Hunter sat at the kitchen table in Ianthe’s apartment, thinking about his… ah… daughter?
He was, of course, very happy he’d found her.
Unfortunately, he’d been so overwhelmed by those feelings that he’d rushed up wanting to hug her, and had only just managed to turn that into grabbing her by the arm instead, which had been such a bad idea, why had he done that!?
He sighed.
At least he managed not to cry. Not in front of her, anyway. After she fled from him and he lost track of her, for lack of anywhere safer to go he headed for Ianthe’s on-campus apartment, where he had a bit of an emotional breakdown in her very fancy shower. Thankfully, the apartment's soundproofing was magically flawless, and he’d managed to get clean regardless, so he didn’t consider it a loss.
Ianthe lived in the penthouse suite of a faculty residence tower, and her apartment took up the entire top floor and the roof. Hunter approved of this on the grounds that it felt a little bit like living in a wizard’s tower, only lacking sentient brooms and a mouse. The area he was in now consisted of an open kitchen and living room that met up on the far side with tall glass doors and a wide balcony. While the whole place seemed to be built out of white and gray marble, Ianthe’s taste in decor ran surprisingly colorful, and the result was a collection of soft rugs and carved furniture sporting bright reds and purples and blues in the Thymimatan style. It was a little strange for an Aeonian woman, but he couldn’t deny it made the place feel more lively.
Chewing on a handful of pumpkin seeds, he tried to figure out how to approach Euphrosyne without scaring her half to death again.
This was easier said than done. The way Euphrosyne had looked at him, that level of frozen terror on her face? People only ever looked at him like that when they were convinced he was coming to kill them. That didn’t usually bother him, but did now that he’d seen it on the face of his daughter.
Still—if she thought he was going to murder her, didn’t that mean she probably had her old memories as Al? He would have looked out for her regardless, but he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t happy about that.
Ah… was it ok for him to still think of the old her as Al?
He wasn’t sure, but figured that since she was probably going by the main character’s name now, surely ‘Euphrosyne’ was the safest option?
He tapped his finger on the table, frowning. Also, if she was a girl now, and she remembered her past… had she been a girl back then too?
In their world, as far as he could remember, Al had never said anything about being a girl. In fact they had argued at length about things Hunter thought were only for women but were, according to his kid, for anybody. Dresses and skirts, skin care, crying at movies—he had been assured those examples and many more could definitely be considered masculine, and that it was offensive to suggest otherwise.
He had also been told by Al—er, Euphrosyne, verbatim, that he should not assume someone was gay just because they looked or behaved a certain way.
He’d taken those lessons seriously in part because they’d been delivered via a PowerPoint titled ‘Remedial Gender and Sexuality for Sad Boomers,’ and the bright colors and cat memes had been pretty convincing.
That said, he wasn’t totally clueless. If his past self had to bet on it, he would have ranked a ‘Dad, I’m gay’ at the top of the list, but ‘Dad, I’m a woman’ felt equally plausible.
Although, he supposed technically it was possible to get both, wasn’t it? He frowned, trying to remember the PowerPoint.
Oh, he paused, wondering to himself. I wonder if that’s why Al didn’t want a bar mitzvah?
Shit, I meant Euphrosyne!
He rubbed his forehead and sighed. This was going to take some getting used to—it was hard to suddenly change the way he’d thought about her for seven years, but if that’s what she wanted then it was what he would do…
Ah, but then, he also wasn’t one hundred percent sure that was what she wanted? He couldn’t just ask her, on account of… everything else going on, really.
That said, now that he’d finally figured out what was going on, it didn’t bother him. Really, what had worried him the most was the whole ‘coming out’ bit, since he’d been terrified he would do or say or assume something wrong and end up hurting her. Finding out this way was actually a lot more convenient for him, which was a cowardly thought that immediately made him feel guilty, because it certainly hadn’t been convenient for Euphy, who must have been struggling for some time.
Also, she probably thought he was dead, right? Or thought that he thought that she was dead, but was himself alive in their old world, even though he actually wasn’t?
He groaned aloud and put his aching head into his hands.
