Page 22 of Thrust into the Light

He opens a door up and holds it open for me. I walk through it and into another pathway that has doors everywhere. He comes in behind me and pushes my shoulders to get me walking, adding pressure when I need to turn a certain way. He opens up another door that leads to a smaller room.

“Find a seat somewhere, pick somewhere that you will feel comfortable. This class is supposed to last for about an hour, so you’ll be sitting down for a while. I am going to go run a few errands, but I will be back before your class is out.” He gives me a big hug and lightly pushes me into the room, and shuts the door behind me.

There are no other people in the room, just me. There are very big windows on the wall that fill the room with so much light. I see a spot in the room where there are no windows and it is a lot darker there. I make my way up the stairs and towards the chair in the darker spot. I sit down and remember Connor telling me to use the small rectangle to record my lessons. I open up my backpack and find it. I sit it down on my desk and press the red button on it so it will start recording. I don’t know how long until the class starts, but I don’t want to have to hurry and get it going when it does.

The door opens, and people walk in. There is a girl that is tall and very nice to look at. Her skin is smooth and almost shines in the light as she walks towards some chairs and sits down. A group of men follow behind her, and set down her bag. Another reaches into her bag and pulls out some of her things and setsthem down on her desk. It’s very strange to me. Connor helps me when I need it, and she doesn’t look like she needs the help. The men stop pulling things out of her bag and look around the room. One sees me and leans down to the girl and they whisper something. The girl turns back and looks at me. She has eyes that remind me of the ground after it rains. Not like any of the eyes I have ever dreamed about. Her nose wrinkles up, and she turns back around fast.

The men surrounding her sit around her in a circle, some of them pulling out their own things from their backpack. More and more people begin to enter the room, and everyone looks up at me as they walk in. No one walks up to the area I am sitting in. Everyone tries to stay two chairs below the line of chairs I am sitting in.

The door opens, and a male walks in. He walks up to the table at the front and sets things down on it. He looks at some papers on his table and turns towards the board. The male begins to write on it. I try to understand what he is writing, but he is going too fast for me. Once he is done, he turns towards us all, and I feel like all the air inside of me is gone.

He has hair as dark as the night sky. He looks very tall and has even more muscles than Connor does! What stops my air is his eyes. I have seen those eyes all of my life. They are the color of my blood, with little bits of black inside them. He looks around at everyone here, not seeing me in the darkness.

“Alright everyone, first rule in my class, you’re not allowed to sit with your match group, ladies move to the back of the class and find a fucking seat. You are here to learn, and I will not have you all over your matches every class causing disruptions. Don’t fucking look at me like that, I said MOVE.”

I jump at how he sounds. He sounds very angry. The first girl that walked into the class puts her bottom lip out and looks around at all the girls heading my way.

“You can’t make me sit back there with the freak. I will tell my Daddy about this.”

“I don’t give two rats asses what you tell your ’Daddy’ this ismy classroom and my rules, move your ass or you will be out in the hallway for every lesson after this one, and you will never figure out what your powers are.”

She picks her foot up and puts it down on the ground hard and grabs her things from her desk. The guys around her stand up and grab the things from her and take them up to a chair the farthest from me. They whisper things to her and her bottom lip is still sticking out. I look around at the girls that moved up here with me. There are only five other girls in here, all of them sitting as far away from me as they can.

I look back at the man at the front. He is holding the top part of his nose. His eyes flickering around the room, and they seem to pass right over the top of me, never stopping on me. Why have I dreamed of his eyes and Connor’s eyes as long as I can remember?

“Alright, so now that that is settled, I don’t care about your fucking match groups and the bond you all are forming. You are here to learn not to dry hump each other in my class. Now I am going to do a roll call, to make sure all of you are here, when I say your name, say here, or some shit like that. Attendance at the academy is compulsory, and it will be taken in all of your classes. Failure to attend classes, bearing a note from the Healers, will result in immediate repercussions.”

I need to learn what these words mean. I don’t understand half of what he is saying, and I am happy Connor got me this small rectangle, so I can listen to them again and ask him what the words mean.

21

Zachariah Fry

Ihate the start of a new semester. To be frank, I hate this fucking place. I have been teaching here for so fucking long, and every year it is the same thing repeatedly. People come to me not knowing how to access their magic, or what even it is, and I help them and watch as they find their center, or I watch a center find all her perfect fucking males. Each year it is the same thing, repeatedly, and it’s never fucking me.

This year, though, it feels like it could be different, and I hate the way it fucking makes me feel. I have had thoughts like this before, and have been fucking let down every time. But unlike all the other times, my body is reacting. I know she’s here somewhere. When I was walking into the class, I caught her scent; it reminded me of snowfall on a crisp winter day. My cock has been rock fucking hard since I caught her scent. Being hard isn’t something new for me, but not having to fucking coax myself to get hard at first, has been a surprise. My heart has been beating out of my chest and feels like I am out of breath.

She has to be close, maybe in another classroom? I don’t see her in the five girls in this class. I would know the second I see her, or so I am told. Grabbing my attendance paper, I skim over every name. Just doing a rough head count, one of my students is missing. Our fucking pompous ass new Dean has listed all the students by sex, males first, and then the females, all of course by how powerful they are supposed to be. Each female has anumber next to their name, indicating how many matches they are supposed to have. Having six females in my class is more than I have had in attendance for a few years. Maybe we are finally starting to bounce back as a race.

I begin calling out the names on the list. Not really paying attention to anyone in particular, as they call out here or some other shit like that. Once I start on the females, the first one on the list was the one who thought she could pout and throw a fucking fit because I moved her to the back of the room.

“Clarissa Augustus.” Oh, that explains the attitude and who “daddy” is. Fuck if I care, she’s here in my class and in here, my word is fucking law. I pinch the bridge of my nose as her nasally voice calls present. My god she is going to give me a fucking headache if I have to listen to her say more than three words a day. I call out the remaining names on the list and call out the last one on the list, knowing she isn’t here. As soon as her name leaves my mouth, I hear a muted whisper, a scratchy, damaged voice say something. Everyone irrupts into whispers.

“EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP. FARLEN NO-LAST-NAME. If you are here, stand up and make yourself known.”

The darkness in the corner of the room begins to move. I fucking wish I had a shifter's eyesight or hearing. Slowly, a small wisp of a girl steps into the row of seats in front of her, and into the light. Every fucking nerve ending in my body feels like I was just hit by a lightning strike.

She is maybe four feet two inches tall, and she is rail thin. Every inch of her skin that is in view is covered in scars and she is wearing sunglasses. Fucking god, the “special” case all the Instructors were notified about. She stands there in the light and her lips are moving, but I can’t hear what she is saying.

“THE NEXT FUCKING PERSON TO SPEAK THAT ISN’T FARLEN WILL SPEND THE REST OF THE SEMESTER IN THE HALLWAY.”

I can’t take my eyes off her. When I started to yell at the assholes in this room, she flinched and started to shake. She takes a few deep breaths and moves her lips again, speaking.Those fucking lips, even those have scars covering them. As she stands there in the light, the beams bouncing off her snow white hair, I finally fucking get it. I finally understand the drive some of these assholes show towards their centers. After one hundred and eighty years of teaching at this fucking hellhole, she’s finally here.

My phone vibrates on my desk, making me break my eye contact with her. I still can’t hear a fucking thing she is saying, though. Looking around the room, there are a lot of empty chairs, but I’m not even sure I could hear her if she was sitting in the front row. I point at one guy in the front row.

“Grab one desk and put it next to mine. NOW.”

He jumps up and grabs a desk and slams it on the ground next to my desk.

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