The Last Lycan System

Chapter 7: The Old Teacher's Gaze

"But I knew your mother."

The words hadn't even finished settling in Noah's chest when footsteps sounded on the courtyard path, unhurried, deliberate, the kind of footsteps that announced themselves on purpose.

The groundskeeper's head snapped toward the sound. Whatever he saw made the color drain from his face.

"Not now," he muttered, more to himself than to Noah. "Not like this."

"Wait…" Noah reached for his sleeve, but the man was already moving, cutting fast across the courtyard toward the maintenance gate, disappearing around the corner of the old dormitory wing before Noah could take two steps after him.

"Mr. Gray."

Noah turned, heart still hammering, and found Elder Corvin standing exactly where the footsteps had come from, hands folded behind his back, watching the corner where the groundskeeper had vanished with an expression Noah couldn't read at all.

"That's not one of our maintenance staff," Corvin said, mild as anything, like he was commenting on the weather. "Did he say anything to you?"

"Not really." Noah's pulse hadn't slowed down. "He just … he said he knew my mother."

Something flickered across Corvin's face. Gone before Noah could name it.

"Interesting," Corvin said, and left it there.

"That's it? Interesting?"

"You're upset. Understandably." Corvin glanced at the statue behind Noah, at its eyes … dull gray again now, ordinary stone, nothing left of the silver light that had been there moments before. "You should head to your next class, Mr. Gray. I'll have security informed about the intruder."

"Wait. What about…" Noah gestured helplessly at the statue. "Did you see that? Its eyes were…"

"Trick of the light, most likely." Corvin's voice stayed level, unbothered, but his eyes lingered on the statue a half-second too long for the words to be entirely honest. "Old stone catches the sun strangely sometimes. Go on, now. You'll be late."

Noah went, because there wasn't anything else to do, but he spent the rest of the day replaying those two seconds … Corvin's flicker of reaction, the too-quick dismissal, the way his eyes hadn't left the statue even while insisting there was nothing to see.

He didn't think it was a trick of the light. He was fairly certain Corvin didn't think so either.

It started happening more after that. Small things, at first, easy to dismiss individually and harder to ignore altogether.

Corvin showed up at the edge of the training yard the next morning, watching Noah's session from the fence line with the kind of stillness that made him easy to overlook if you weren't looking for him. Noah looked for him. Found him twice more that same day … once outside the mess hall, once near the library entrance … each time positioned just far enough away to seem accidental, if you didn't already know better.

By the third day, Dax caught him staring across the mess hall and followed his line of sight to where Corvin sat at the staff table, not eating, just watching.

"Okay, that's weird," Dax said. "Corvin's been doing that a lot lately. Staring at you, I mean."

"You've noticed too?"

"Hard not to. He was at the fence during your session yesterday. And outside the library the day before that." Dax lowered his voice. "Did you do something? Fail an assignment for him or something?"

"I've never even had a class with him."

"Then that's extra weird." Dax glanced back at the staff table, then quickly away, like even looking too long felt risky. "You should ask him what his deal is."

"Maybe I will."

He caught Corvin's eye across the training yard during a break between drills, later that same afternoon, and instead of looking away, held it. Corvin didn't flinch. Didn't pretend he hadn't been watching. He simply gave the smallest possible nod, like acknowledging a question Noah hadn't actually asked out loud, and turned to walk toward the main hall.

Noah followed.

He caught up to him in the empty corridor outside the history classrooms, footsteps echoing louder than he meant them to.

"Why are you watching me?"

Corvin didn't stop walking right away. "Am I?"

"You know you are. Everyone's noticed. Dax brought it up at lunch."

That got a reaction, at least … a small pause in Corvin's stride, quickly smoothed over. "Students notice a great many things that don't mean what they think."

"Then tell me what it means."

Corvin finally stopped, turning to face him fully. Up close, Noah could see things he usually missed from a distance … the faint scarring along one side of Corvin's jaw, old enough to have gone silver-white, and a weariness behind his eyes that had nothing to do with age.

"You've been having dreams," Corvin said. Not a question.

Noah's stomach dropped straight through the floor. "How would you know that?"

"Fire. A voice. A name that doesn't belong to you." Corvin's voice had dropped low enough that Noah had to lean in slightly to catch it. "Am I close?"

"How do you know that?"

"Because I've been waiting nineteen years for you to start having them." Corvin glanced down the corridor, both directions, the same instinctive check the woman at the shed had used, the same one the man in the courtyard had used. "Longer than I expected it to take, honestly. I'd started to think it might never happen at all."

"What might never happen? What is happening to me?"

"Not here." Corvin's jaw tightened. "This conversation isn't safe in a hallway, Mr. Gray, and it's certainly not safe with that man still wandering the grounds. Whoever he is, he found you before I could, which means either my information is old or someone else's isn't."

"Then where? When?"

Corvin studied him for a long moment, something like calculation moving behind his eyes … weighing risk against risk, Noah realized, like a man deciding how much rope to give before the whole thing snapped.

"There's a meeting of the senior faculty tonight," Corvin said finally. "I won't be missed for twenty minutes if I'm careful. Meet me at the old chapel behind the east dormitory once the bell tower strikes ten. Tell no one. Not your roommate. Not anyone."

"Why should I trust you? I don't even know you."

"You don't have to trust me," Corvin said. "You just have to decide whether you'd rather keep having those dreams without any answers, or finally learn what they mean."

He turned and walked away before Noah could respond, footsteps unhurried again, like the entire conversation had cost him nothing at all … though Noah had seen his hands, just before he turned, and they hadn't been steady.

Noah stood alone in the corridor for a long time afterward, staring at the empty space where Corvin had been, turning the invitation over and over until it stopped sounding like an invitation and started sounding like exactly what it was.

A choice. And not one he had any real way of making safely.

Ten o'clock. The old chapel. Tell no one.

He didn't know if he was more afraid of what would happen if he went, or what he'd never learn if he didn't.