What hurt the most was that it felt like their relationship had regressed seven years in just one night. Despite how close they’d been just before they’d died, their time together had not started that way.
Hunter assumed most parents met their new children as infants in hospitals, but he hadn't gotten that option. No, the first time he met his daughter was in the house of his ex-girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend Maria, who’d been given temporary custody after Jessie’s death. He only had a second to look at her, glaring up at him as she clung to Maria’s hand like an angry little cat—only a second to think that she didn’t look much like him, and that was probably a good thing—but, ah, her eyes were hazel, so he must have thrown an allele in there somewhere.
Then she spoke her first ever words to him, which were, “I don’t need you.”
She shot him through the heart before he could even open his mouth.
Euphy really did take after her mother, although technically the bullet Jessie used hadn’t hit any important organs.
She’d then followed up her initial statement with, “I want to live with Auntie Maria, so you can go.”
Remembering that made his heart ache. She’d been seven years old, newly bereaved, and just meeting her father for the first time in her life. She’d been so tiny, so angry, so afraid.
Which was all terrible, but she’d also been so cute! Thinking about her at that age made him tear up a bit. He almost reached for his wallet to pull out a picture, then realized it was gone with all the other photos he’d had of her and, oh, he actually felt really upset about that.
No internet was fine, but he wished he could have kept the pictures.
Hell, he hadn’t even had a chance to see her in this world as a kid! Her face wasn’t too different, but that pink hair! She must have looked like a furious little ball of cotton candy!
It really wasn’t fair.
Still, he felt confident that if he could coax her into trusting him once, he could certainly do it again. All he needed was some time, and also a way to convince her that he wasn’t a video game villainess who wanted to kill her.
That last part was the rub, really, since he knew just how paranoid and suspicious his daughter could be from personal experience. Even if he managed to corner her somewhere and tell her he was her dad, she’d probably still take some serious convincing. Ah, and she also might attack him if he scared her enough. He’d really lucked out that she hadn’t smacked him for grabbing her earlier. He might have stood a chance in his old body, but definitely not in this one.
He resolved to try and keep his hands to himself from now on, because getting beaten up by his daughter would be too embarrassing.
Really, the easiest thing would be if he could find another Maria, someone she already trusted who could take her side and help her verify him, but doing that meant he’d have to reveal his identity to someone, which could be troublesome.
Also troublesome: was he going to have four children-in-law?
He’d be the first to admit that he hadn’t paid enough attention to Rabbit Heart when he had the chance. He vaguely recalled Euphy saying something about a harem ending, but he couldn’t remember if she’d been joking or not.
It wasn’t that he was against her having four partners. In fact, he felt it was very reasonable that so many people would want to pursue her because she was obviously so precious and great. However, weren’t the protagonists all kinda dangerous?
Well, okay, to an extent everybody here was, thanks to magic. It was like they were all born with machine guns for hands, but didn’t worry about it because it was normal to them. He tried to imagine what things would be like back in his old world if everyone could use magic.
“A bloodbath,” he concluded.
Still, even in this setting, the protagonists were something special in terms of destructive power! He supposed it made sense for the Goddess to pick scary people for Her team, but he wanted to ask if She’d thought through the potential complications.
Oh, and as for the Goddess…
He felt a muscle in his forehead twitch.
The gods here sure weren’t shy about using people, were they? Except in this case the person in question was his teenage daughter, which had him madder than a broody hen. Sure, he’d joined the army when he was eighteen, but this was different! This was about his baby, and if the Goddess thought he’d sit back and let Euphy hare off into mortal peril on Her behalf then She had another thing coming!
A soft chiming sound came from his pocket, and he realized he’d gotten a message. Earlier he’d stumbled upon Ianthe’s receiver in her bedroom, and so he’d grabbed it to figure out how it worked. As far as he could tell, aside from sending and receiving voice spells targeted at people’s mana signatures, its main function was letting Anemone worry at him from afar.
“President, how are you feeling? Do you need me to bring you anything? Even if you’re feeling alright, maybe stop by the infirmary again in a bit?”
No, he refused. Chiron was too smart, it made him nervous.
