case anyone needs help.”
“You good, Em?” Jupiter asked as she looked at me with concern. “You’re white as a sheet.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said and swallowed hard as I glanced down at the map in front of me.
“You have until the end of the class period to get this spell right,” Stone said.
Everyone set to work immediately. There was a sense of motivated industry to our efforts that we’d never showed professor Tarkington.
“How are we doing over here?” Stone approached from the aisle, his hands clasped behind his back as he walked steadily closer. The fabric of his blue sweater clung to his biceps. The long, muscular shape of his torso was pronounced, even through the layers of clothes.
“Great!” Jupiter answered. “I think I’ve displaced almost all the dust in this general area of New Mexico.” She waved her hand over her map. A rapidly rotating cyclone swept across the parchment. The desert below shifted in response. The cone of constricted air bent to Jupiter’s will. She moved her fingers, and the mini tornado spun along with the motion.
“Good work, Miss?” Stone started.
“Jupiter Klien,” she answered with a smile.
“Miss Klien, nice to meet you,” Stone said and nodded his approval.
Jupiter’s doe brown eyes shined at the praise.
As for me, I was still reeling from the realization that I was one of his students. The thought was oddly deflating. Even the memory of his finger’s warm touch on my mount of Saturn prickled my skin.
“How about you, Miss Balfour?” He turned his striking blue gaze on me. The blue sweater under his tweed jacket made his eyes pop even more vividly. “Any luck?”
“No luck so far,” I answered, immediately thinking of my luck line. What a load of shit that was…
Well, I haven’t summoned any tornadoes, I thought. I guess you could say that’s “lucky” for these twelve square miles on my map, anyway.
Stone looked between me and the unaltered map. I braced myself for his disappointment, but he turned back to me with an encouraging smile that curled the end of his full lips.
“Patience is power all in itself, Miss Balfour,” he said. “Keep at it. The greatest powers reveal themselves with time, and you’ve got plenty to spare.”
I stared after him as he made his way to another student’s desk. His words rang in my head. My skull felt like an active pinball machine: empty space with a few annoying obstructions.
“Remember, class,” he announced. He tilted his strong jaw upward to project across the room. “If you don’t have any success summoning a tornado, you can always turn the map into a paper airplane for partial credit.”
Laughter echoed across the classroom. Stone turned toward the front of the classroom. His deep blue eyes locked on me for a moment. It was the last time we looked at each other before the bell rang.
“What’s the deal with the new professor?” Jupiter asked.
We walked down the steps outside the lecture hall.
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “Didn’t you two walk in together?”
My phone rang.
I saw Rowan’s pretty, pale face flash on my screen. “I gotta take this,” I said, pleased to get out of the conversation with Jupiter and Kevin. I just… I wasn’t ready to talk about Stone yet.
Keven lifted his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “Saved by the bell!” He called after me.
I walked out onto the quad, getting some distance from the bustle of students.
I pressed the green “talk” button next to Rowan’s hand; in the picture, she held a rose in one hand and a fist full of baby’s breath in the other. I always thought she looked her most at home in Kinloch’s greenhouse.
“Hey, Ro,” I said into the phone. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing much,” she answered. Her voice sounded a bit higher over the phone. “Just bored in the house. Mathilda’s teaching me to make a lucky elixir, but the eye of newt has to germinate another six hours.” She sighed in frustration. “So I figured I’d give you a call to say hi.”
“I’m sorry, Ro,” I said sympathetically. I tried to think of everything there was to do at Kinloch. I couldn’t think of any good suggestions “Have you read the Odyssey all the way through?” I tried, hopefully. “I think my dad left a copy of it in the reading room…”
“Already read it,” she said. “Wasn’t impressed.”
I laughed and shook my head. “Maybe it takes a few reads to appreciate it.”
“Could be,” Rowan agreed. “Some things don’t get better with time, you know. Unless you’re wine