it out among all the hubbub of the party. She opened her eyes with a start, looking through the trees again towards the bar that stood at the tree line where the sand gave way to rocky soil. Half-obscured by leaves and branches, but nevertheless recognizable, was Callan, his white shirt half-unbuttoned and his dark hair cascading around his shoulders.

Inota was moving before her conscious mind had caught up to her body. She reached him faster than she’d dreamed possible, her heart pounding, sheer panic drowning out everything in her mind except the need to get to him, to reach out, to take hold of his wrists. His skin was warm against hers and it felt like her whole body was buzzing as his surprised eyes met hers. And in that moment, she realized she had no idea whose face she was wearing.

“Callan,” she said, hearing a man’s voice emerge from her lips. She could make out the sleeves of her clothing in her peripheries, realized with a start she was wearing the uniform of the library staff. Of course. The librarian Callan was on good terms with… she’d chatted with him a couple of times in this guise.

“You’re still in uniform?” Callan was smiling, looking puzzled. “It’s a party, Melton.”

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