“Ah, don’t forget, your regular medicine should be here sometime week. Please try to eat some extra iron, and lay down if you feel too tired.”
Her regular medicine? He frowned. What condition—
And then he recalled that red-lit room in the Duke’s dungeons, and the awful noises that echoed from it.
“Shit.” He shivered. That wasn’t something he wanted to think about right now, or ever, but it did remind him of one important thing he kept ignoring:
This new body of his was cursed.
He really, really needed to look into that.
Since this place had no internet, he went to the university’s library.
Or, at least, he tried too.
An hour passed and he still couldn’t seem to actually get there.
He kept getting turned around, which didn’t make any sense because Ianthe knew Aegis inside and out, and the library was pretty hard to miss. It was situated in the oldest and biggest building on campus, a two-winged monstrosity with a tall domed section in the back that housed it. Once he got in there, all he had to do was head towards the back, but instead he seemed to wind up anywhere else.
Maybe his fever was acting up again? He took some more of the pills, but they didn’t seem to help. On the bright side, the frustrated look on his face and Ianthe’s less than stellar reputation kept the people he was passing from trying to bother him as he figured things out.
Or at least it did, until…
“President, you look lost.”
He’d been glowering down a hallway in confusion when someone spoke from behind him. Turning around to look at them, he paused, recognizing her.
Ianthe’s memories told him that the woman before him was Selene, and that she was the Dean of the College of Artificing. Despite her long silver hair, she looked only a few years older than Ianthe, and it only then occurred to Hunter that gray or white hair in this world had nothing to do with age. Her clothing was in the Thymimatan style, a dark open robe draped over a black silk dress, cinched at the waist with a purple sash that matched her eyes.
The weird thing was, Hunter felt like he’d seen her before in his memories, too? He couldn’t quite place her. She must have been from the game. An extra, maybe?
Smiling gently down at him, she continued, “How are you feeling? I heard about your injury. If there’s anything I can do to help…”
He frowned, staring up at her with narrowed eyes. It was on the tip of his tongue. He hadn’t seen her in the game, he’d seen her in…
Ah!
It hit him.
He remembered her from a fight he had with Euphy about the game.
By that point in time she’d played the thing to death and seemed to be getting bored with it. Then, like a rain of obsession-fueling mana from heaven, DLC was announced. She’d rushed to the Nintendo store and then spent a good twenty minutes waffling on whether she ought to buy it right then or save up for some other game, at which point he’d looked up to tell her to just get both, when did he ever not give her money, only to see something that made him frown.
“Wait, isn’t that lady a little old to be a love interest?”
The art onscreen depicted the woman in front of him now, with her name and profession. With her were some younger fellows Hunter hadn’t run into yet.
In response, his daughter had looked him dead in the eye and said, “So? What’s wrong with dating older women? Don't tell me you think they have an expiration date?”
Just like that, she’d instantly pissed him off. She knew that wasn’t what he meant, she was just baiting him because she could, but unbeknownst to her she’d hit a sore spot, and his tone hadn’t been joking when he snapped back.
“What’s wrong is the main character is a teenager!”
“Only for a bit, she does turn twenty.”
“It’s still not fine if she’s twenty! That woman has to have at least a decade on her, and she’s a dean!”
Euphy had said, “So? If it’s forbidden it’s more fun.”
Standing in front of the older woman in question now, Hunter winced. That fight had not gone well, and the worst part was, he still wasn’t sure if he’d been able to convince Euphy that anyone that old who wanted to date someone that young was bad news.
So…
Should he kill this woman?
He must have been staring too long, or some of his murderous intentions had slipped out, because Selene’s smile grew awkward and she asked, “Is everything alright?”
No! It wasn’t!
Gritting his teeth, he lied, “It’s nothing. Just still a little dizzy from my injury, is all.”
Dare to date my daughter—no, dare to date any of these kids and see what I’ll do to you!
“Ah.” Selene’s thick silver eyebrows met in the middle, hugging like two worried caterpillars. “Is that why you’ve been walking back and forth? You looked busy, so I wasn’t going to bother you. But then you passed me a third time.”
Well, that confirmed one thing. He really had been getting turned around, and this lady had witnessed it.
