Chapter Seventy-Nine: Carol's POV

Chapter Seventy-Nine: Carol's POV
The afternoon sun slanted through the tall windows, casting long shadows across the rows of empty seats.
I sat in the back, watching Maurice erase the last equations from the whiteboard.
The other students had filed out ten minutes ago, their chatter fading down the hallway.
But I'd stayed behind, my notebook still open on the desk in front of me, the pages blank except for a few scattered doodles that meant nothing.
Maurice glanced back at me as he set down the eraser.
"Professor," I said, gathering my things and making my way down the aisle toward him. "I need to ask you something."
He turned to face me fully, leaning back against the desk with his arms crossed.
The afternoon light caught the gold rim of his glasses, making it hard to read his eyes.
"It doesn't work on her," I said.
"On Caitlin. I've tried twice now, and it's like she's behind bulletproof glass. I can't even feel the connection I usually make."
Maurice was quiet for a moment, studying me with that clinical intensity.
Then he reached up and removed his glasses, folding them carefully and setting them on the desk beside him. Without the barrier of the lenses, his eyes were darker, more direct.
"Show me," he said.
I blinked. "What?"
"Use your ability on me. Right now. I want to see the mechanism, understand how it fails when it encounters resistance."
My pulse quickened slightly.
"You want me to control you," I said slowly.
"I want you to try," he corrected. "There's a difference. And besides, I'm curious to see if you've gotten stronger since last time."
I hesitated, then nodded. It was just an experiment, after all. Scientific inquiry. Nothing more.
I fixed my gaze on his eyes, letting my focus narrow until everything else in the room blurred at the edges.
"Tell me," I said, keeping my voice light, "what's on the final exam."
Maurice's jaw tightened.
I saw his hands grip the edge of the desk, and for a moment I thought he'd throw me off entirely.
But then his lips parted, and words came out that clearly didn't want to be spoken.
"Question twelve," he said, each syllable forced. "Mechanisms of epigenetic modification in mammalian cell lines."
The moment the words left his mouth, I released my hold, and he sucked in a sharp breath, his head dropping forward slightly.
When he looked up again, there was something almost like approval in his expression, mixed with irritation.
"You've gotten stronger," he said. "Considerably so. A few months ago, you wouldn't have been able to get that much out of me."
"But I could do it," I said. "I could make you answer. With Caitlin, there's nothing. Like she's not even there."
Maurice straightened, reaching for his glasses and sliding them back on.
"The vampire who controlled all of you," he said.
"The blonde woman is significantly more powerful than you are, and she's left her mark on the girl's mind. Think of it as a lock on a door. She locked it, and you don't have the right key."
I felt my shoulders sag slightly. "So there's nothing I can do."
"I didn't say that." Maurice moved away from the desk, pacing toward the window.
"There are two ways to bypass a superior lock. Either the person who set it removes it willingly, or you become strong enough to break through it by force."
"And how exactly do I do that?" I asked, following him. "The second option, I mean. I doubt this vampire is going to remove anything willingly."
He was quiet for a long moment, then continued: "Your ability is unusual, Carol. It doesn't follow any known species patterns, so it's hard to predict. But it also means it has potential that others don't."
He turned to look at me. "The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. The more complex the target, the more your mind learns to adapt. But there's a cost."
"What kind of cost?"
"The kind that makes you question where the line is between using your ability and letting it use you."
He said quietly. "I've seen powerful people lose themselves, starting with small things, convinced themselves it was justified, and ended up hollowed out, addicted to that sense of control."
I thought about how easy it had become to use my ability, how natural it felt now to reach into someone's mind and pull out what I needed.
And I thought about the satisfaction I'd felt when Maurice had answered my question, that little thrill of power.
"I'm not going to become that," I said.
"I hope not," Maurice said. "But power has a way of changing people, whether they intend it to or not."
I pushed down that flicker of unease and cleared my throat, changing the subject.
"The blonde woman," I said. "The one who controlled us. Did you find anything?"
"I looked into it," he said. "There's no record of any blonde vampire matching that description in the Pacific Northwest registry. No recent arrivals with mental abilities of that magnitude. Which means either she's very good at staying off the radar, or she's operating under someone else's protection."
"Thank you," I said. "For the information. And for not telling Simon about the investigation."
"Simon will find out eventually," Maurice said. "He always does. But I'll leave it to you to decide when and how to tell him."
The mention of Simon made something twist in my chest, that familiar mixture of guilt and longing and fear I'd been carrying since the kiss. Since he'd pulled me onto his lap and pressed his lips to the corner of my mouth and made me feel things I had no right to feel.
Maurice must have sensed the shift in my mood because his expression softened slightly.
"Go," he said. "You have studying to do, and I have papers to grade. We'll talk more later."
After saying goodbye to Maurice, I made my way toward the library, where Emma had texted me an hour ago saying she'd be camped out until the biochemistry exam stopped haunting her dreams.
I found her in our usual spot on the third floor, surrounded by a fortress of textbooks and highlighters, her blonde hair pulled into a messy bun.
She looked up when I slid into the chair across from her, and the relief on her face was immediate.
"Thank God," she said. "I was starting to think you'd been abducted by aliens. Or worse, that you'd decided organic chemistry was more important than our friendship."
"Never," I said, pulling out my own textbook. "Though at this point, alien abduction might be preferable to finals week."
We settled into the comfortable rhythm of studying together, the kind of easy silence that comes from spending enough time with someone that you don't always need to fill the space with words.
Emma worked through problem sets while I tried to memorize metabolic pathways, until darkness fell outside the windows.
Emma checked her watch. "It's almost six. Walk back together? I'm starving anyway, and if I look at one more amino acid structure I'm going to cry."
I nodded, and walked out of the library together with Emma.
Footsteps sounded behind us, not like another student taking a shortcut.
I slowed my pace slightly, a smell that made my hackles rise.
Blood. Fresh blood. And something acrid and wrong that reminded me of Maurice's office after he'd gone too long without feeding.