Gypsy Magic - J.R. Rain Page 0,84

and limped back out the way I’d come, feeling the coming dawn like a prickle of dread at the base of my spine.

Chapter Three

Someone had magicked gum into my hair. I wasn’t sure who, but when I found the little a-holes, they were going to pay.

Okay, ‘little a-holes’ was an exaggeration. These were college kids. So they were big a-holes. With bad attitudes.

Trying to keep the homicidal impulses out of my eyes, I turned slowly away from the blackboard,. I really had pushed my luck a little far. My eyes had been turning faintly crimson by the time I returned home and dug Lissa’s Elixir out of my nightstand.

It was Elixir drinking night and I hadn’t wasted any time in taking it. The mint and black licorice taste still coated the inside of my mouth. I knew from long experience neither toothpaste nor Tic-Tacs could scrape the taste off my tongue. It was stuck there for at least the next twenty-four hours. Some sort of karmic punishment for having the audacity to be bled dry by one of the most notorious vampires around.

Between the gum and the taste, I was pissed and ready to lay into someone. Question was, who was the culprit?

I scanned the room, squinting at each face in turn. Almost all of them showed traces of amusement. A prank had just been pulled, after all, and it looked like it was going to cost Professor Westenra almost four inches of hair. Four inches of beautiful, thick and platinum blonde hair, I might add. Hair that was my pride and joy. Hair that almost reached my waist.

The only kids who weren’t biting their knuckles to contain snorts of laughter were Cynthia Whitfield and her small social circle. Four girls, all pretty, and all fairly well-off. Since the start of the term, they’d been coming to class with the shakes, unable to meet my eyes. Cynthia could answer questions just fine, sure. That wasn’t a surprise though because the drug she was taking increased cognition. That was because it was a performance enhancer, at least I was pretty sure that’s what it was.

I’d corner Cynthia after class, if I got the chance. I knew she wasn’t the gum culprit. Her hands weren’t steady enough to perform magic at the moment. No, I was interested in her for different reasons…

I gave the class of twenty a smile. The false one I’d perfected over the course of a century, carefully showing only my front two teeth, hiding the canines from view. No matter how human the elixir made the rest of me appear and act, the fangs never went away. If I ground them down, they were back within days. If I plucked them out, they stayed gone... oh... a week maybe? Not worth the hassle.

Separating the long pale lock of hair with the gum stuck in it, I twirled it around my finger to bring attention to it. Some were looking a little less confident now that I’d failed to scream at them. Hazing-the-new-professor wasn’t supposed to go like this.

“Well, I suppose someone’s decided we need a practical demonstration in alchemy, hmm?” I said, unable to keep the acid from my tone. They were about to see just what happened when Lucy Westenra got pissed.

A few of the kids exchanged glances. One face, in particular, was beginning to crease into an unhappy frown. Tobias O’Keefe. No proof yet, but his motives were solid…

The position I’d been filling for the last three weeks had belonged to his mother. Professor Devina O’Keefe had been fired after having an affair with Lissa Ravenwood’s husband. Now both families were in shambles, and Lissa had called in a favor from me. I agreed (if that’s what you wanted to call it) to teach the little monsters until someone else could replace me.

Apparently Tobias had found some way to blame me for the loss of his happy home life. Or maybe he’d just been hoping I’d dismiss class early so he could go home, play Halo, and forget about how crappy things were. I sympathized with him. I really did. It wasn’t his fault his mum was so scandalous. But I also wasn’t about to let some punk bully me out of this position. I was at least six times this kid’s age.

Time for a little object lesson.

There was a half-full bottle of water resting on the edge of my desk. I couldn’t wash the elixir taste out of my mouth, but some futile part of