“Are you trying to go somewhere? Do you need help?”
As much as he loathed spending time with this pervert, he really couldn’t seem to get there on his own. Anyway, he needed to figure out what he was going to do about her.
”The library.”
”Ah—this way,” Selene said, openly pleased to be of help. She reached out casually to take his arm, but Hunter wasn’t having that.
“Touch me and I’ll break your fingers.”
She froze, her smile faltering, and withdrew her hand. For a moment there was a strange look in her eyes, like his rejection had given her a deep cut, but her expression quickly returned to normal.
”I apologize, I should have asked,” she replied, and clasped her hands behind her back. Then, like nothing had happened at all, she began to make small talk. “So, I’ve started reviewing late applications for my cohort…”
Mulling over Ianthe’s memories, he found that there were a few instances where this woman had made overtures of friendship towards Ianthe. Ianthe shut them down with Selene like she did with everyone else, in part because she didn’t have the time nor the desire for relationships, and in part because there was something about being around Selene that she found upsetting. Hunter tried to remember exactly what it was, but perhaps Ianthe hadn’t known either, because all he could conjure up was a vague feeling of discomfort.
That said, other than her vibes and his memory of the DLC art, he couldn’t recall anything about Selene that seemed untoward. Her students rarely complained about her and she filled her job’s role without any incidents. Plus, the cohort she was now discussing with him tended to generate projects that made the university a great deal of money off of patents.
”… I know I usually take on product-oriented proposals, but there are a few less-marketable ones I was considering this year—particularly ones to do with curses…”
Curses a big problem around here, huh? He thought, still not really sure what curses were.
Was it like a fairy tale thing? Were people getting accosted by poisoned spindles and iron shoes?
She looked at him like she was trying to see whether or not he approved, so he just nodded at her, said, “Mmhm,” and went back to considering more important topics, such as:
Ok, should he kill her?
First of all, he was retired, and if he’d learned anything since getting this new body it was that he was rusty to an embarrassing degree. Second of all, it was kind of nice not having to worry that somebody somewhere might dig up something they shouldn’t and suddenly cause him a lot of problems.
He quietly walked that thought back, recalling that one of the first things he’d done when he got here was burn a body and, knowing Ianthe, that probably hadn’t been the only one. He resolved to take some time later to search through her memories and make sure she hadn’t left him any other surprises.
The third and biggest reason was, of course, magic.
Magic was a new and incredibly complicated variable. He was used to going after people who knew how to protect themselves, but how they did that here was very different, and there were a staggering number of ways they could do it. Selene as a target might be more complicated than most, considering that, like Ianthe, she was an artificer. Artificers specialized in designing inventions that could store spells and cast them later, and… Well, there were a lot of defensive spells out there, not to mention countless ways of combining them.
"…Do you remember when we were younger and pitfall curses began showing up?”
“Yes,” he lied automatically.
"I don’t know if you heard, but a few friends and I successfully lobbied to get the research embargo against them dropped, and now I’ve received a proposal aiming to address them.”
Don’t tell me you’re a politician, too?
He frowned a little, trying to remember. Selene was… a Marchioness? Not even a Young Marchioness, she actually held a title.
Hunter knew that if one had money and luck, the Cydonian lifespan usually petered out around the 150s. Because of this, a lot of heirs wouldn’t inherit their titles until they themselves were past their sixties, so it wasn’t uncommon for someone like Ianthe to go off and have an entirely different career before she eventually took over.
However, Selene had a title, and those generally came with some pretty big responsibilities, so why the hell was she teaching at Aegis instead?
"I’ve been exploring some countermeasures myself, but I haven’t come up with anything that’s practical for an individual, much less affordable for mass-market production.”
Hunter nodded, still only half paying attention. At least this bit of the conversation he did understand, thanks to Ianthe’s memories of artificing. In terms of materials cost, development time, and the knowledge involved, a lot of artifacts ended up wildly expensive. That had changed somewhat in the last century thanks to a new generation of artificers that specifically focused on making affordable designs utilizing inexpensive materials and cleverly-combined low-level spells, but when it came to something high level such as, say, a defensive enchantment that could stop someone from stabbing, or burning, or poisoning you, that stuff was still rare and expensive.
