Chatoyant College Book 13: Chapter 11: Rumors and Speculation

Corrie walked to her magic class with the question of Elrath’s glamour on her mind. Would he have had to keep it up deliberately in order for it to continue after his death? That certainly argued for the theory that he had committed suicide. But if the glamour would have stayed with him after he died no matter what, that didn’t tell them anything.

If he had committed suicide, she didn’t think the administration needed to worry about anyone else following him. As far as she could tell, no one had known him well, so their grief wouldn’t drive them to it. In fact, if the people wanting to know more about him had talked to Dawn in an attempt to learn something, then she doubted she would be able to find people who were actually friends with him.

But maybe that wasn’t why people followed each other in committing suicide. She’d heard of things like that, young people killing themselves one after another, and they didn’t necessarily know each other. Maybe the administration actually knew what they were dong.

She hoped they did, for their own sake if no one else’s. The students wouldn’t be happy about having information kept from them in such a bloody death.

Indeed, the whispers were even louder in her psionics class than they had been in her math class. Here, she heard a lot of wondering about whether the killer had used magic. Now that she knew who the victim was, she was sure magic had to be involved, even if it was just the magic that meant iron weapons were particularly effective against faeries—but she wasn’t going to tell anyone that.

She sat down next to Roe, who had been chatting with Lin in the seat behind her, but turned to Corrie with a strained smile. “Have you heard anything? All we’re getting is rumors.”

Corrie nodded, taking in both Roe and Lin with her gaze. She was pretty sure Roe didn’t know that Christy Latham was Elrath, so she might as well just tell both of them. “Charlie’s poli-sci class was told—it was Christy Latham.”

Lin gasped. Corrie turned to her quickly. “Did you know her?”

Lin shook her head. “But she must have been a senior, right?”

“Yeah, she was.”

“She was only a few weeks away from graduating and getting out of here. That’s so sad.”

“Maybe that’s… why,” Roe said with a grimace. “A lot of people are saying it was suicide. Maybe she couldn’t handle life after Chatoyant College.”

“Maybe,” Corrie said. It wasn’t actually an unreasonable idea. Maybe Elrath had been unable to face going back to the ordinary faerie life he’d left to come be a student, or maybe he felt that he’d failed at pretending to be human.

Or maybe he was just furious with himself for changing the magic, taking away the protective magic that made students forget about the faeries’ existence and smooth everything over in their minds. He’d been so upset about others noticing that he was strange.

She put her hand over her mouth as a thought struck her. Did the administration know about the change in the magic? Maybe they thought it was going to smooth everything over. That would be why they were refusing to answer questions. When Annie had been taken by the faeries, everyone had just forgotten about her.

That approach wasn’t going to happen this time.

“You okay?” Lin asked her, frowning. Corrie nodded, and thankfully, before she had to explain herself, Professor Rook entered the room and cleared his throat to quiet the class.

Corrie turned to face him. Like in the other faerie professors’ classes, she tried to avoid touching a four-leaf clover while she was here. Professor Rook’s real appearance, that of a giant black bird, was not as threatening as Professor Lal’s teeth or Professor Strega’s lizardlike face, but it was still pretty freaky to see.

His glamour looked like a tall, slender, dark-haired man, with wrinkles around his eyes and light stubble on his cleft chin. He wore round glasses. “Today we are learning distance sight,” he said in his usual bored-sounding, slightly nasal voice. “We will begin practicing as we did with future sight. Those in the front row, please take a set of bowls and pass them back.”

Corrie took the stack of bowls as they were passed to her, chose a pretty one with a dark blue dragonfly design, and passed the stack to Kira, who sat behind her. What they’d done for future sight was to fill the bowls with water, so she automatically used magic to fill her own bowl, then looked around at those sitting near her to see if any of them needed help.

Mason, who was sitting to her right, seemed to be having trouble, so she leaned over and offered to fill his bowl for him. He gave her a grateful smile and she quickly filled it. Once everyone’s bowl was ready, they all turned to face Professor Rook again, waiting for their next instruction.