He fixed my eyes, lowering his voice as if he were just talking to me.

“As soon as you look at a controversial subject like mythology in a scientific way, it gains respectability. And maybe it’s just in my interest to give a certain subject more respectability.”

He propped himself up on the table in front of me, and I was grateful that this table existed, because it hid my hands, which were clawing into the fabric of my gray-blue skirt, from the professor’s gaze, and prevented me from being completely exposed to him.

“Miss Blair,” he began quietly, as if we were alone in the room. “Do you believe in conspiracy theories?”

Confusion rose in me because all I understood by conspiracy theories were the things human residents told each other about Blairville, the founding families, or the woods. And they were all true.

“No,” I pressed out in concentration.

His gaze inspected mine, searching for the lie behind my unstable facade, and I wondered how readable I was to this man.

Then, unexpectedly, he pushed himself off the table.

“Neither do I,” he replied dryly, spinning around to walk back through the rows of seats to his table. “I believe in facts.” He walked around the table and picked up his iPad. “And this may surprise you, but mythology involves a lot of provable facts.”

He looked around the table, and I had a feeling he was intentionally avoiding my gaze.

Amber turned to me and eyed me, shaking her head, as if she thought I was paranoid. Maybe I was.

The guy was so weird that I was still sitting there in my shock stupor, staring at him like he was a dinosaur skeleton that had gotten lost in the Louvre.

“How exactly we can link mythology to molecular biology is something I’ll get into with you another time.”

I looked at David, who was staring at my open laptop.

Quickly, I closed the web page to the DLSC.

David looked at me, eyed me suspiciously, then the Prof.

“He’s human,” he finally said so quietly that only I could hear him.

I gritted my teeth.

Of course he was human. But why did this guy seem anything but human? And what kind of prejudice did he have toward my family?

“He works in your family’s research center,” I returned insecurely.

David eyed me as if I had said something clever. Then he looked ahead to the Prof.

“Trust me, Quatura, he’s just a curious person.”

I followed his gaze to the professor, who opened a PowerPoint presentation on the whiteboard.

“Today, however, I will first give you an overview of the course.” He cleared his throat and pointed to the whiteboard, and around me the other students began opening their laptops and notebooks. My gaze lingered on his prominent Adam’s apple. “We only have a few months, which is why this course will only cover the basics of molecular biology: DNA, gene expression, transcription, replication, translation, gene regulation, mutations...”

I listened to the professor and tried to push aside the strange feeling.

He was probably just some highly intelligent fanatic. I didn’t even know what mythologies he was dealing with... Why did I immediately see him as a threat? Maybe because he jumped at my question?

“The subfields we will discuss are genetics, genomics, epigenetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, molecular genetics, molecular immunology, structural biology, molecular oncology, and molecular neurobiology.”

I forced myself to look at the laptop instead of the professor and focus on getting my shaking under control.

Probably, I really was too paranoid.

I shook my head and started typing.

“And, depending on what else you’re studying, you’ll each delve deeper into the topics we’re discussing here in the coming semesters.”

It wasn’t long before my gaze slid back not from the whiteboard to the laptop but to him, and our eyes met.

Again, I held my breath, trying to reassure myself that he was looking at me by maintaining eye contact. Something I had a hard time doing with any other person, but with this unrealistic-looking man, it was like making eye contact with a ghost.

He was no longer smiling. And the intensity of his green eyes made me shudder inside.

He looked away to the whiteboard and continued.

And I took another breath.

“I think you’ve made an enemy, Quatura,” David said from beside me.

And how right he would be.

Chapter 27

Emely

When I entered the room, she was still asleep, but fortunately, I was the only one here. The Blair cousins had probably taken some unnecessary extra courses in mathematics, which was Quatura-typical and idiotic. Something you didn’t really need when you owned almost the entire inner city as it was. But Grace had always wanted the extra credit to make her vain mother proud.

I tiptoed over to my bed with care, where somewhere I must have left my cell phone, which I had forgotten here this morning.

“Julian...”

I immediately wheeled around when I heard a faint whisper from the other corner of the room.

Great. Sleeping Beauty had awoken from her slumber. Now, of all times, when I was here. Couldn’t she have slept a few hours longer?

“Julian, where am I?”

I rolled my eyes in annoyance.

Bayla sounded a little confused, and judging by her scrunched-up face, things had really hit her hard yesterday.

“I’m not Julian,” I replied, perhaps a little too harshly, and turned back to my bed.

I threw back the black blanket, but there was nothing there. Crap, where had I put it?