Not that it was a problem for Selene. First of all, as an artificer herself, she had the ability to design her own inventions at cost of materials. Second of all, like Ianthe she’d probably collected far more than ordinary people in the course of her professional research, so God only knew what kind of things she had stored away. Third of all…
She was rich. As far as Ianthe knew, Selene was as rich as her if not richer, and…
I really gotta find some poorer people to hang out with, or all this money is gonna make me weird.
He wanted to pretend that he was still the proud son of humble, hard-working immigrants, and that money wouldn’t change him, but if he was being honest with himself, if he ever visited Ianthe’s bank vault, he’d probably get so excited he’d leap into it like Scrooge McDuck and break his neck.
“I don’t suppose it’s a topic you’ve had time to look into?” Selene asked, her voice soft and a little hopeful.
”No,” he replied, and failed to notice how his response seemed to deflate her.
“I see. Well, you’ve probably been busy with your own troubles,” she murmured. Her smile became self-deprecating, as though she’d been foolish to think Ianthe would have cared about that sort of thing at all.
While he’d been ignoring her emotional state, he had been paying attention to her accessories. He didn’t usually bother with jewelry, but after stopping by Ianthe’s apartment earlier he’d still picked up a few things, all enchanted with offensive and defensive capabilities, though that sounded a bit more impressive than it really was. Artifacts like those had to be designed very carefully so they wouldn’t accidentally trigger if someone bumped into you, which meant that their window of usefulness was narrower than he’d like.
Though he couldn’t tell at a glance what Selene’s jewelry did, or if it was even enchanted at all, it was safest to assume that it was.
He had no idea how she was protecting herself, and had no way to reliably find out. He had none of his old tools here, and while he did have magic, so did she, and she was probably far more used to utilizing it.
The more he thought about it, the more it felt like figuring out how to take her down would be quite the pickle.
Strangely enough, that actually made him more interested in trying.
It was the challenge that excited him. He’d been so successful as a freelancer in part because he’d specialized in finding creative ways to take out targets that ought to be invincible, and puzzling out how to successfully and quietly get rid of this pervert was filling him with professional nostalgia.
"Ianthe?” Selene asked. She moved to block his way so suddenly that he nearly ran into her.
"What? What are you doing?” He asked, glaring up at her. She couldn’t read his thoughts, could she?
"You wandered off,” Selene replied, radiating concern at him. “Where were you trying to go?”
"I…” he began, and then looked around himself. He’d veered off into a random corridor, and had no idea why. “Sorry, I got distracted. Keep going.”
Selene’s eyes narrowed, and she looked like she wanted to ask more questions. Thankfully she held back, and instead wordlessly began leading him in the right direction once more.
Meanwhile, Hunter followed her and thought, Fuck.
I think someone’s put a whammy on me.
Earlier he’d been unsure if he was just imagining it, but twice now an outside person had witnessed him getting confused.
All he wanted to do was go to the library, so why couldn’t he…?
Oh.
The curse.
It wasn’t a spindle or a shoe. It was something more subtle than that, wasn’t it?
A few years ago he had a cancer scare. Even though he’d quit, years of smoking had given him a semi-permanent cough, and eventually that cough became so painful and frequent that he had trouble breathing, and that led to a scan that found a mass, and…
Well, he was lucky, because it had been in a place that was operable, and because in the end it turned out to be benign. Still, he remembered just how terrifying it was, looking at that x-ray and wondering if that little grayish blotch was going to kill him, and how afterwards that image hovered just behind his every other thought, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it.
So why didn’t being cursed bother him? Why did it feel like a joke he could shake off, even though he knew magic was real here?
Every time he remembered it, he’d feel frightened and confused, and then he’d just forget about it. For goodness sakes, he’d been glued to Chiron for hours! He could have asked the country’s foremost medical expert about it, but he hadn’t because whenever he thought of it he’d get distracted. Now all he was trying to do was go to the library to get some information on it, and for some reason something was trying to stop him.
Well, now? Now he was scared.
