scenarios in my head. I’m strung out, and I know they can see it.
Tamlin notices too.
“You look beat,” she tells me when I walk into the Combat classroom. It’s our last practice before the next challenge, and I’m nervous as fuck. I want so badly to win, but I just don’t know if I’m good enough.
Forget sabotage, what if I lose just because I’m incompetent?
“That’s one way to put it.” I set my bag down and start stretching. “It’s been a long week.”
Tamlin gives me a weak smile. “Yes, it has been.”
That makes me pause.
I look over at her and take in her expression more closely this time. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Tamlin looks… sad.
Professor Tamlin isn’t the kind of person who shows her emotions easily. She’s very put together and always has a poised and confident air about her. I sometimes think she could have a hurricane raging around her and still manage to smile serenely and get on with her business.
But not today.
Her eyes aren’t quite meeting mine, her clothes look slightly rumpled, and there’s a slowness, almost a weariness, to her movements.
“Are you okay?” I ask. I can’t help it. Tamlin and I aren’t exactly friends—I don’t even call her by her first name, Josephine—but she’s a good person, and she’s making an effort to help me. And I think Roman hinted to her that it was more important than ever that I’m ready for the next trial, if the way she’s been drilling me is anything to go by.
Tamlin startles a little. I didn’t think I was capable of surprising her, so that tells me a lot. “I’m fine.” She gives me a wan smile. “Just had a long weekend.”
“Are you sure?”
She sighs. “It’s personal, and I’d rather not—you’re a good person, Elliot, and thank you for asking, but you are my student, and I’d like to try and keep our relationship boundaries in place.”
“You’re not much older than I am.” I’d say about five years. Same as Roman.
She rolls her eyes, but she looks fond of me, pressing her lips together to hide a smile. “I had a talk with someone—I felt one way about our relationship, they felt the other way.”
“Most of us eat a tub of ice cream and wear sweatpants for a week when that happens, so I’d say you’re doing pretty well,” I reply, even as butterflies erupt in my stomach.
So Tamlin did want to get back together with Roman. She must’ve said something after the dance, or maybe it was her behavior then that convinced him to sit her down and have a proper talk with her.
Either way—he said no.
He picked me.
She doesn’t know about that, obviously. I doubt she’d be quite so friendly with me if she did know. And given what she just said about professor-student relationships, she probably wouldn’t approve of me and Roman one bit.
But it’s true. He picked me. He told me he wants to be with me, that he’s okay with sharing me, and he doesn’t want to get back together with her or anyone else.
I almost want to cry, stupid as it is.
“Thank you,” Tamlin tells me, and what I really want to say is no, thank you, or maybe I’m sorry, but she wouldn’t understand that.
So I just nod, powerful emotions churning in my chest. “Of course.”
On the way out of Wellwood Hall, I run into Professor Goldstein, my History of Magic professor.
“Elliot! Do you have a moment?”
Shit. Her class was my easiest subject last semester, but right now, I’m barely scraping by. Who has time to learn about Salem when they’ve got a massive, terrifying competition to win? My heart sinks as I trudge after her to her office, expecting to be berated for falling behind in my work.
Professor Goldstein is the opposite of what you’d think a history teacher would be—not stuffy or stodgy at all. She has short, white-blond hair and a sort of manic energy in everything she does. She has us do reenactments where we role play as historical characters and will rant for hours about how terrible the Renaissance period was for women’s rights.
She’s kind of awesome, actually.
Goldstein closes the door and frowns at me over her cat-eye glasses. “You’ve really been struggling since the Trials began. You were one of my best students last semester.”
That’s because even if I’m useless at practical magic, at least history is something you can learn whether you can cast a spell or not. It was