Reaching Answers (Artemis University #8) - Erin R Flynn Page 0,102
in my place” and all that stupid sexist bullshit and left. If he thought barking at me that I needed to shut my mouth and stand off to the side like a woman should after all I’d been through when bigger and badder had already tried… Well, I couldn’t fix the stupidity of others.
But I could punish them for their misdeeds.
And soon, I would. Legally, once I was out.
I was starting to honestly look forward to that day.
22
The next few weeks were actually calm and pretty great. After what happened with Izzy being taken off campus, we expected pushback on demanding stricter security procedures but before we could say anything, Mr. Von Thann was formulating plans for the school board to implement. It had taken me a few moments to catch up, but Lucca had filled me in.
Someone had found a weakness and publicly exploited it. Others would try it next, and that risked all the wealthy, high priority targets of the elite families attending Artemis. It had nothing to do with Izzy or I and everything to do with protecting their kids, which they didn’t mess around with.
Fair enough. I’d always known that given the amount of security guards compared to the number of students at such a small university. There were cameras and protection measures all over, plus the wards and barriers.
Hey, I wasn’t complaining.
And our school wasn’t the only one who had stepped up. At first, the warlock elders had assumed it was their time to shine and get something out of the deal. Some needed goodwill when so many were pissed at them either for the ongoing crap with McGrath, Ainsworth, or that elder who had been willing to work with a leader in the Underground to take me out.
Instead, the school boards approached the Calloways and asked how to figure out what to do. They had some ideas but in the end, I had asked the fairies in hiding at my hotels for help. It was a chance for us to help our allies and protect students, which we needed to, and they agreed.
Unfortunately, the answer they had would have been busted as fairy magic in a few minutes flat.
Of course it would.
It had been an all-hands-on-deck situation since the longer we left the door open for baddies to slip in, they would want to use it. Iolas, Katrina, and Craftsman came up with the answer after he was able to create a new rune based on a fairy one, but only because of his link to my magic and being my mate.
We were going to leave that part out of story. Definitely.
There were currently magical items that scanned for magic. I’d used one several times when we’d been interviewing people to work at HAVEN and hunting Underground. There were ways to cloak magic though, like how White had that safe in my closet or her purse blocked crystals from me at times.
Or I cloaked myself all the damn time.
So that was a factor. There were lots of factors, and we had to be smarter than the bad guys. Iolas, Katrina, and Craftsman all said my not growing up in the supe world was truly my biggest asset sometimes, as it was my weird way of seeing our world that had given them the visual of what to focus on, try for.
“Why can’t you just have a damn black light you turn on in the security room?” I had demanded. “Like when police or forensics scan for blood or bodily fluids with lights? Bring packages into the room and flip on the switch to activate the bespelled light that will flare up anything that’s not what it’s supposed to be. Either magic or ill intent or just that the fucking bad guys sent it.”
Sure, I’d been mostly sarcastic and a bit snippy because they’d been discussing magical theory and all the stuff I didn’t understand. But it was also how long they’d been going on, and it was way past when we were supposed to have eaten.
Hey, I warned people I got hangry.
After they’d gotten over their shock that I’d come up with such a simplistically complicated genius idea, Katrina had muttered something about getting me a warning shirt. I wasn’t sure how something could be simplistically complicated until they all pointed to the reservoir on the counter.
That made sense in a magical context. The concept was simple. It held magic until one needed it. It stored it for later.