There was something in his head, and it was tricking him, and even as he reviewed how he knew that and why he should be worried about it, he could feel his own thoughts getting slippery, feel how he was about to lose sight of the problem again the second he looked away from it.
He tried to focus on it, tried not to let it out of his sight, focused until he tasted blood because he’d bitten his own lips, and still it was hard to hold onto—and he realized that if this woman hadn’t picked him up he probably would have kept wandering around until he gave up or forgot what he was doing—
—And really, he ought to be more grateful to her, considering Ianthe’s reputation and the fact that she’d stepped in despite it. Instead he’d spent this whole time quietly noodling on how to get rid of her, which was in retrospect a little insane because he was basing their enmity off of a video game whose accuracy he hadn’t had a real chance to gauge yet, not to mention that even if Selene was a pervert who might threaten his daughter, she couldn’t have done anything yet since Euphy had only just arrived. Also, technically he was this woman’s boss! He couldn’t just go around killing his own employees willy-nilly because he suspected them of wrongdoing! At the very least he ought to do some investigating first!
That said, he was absolutely going to keep a close eye on this woman. If she did turn out to have any untoward intentions, any mercy was going right out the fucking window.
A hand grabbed his arm, and he startled once more.
”Ianthe,” Selene said, her voice quiet, “you’re sure everything is alright?”
It distracted me again, he thought. He’d always been a bit of a scattered thinker, it’s why Euphy kept trying to get him to try her Ritalin, but this… this was fake. He was being manipulated, and that knowledge made his blood run cold.
”Yeah,” he replied, convincing neither of them.
Focus… he needed to focus on getting to the library, on looking into curses… Library, curses, library, curses… If only he had a pen, he’d write it on his damn arms.
This time he made no effort to reject Selene, so she intertwined her arm with his and began pulling him along once more.
So close to her, he felt that vague feeling of discomfort Ianthe always had around her. Strangely enough, it didn’t feel like he was threatened by her. If anything, he just felt sort of melancholy.
Huh.
For the first time since he recognized her, he turned to really look at her, and what he saw was not the pervert behavior he’d been expecting.
Blushing. She was holding his arm, body rigid as a tin soldier, and looking away and blushing.
Seriously, how old was she? She’d hooked arms with him and that made her feel shy? How the hell was she going to prey on students when she couldn’t handle platonic human contact with her boss?
“Ianthe,” she began, not meeting his eyes even though it was obvious he was staring at her, “are you free this weekend?”
…What?
Wait. Hold on.
”I was hoping you might meet with me. You could come to my manor, if you like, or if you’re not comfortable with that, maybe a restaurant, or a café?”
His brain scrambled frantically to catch up to this unexpected turn of events.
Is she asking me out!?
Is she that desperate for a girlfriend!?
He felt that, first of all, good on her for hitting on someone in a reasonable age range. However, judging by her interest in him and possibly his daughter, he couldn’t help but feel like she was looking for a girl, and he was just an old man pretending to be a woman! He wasn’t even doing it well!
”I… don’t think that’d be appropriate,” he began, mentally swiping away visions of an illicit supervisor-supervisee romance. Were power dynamics between a boss and their subordinate still a problem if both were rich and neither of them needed to work for money?
No, more importantly, he wasn’t here to date. He was here to protect Euphy!
”Please,” she said, and now she finally looked down at him, her expression sorrowful. “I know how you feel about me. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t so important.”
???
He had to be missing something here, right? From one point of view, her wanting to date him instead of his daughter was actually really convenient, but from another, it didn’t make any fucking sense!
Gritting his teeth, he tried to pull away from her grasp. “I’m not sure what you’re looking for, Dean, but I—”
”I only need an hour!” Selene said, her grip on his arm tightening until it was painful.
No! I’m too old to pull off a honeypot. If you’re actually a danger to Euphy I’d rather just kill you!
“I’m—I’m just not comfortable with—”
Her expression darkened, and without warning she pushed him into an alcove, pinning him there against the wall.
On instinct he tried to retaliate, to get one of her wrists in a hold so he could slip away, but everything about his body was still so subtly wrong, smaller and weaker and flimsier, that she broke his grasp with laughable ease and pinned his hands to the wall.
