“I don’t know... Maybe you like to stalk girls.”

I couldn’t help but laugh after all. She probably found it rather less funny, yet she tried not to let on. 

Julian! Pull yourself together. This is about your neighbor, whose mother is good friends with your father. Don’t screw it up again.

“No, honestly, I’m just sitting there and...”

“...playing the piano?”

It wasn’t Bay who finished my sentence, but Emely.

“Was he bothering you?” she asked Bay, who looked at her in surprise.

“No, I actually wanted to talk to him.”

“You know each other?” Emely looked from Bay to me and back again.

“Yeah, he’s my neighbor.... unfortunately,” Bay replied with a put-on smile.

Emely looked back at me and I immediately recognized the confusion in her eyes. 

She must have remembered where I lived.

“Yes, unfortunately,” I replied. At that, I tried to sound a little annoyed by the fact, just like she was. In reality, though, I didn’t care where I lived or who my neighbors included, as long as they weren’t the Ruisangors or, worse, the Copelands.

“Yeah, well... I’m off, then,” Bay said, turning back to the main building and eventually disappearing behind the passing students. 

Had she wanted to say something else?

I watched her go, perhaps to avoid the coming situation. 

Emely was standing in front of me. With an even more serious face than a few days ago.

“You’re stalking your neighbors?” she finally asked briskly. But it sounded more like a judgmental sigh.

“No, man. Our windows just face each other. That’s it. I never stalked her.”

Trying to talk my way out of it didn’t fail, but Emely, for whatever reason, stuck to this irrelevant topic.

“But your window is on the other side, isn’t it?” she asked.

Now I was the one with the puzzled look.

“No, she’s my new neighbor. She lives in the run-down house across from my window.” 

Why was I explaining this to her, anyway?

“But that was the witches’ house.” 

“Yeah?”

What was she implying?

“She’s not one...of them...”

Ah, so she had smelled it, too. Better said, she hadn’t smelled it any more than I had.

“She’s one of them, though,” I sighed.

“Are you sure about that?” Emely sounded like she didn’t believe me.

“Her mother is one,” was all I replied.

“And you just talk to them? Julian, where has your honor gone? These women are just taking advantage of your family.”

“Stop always talking so snidely about others. That’s not who you are.”

Emely looked at me as if I had kicked her.

Not every witch was instantly sneaky. But in this town, if you were a Senseque, as our kind liked to call themselves solemnly, you stood alone with such a point of view.

“I just want you to be careful. They’re powerful, and everything they do is just to get something that doesn’t belong to them.”

Again and again, the same old story. When would she finally stop seeing the Quatura as the problem? In reality, we were the dangerous monsters, after all.

“Is that it for now?”

Determined to keep going, I was about to turn away when she grabbed my arm.

“Emely,” I grumbled annoyed, because I was getting tired of it. I didn’t like being pushed around.

“It’s about the Ruisangors.”

I was surprised that she had come to me about that. After all, I had nothing to do with them. 

At a slow pace, I looked around, but there was no sign of any of the three guys.

“What are they doing here?”, I inquired.

“I don’t know... I thought you’d have more of a clue.”

I immediately regretted taking an interest. Because normally I stayed out of exactly this kind of trouble.

Of course, I should have known what to expect at Vanderwood, but I hadn’t been able to afford other universities. Inwardly, I was annoyed by this.

“I have nothing to do with any of this stuff, remember?”

“But...” Emely wanted to start, but I interrupted her.