Page 4 of Lessons with the Mothman (Monster Smash Agency)

CHAPTER 4

Victoria

"I'm not saying demisexuality doesn't exist, Margo. I'm asking you to make the supported argument with evidence that's more than anecdotal. This is what we're here for."

I stared down at my notes as Phillip clapped his hands together. At my side, Lyle muttered the word "prick" under his breath, the harsh word still silky in his voice.

"Sam, Kate, you're up next week. Have your points emailed to the class by Friday. Everyone, come ready with your questions. I can tell when you come up with them on the fly," Professor Stanton called over the sounds of us shuffling our laptops and notebooks and phones into bags. I kept my head down as I turned for the door.

"Victoria? A word."

Shit, Phillip. It's the first day .

Lyle stalled at my side, catching my eye, and I nodded him toward the door. "Wait for me?" I asked, loud enough for it to drift to the desk at the front of the classroom.

Lyle shrugged, but he checked on me once more before sliding out of the open doors with the rest of our seminar. I moved slowly through the scattered desks, down the shallow tiers of the amphitheater style classroom. It was too big a space for a class of seventeen, but I'd taken a spot as far from the front as I could reasonably excuse.

I stopped my approach at the last step, well out of reach from Professor Phillip Stanton, not that I thought I was really in any danger of him reaching out.

Lyle had left the classroom doors open. He was the only person who knew about the affair I'd had with our seminar professor in our first year. He hadn't even mentioned knowing about it until last spring, after we'd tried hooking up. Hiding sexual tension from an incubus was useless, apparently. Trying to pretend that you're about to have an orgasm was also useless.

"I can't really come unless you can, Vic. Want to order food and watch Secretary ?"

Lyle was a good friend.

Phillip leaned back against his broad cherry wood desk and crossed his ankles, and contrasting, illogical tendrils of arousal and disgust flitted through me. "It's good to have you back in class again, Vic."

"Thank you, Professor Stanton."

"Even Eddie calls me Phillip."

Not because he respects you , I thought, but I tipped my head, waiting for him to get to his real point.

"I saw the update on your study. A volunteer assistant in… What exactly is this Elias offering you?"

Phillip was less than a decade older than me and his sandy hair had a little more gray in it now than it did three years ago, but it didn't lessen his appeal physically. Truth be told, I was still attracted to this man, visually speaking. He was tall, slim, and conventionally handsome. He also dressed the part of a professor, which I now suspected was an intentional effort. His tweed patch elbows were every bit the costume as the pleated skirts I'd worn to his class had been at the time.

I'd been looking for a fantasy, searching for something to feel explosive—or maybe just something to cause my life to implode. As much as he'd told me he wasn't attracted to students, that it was my intelligence that ensnared him and my maturity that made his desire for me "helpless," I figured it was safe to say he was enjoying the stereotype as much, if not more, than I had.

"He's arranged four interviews already," I said. One of which has the potential to offer a demonstration , I reminded myself, a warm thrill growing in my belly that was entirely inappropriate to the spirit of the study, I suspected.

"He finds you subjects," Phillip said. "You weren't able to do that on your own?"

"Some. Not as many. He has the non-human perspective too. I've edited my questions with his help."

"It's risky of you to bring an outside force to influence your study. Its reputation is already fragile enough with the department."

Isn't it your job to protect that? I wanted to ask.

"Elias is very conscious of the boundary. He offers information based on my prompting. The work I present will be my own, Professor."

"I'd like to sit in on some of the interviews."

It hit me harder than such a demand should've, and I fought to hide my flinch. My relationship with this man had dissolved as undramatically as an affair between student and professor might manage. I'd never told Brett about cheating on him, and I'd miraculously managed to avoid another class setting with Phillip Stanton for two and a half years. But the program was too small for that to go on forever. He was the only figure in the department qualified to advise my work as it was now.

"Of course. I'll send you the schedules. Accommodating the subjects will be my first priority, of course," I said. "But I can always record the interviews."

"I'm only trying to prepare you for the department's pushback," he said, not quite succeeding to disguise his smug pleasure at my discomfort. "Friction is good for a study, yeah?"

Bastard , I wanted to scream.

"I appreciate that," I said, nodding. "See you next week, Professor."

"Enjoy your lunch," he said, calling toward the door where Lyle had shifted into sight.

The incubus didn't bother smiling back at our professor, his preternatural beauty managing to emphasize cool dismissal.

"Off campus?" I suggested, almost breathless. Was I running away from the room? I forced my steps to slow, and Lyle matched me easily, looking back over his shoulder with a narrowed gaze.

Lyle was quiet, and I glanced at him. His pale, almost translucent skin shimmered under the old fluorescent lights that glowed intermittently along the ceiling of the hallway, deep blue lips twisted in a grimace.

"I have my next psych in forty minutes, but?—"

I waved my hand. "No, that's fine. I have something to eat in my bag. Let's just get outside." Preferably before my skin crawls right off my body , I added privately.

"You should report him," Lyle murmured, not his first time suggesting. "At the very least, you could get a new advisor."

I shook my head. "It was years ago. I'd just look like I was trying to work my way out of a conflict over my study. And no one else would?—"

" Someone— "

"Lyle, I'm fine," I said, my voice smooth and controlled, a little too close to my mother's own tone.

His expression softened to a smile, eerie aquamarine eyes crinkling at the corners in amusement. I found myself smiling back, some of the tangled tension in my spine easing. I'd always been good at lying. The value of appearance, both in terms of physical and also social, had been persistently enforced in my growing years.

