Page 24 of Crashing Tides

Jane shoots me a glare. I’m pretty sure we talked about this last night, but I got up early to go to the gym, and I’m exhausted. My muscles ache. If I put my head down, I’m falling asleep right here, right now. “I don’t remember reading that,” I admit.

Jane elbows me. I wrack my brain, vaguely remember a line. “Oh! I think they, um, resurrected sewer rats in the Battle of, um, fuck… Anyway, they used rats to spread like… the plague?”

“Deliver messages,” Jane hisses.

“They used rats to deliver messages,” I say, straightening my spine. “And uh, I guess they were undead rats?”

Lily giggles. “Wait, are you serious?” She bats her eyelashes and⁠—

Wait a minute.

Nobody has batted their eyelashes at me in over a month. Not since I quit waiting tables. Furthermore, no one has giggled in my presence in a really long time.

What the fuck. Is she flirting with me? Doesn’t she know I’m an idiot?

At my side, Jane grows annoyed. I can practically feel the disappointment radiating from her.

“As a car crash,” I answer just as the buzzer sounds.

My next partner is a tall, dark-skinned fae named Olta, and he’s completely, utterly unimpressed with my lack of knowledge. “Did you even read the textbook?”

“Yes,” I groan, covering my face with my hands. “Twice.”

“OK, well, the rats weren’t delivering messages. One rat, one time, delivered a message. The rest of the time, they were being used as spies. Living rats were too disorganized, too difficult to control. It was easier to reanimate the rats than try to keep track of where the live ones went. In fact,” Olta leans down, rummaging through his bag until he emerges with a battered textbook. “It’s on page…” He flips through dog-eared pages until he finds last night’s reading, marked with annotation tabs and transparent sticky notes. “Two seventy-two.”

I borrow his ballpoint and scribble 272—rats on my hand. Olta frowns but doesn’t comment. “Thanks,” I say, handing the pen back. “I left my bag at my seat.”

“Yeah,” says Olta flatly. “You probably should go get that.”

When the buzzer goes off, I dive for my bag, properly chastised. Olta’s right. I’m not prepared for class at all.

The next five people are nice enough, but my cheeks are burning. Every time the question changes, I’m a little more lost. Luckily, my classmates are discussion-ready and willing to carry the conversations for the most part.

As I get closer and closer to Duncan Stirling, my stomach clenches. I want to run from the room.

I’m overreacting. Duncan’s kind of odd, but I shouldn’t dread this interaction the way that I do. I wrack my brain for any real reason to be afraid of him, and can’t come up with any. So far as I can tell, he’s harmless.

Unless he isn’t. When I was a kid, my mom used to watch true crime shows on repeat. Tons of people met future (and current) murderers, and had a bad feeling about them. Something they couldn’t explain that was later proven right.

I inhale, and tell myself sternly that paranoia is a bad look. I have no reason to think anything negative about any of my classmates, because I don’t know them.

The only thing I do know is that I wouldn’t want to be in a room alone with Duncan, even though I kind of like his strong jaw and his serious brows and his gray eyes⁠—

I’m so fucked.

And then we’re across from each other and⁠—

Is he having some kind of medical emergency? His face is red. When he opens his mouth, no sound comes out. He won’t look directly at me.

“Are you alright?” I blurt.

He’s probably not alright, because when he speaks, his voice is shaky. “Awesome.”

I look at him. He is definitely not awesome. He’s gone kind of pale. I scoot my notes back in case he throws up on them and look frantically to Jane, but she’s already engrossed in conversation with her partner.

“So, um, prophecy in World War II?” he says, and yeah, he sounds like he’s dying.

Maybe he’s just really shy?