Humiliation at the situation and anger at himself made his cheeks burn. Just as he opened his mouth to chew her out, she cut him off.
"I’ve always kept your secret, even after all these years!"
He stopped struggling, his anger turning to worry. Secret? What secret?
What else had the crazy bitch gotten up to!?
Selene’s eyes were wide with desperate frustration, her teeth clenched as she continued, “Don’t make me threaten you. Just meet with me and hear me out, that’s all I ask.”
Great, his second day in this world and he was already getting blackmailed.
Only… blackmailed with what? Was she bluffing, or did she actually know about something Ianthe was hiding? Considering how he’d entered this world, he wouldn’t be surprised to find there were a few skeletons in Ianthe’s closet that hadn’t made it into the memories he’d gotten from her.
Unfortunately, this was not a great location for asking Selene to elaborate on Ianthe’s crimes.
He glared back at her. “What are we meeting about?”
”Helios,” she said, like that should mean something to him.
It did not.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He had enough bullshit on his plate right now as it was, he couldn’t spare any extra brainpower for whatever mishegoss 1craziness was going on here.
On the bright side, she wanted to meet in a week, so that gave him that much time to figure something out.
“Okay,” he agreed, unsure what else to do. “Saturday. A café. I’ll pick the place.”
Somewhere well-lit and public, with no alcoves, he mentally added.
“Thank you,” Selene said, closing her eyes in relief.
Then, like she had not just pinned her superior to a wall and threatened him, she let go of his wrists, took a step back, and calmly cleared her throat.
Hunter stepped out of the alcove and, with the air of an embarrassed cat that’s decided the only way to recover his dignity was to start grooming, began to adjust his clothes.
He’d forgotten he could use magic to defend himself, hadn’t he? And she hadn’t done anything that could trigger any of his artifacts.
He let out a beleaguered sigh. Oh, for fucks sake… he really needed to get his shit together.
“Ianthe?”
He twitched angrily when she called for him. If he was younger he would have cursed at her, but after seven years of fatherhood what he actually said to her was:
”Do you think that kind of behavior is appropriate?”
Selene tensed up, reddening once more.
”This is a school, there are kids around,” he continued, glaring at her with an expression that suggested that, if she weren’t a fully grown woman, he would have sent her to stand in a corner somewhere to reflect on her mistakes. “Do better.”
Selene’s mouth parted, but she didn’t seem to know what to say. She probably wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d retaliated somehow, physically or magically, but… instead she was being scolded like a schoolgirl.
Instead of getting angry, she blushed harder.
”You… you used to like…” She stopped, folding her hands together as her expression went back and forth between sheepish and pleased. “I mean, yes, my Lady. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
”Don’t ‘my Lady’ me,” he grumbled, “Now, are you done pushing me around?”
”Oh, uh… we’re here.” Selene pointed behind him where, not thirty feet away, the gigantic wooden doors to the library stood.
He turned around, finally noticing the impossibly obvious doors right down the hall.
Selene glanced at him, those silver caterpillars on her forehead snuggling in worry again. “I could go in with you. I have some time…”
”No, let’s… just… to the door,” Hunter bit out.
Mentally he was holding the tattered and beaten remains of his self-respect as it quietly passed away in his arms.
It’s fine as long as I get there, he told himself. And I’m never lying about having brain damage ever again.
Selene led him to the entrance and paused there. Then she pulled a card from her robes, much like the one Iphis had given him earlier, and offered it to him.
”I’ll contact you later in the week for more details,” she said.
He reached out to take it, only for her to press it into his palm and trap his hand in both of hers. Pulling it towards her chest and squeezing it a little, she gazed down at him, her eyes curved with happiness, and said, “Thank you, Ianthe. Really.”
He felt that he ought to feel smug after getting lavished with so much attention from two handsome young people in one morning, but the fact that they were both weirdos really put a damper on things.
“Cut it out and go away,” he said, tugging his hand back.
Selene, delighted by his coldness, smiled wider. “Alright. I’ll be seeing you, President.”
With one last meaningful look she turned and left.
Ignoring her, he shoved open the doors and stepped inside.