My mother wasn't cruel, but her will was stronger than my own as a child. Her words were the stubborn rose bush that had stretched their strong roots and thorny branches inside of my mind for two decades. And she had taught me that at the bare minimum, I should always be fine . For a long time, fine had been my baseline, a status so innocuous I'd fooled not just my family, but Brett, and even myself. It was a reflex deeper than my own nature to say that I was fine.

And it was a relief beyond measure to now have a friend incapable of being tricked by a lie, no matter how good.

"When do you meet with the moth again?" Lyle asked, offering me an easy change of subject.

I glanced over my shoulder as another class let out, this one full of undergrads. They looked shockingly young to me now, although I could remember how mature I'd considered myself at the time. I'd been in a relationship for four years already, and I was too tightly wound at parties to enjoy myself, especially with Brett checking in by text every hour. Maybe he'd always known I would stray eventually.

"Tonight," I answered Lyle.

"At his bar again?"

I'd been to Nightlight three times so far, and each one had started with a new cocktail waiting for me, and a quiet exchange of notes between myself and Elias. He was an interesting bar owner by my estimation, somehow both entirely in command of the space and people around him, and yet also fairly uninvolved. No one greeted him as they took their seats, and he seemed to take very little interest in the general management.

I wasn't sure if he needed to meet there so he could keep working, since I hadn't really seen him doing anything that seemed to qualify, or if it just felt like easy neutral territory. I'd considered suggesting meeting elsewhere, like a library or coffee shop, except that the patrons of Nightlight fascinated me. The variety of monster races was wider in a small Wicker Park bar than anywhere else in the city I'd encountered, all mingling together over drinks and food. Humans were frequent too, but never so many that they outnumbered any other race.

I nodded to Lyle. "But late tonight. We have our first interview after the bar closes."

"Are they a vampire?" Lyle guessed. "How old?"

I found myself smiling. His own work was focused on fear as a sexual stimulant, and a vampire would be an excellent subject to interview.

"Decades, not centuries," I said.

Lyle drooped slightly. "We shouldn't really be swapping, anyway."

"True, but I can ask if they might know anyone qualified for you."

Lyle's long arm swung over my shoulders, squeezing briefly. "I'd owe you."

I wasn't sure that was true. My friendship with Lyle often felt lopsided, but at least a small favor might help even the scales a little.

A horn blared from the street, barely muffled even from the back porch of my apartment. The kitten in front of me stiffened and yowled in warning.

"Yes, I know," I murmured, silky and low. "How rude of them, hmm?"

The kitten hissed. Behind him, the black tomcat I'd named Hubert yawned and stretched, finishing with a lick of his jaw and a patient glance at the wet treat I held out in front of me. He knew he would get his turn.

The kitten warned me once more, arching its tiny, bony spine, but it pounced closer another few inches, and its eyes flashed between my face and the treat.

Seraphina, a svelte tortie, brushed up against my side and butted her head into my elbow. My knees and ankles ached from squatting for so long, but any attempt at settling myself would no doubt end in the kitten fleeing.

It was a dusty, dirt stained white, with spots of brown on one ear and the tip of its tail, and it had been following Hubert here for three nights, gobbling the bowls of food I left out and growling at anyone and everything. None of my other regulars paid any heed. The kitten was a scrap of fur and bone, and we'd all been through this routine before.

A soiled paw with preciously small black beans slapped ruthlessly at the end of the plastic tube, and a glob of wet treat flew out and landed on the floor of my porch. Seraphina helped herself, ignoring the kitten's outraged howl at her nearness.

I sighed, and it leapt away, scurrying into a dark corner. Growls and crunches of dry food commenced, and Hubert strolled closer to me with a lazy pace, stretching his back legs one at a time.

"Good baby," I whispered, scratching his head as he licked at the end of the treat tube.

Hubert looked like a miniature panther, with muscular broad shoulders and a long sleek frame. Unlike many of the other tomcats who visited, Hubert seemed to have considered his options and decided to settle down, accepting the hospitality of my food and the top cubby of my overly elaborate cat tree within a day of arrival. Lately, he spent more time inside the apartment than out.

"You want in while I'm gone?" I asked.

Both Hubert and Seraphina, the loyalest pair of strays I'd tamed and fixed and vaccinated, wandered to my back door obediently. They didn't always come in, but they had beds and litter boxes and food bowls when they were in the mood. I took their presence as the compliment it was.

Checking the water and food outside once more, I turned off the porch light and picked up my bag from where I'd left it at the door.

With a parting rumble and a hiss, the new stray kitten watched as I took the backstairs down to the alley, calling a car for my trip to Nightlight. It was after midnight, but the bar wouldn't close until two. I'd have time to kill there, but I found myself strangely eager.

I'd never liked bars much before. They'd been places I went with Brett and his friends and their girlfriends—noisy and crowded and inevitably the scene of someone else's personal argument, drunken tears, or vibrant shouting. After Brett, I'd found myself without a social circle that really belonged to me, without anyone to call me out for a drink. It hadn't occurred to me that I could do so on my own, that there might be a place like Nightlight, lively but not oppressively loud, where the drinks were little works of art and the crowd that frequented was anywhere from mid-twenties to centuries old.

A dark car pulled up to the curb where I waited, and I slid into the backseat, wondering what Elias might have waiting for me on the bar top when I arrived.

On my way. I texted.

Good, there are people here I'd like to introduce you to.