As soon as they were through the door of Moxie’s room, Noah made a beeline for her bed. A vine shot out and wrapped around his chest, yanking him to a stop before he could flop down.

Noah shot a glance over his shoulder at Moxie. “What?”

“When’s the last time you had a shower?” Moxie asked. “We’ve been traveling for weeks. You are not getting on my bed in those dirty clothes.”

“To be fair, these are pretty clean. I blew my old clothes up.”

“Shower.”

Noah grumbled and fished through his bag in search of a new change of clothes, only to find that he’d actually managed to go through all of them. He cleared his throat. “I appear to be out of wardrobe replacements.”

“That’s because you keep blowing them up,” Moxie said. “What, are you asking for my clothes? I don’t think they’d fit you very well.”

“I’ve probably got something left in my room. I’ll be right back.”

He headed down the hall and back toward his room. When he got a chance the following morning, he’d have to go place an order with the seamstress to get some more outfits made. Not fully paying attention to his surroundings, Noah reached his door and pulled it open.

Contessa sat cross-legged on his bed, petting a white ball of fur curled up in her lap. Noah recognized Mascot’s glowing red horns immediately. Contessa’s head jerked up to meet his gaze. She had a small piece of jerky in her hand that was half eaten – and, judging by the small pieces of food scattered across the top of his sheets, Mascot had been the one enjoying it.

Either that or Contessa is a really messy eater.

“I don’t know where the monster came from,” Contessa stammered. She made as if to stand up, then looked down at the cat and elected not to move. “It sat down on my lap, and now I don’t want to get up. I’ll wash the bed, I–”

“Forget it,” Noah said, walking across the room to his dresser and digging through it. “Looks like he’s taken a liking to you. Don’t piss him off. That cat has indirectly killed a few people.”

“This?” Contessa paused mid-pet, which caused Mascot to let out a threatening purr. She started to stroke his fur again and Mascot fell silent. “How? It seems so… innocent. And soft.”

Noah found a change of clothes and pulled it out, tucking them under an arm. “Well, hopefully he’ll stay that way. I didn’t realize you liked animals. Not a plant person like the rest of your family?”

“Not everyone in the Torrin family is a plant mage,” Contessa grumbled. “And I was never good with them anyways. At least animals can think. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

“Hey, don’t let me mess up your mood.” Noah shrugged. “Like what you like, it’s no concern of mine. A cat-sitting service for Mascot when he’s bored is pretty useful. It means he won’t try to bring monsters to kill me while I’m trying to relax.”

“Has… he done that before?” Contessa swallowed and sent another look at the contented cat in her lap.

“Only a few times. I’ve never seen him that calm before, though.”

Contessa nodded thoughtfully. It was one of the first times that Noah had seen her genuinely caring about something other than her own life. He wasn’t particularly worried about Mascot’s safety with her – the small monster could break into Father’s office without a second thought, so a Rank 2 Mage definitely wasn’t going to put him at any risk.

“If you want to include taking care of Mascot in your contract, we can replace some of the information gathering,” Noah offered. “I don’t know how much of your time he’s going to take up, but if he sticks around a lot, you may not be able to get much more accomplished.”

Contessa’s eyes shot up. “Seriously?”

There was definitely more excitement in her voice than she’d meant to let through, because her cheeks reddened in shame a moment later.

“Just keep an ear out.” Noah turned to leave, then paused. He looked over his shoulder at Contessa. “Just so you know, I’m not going to hold you here. So long as you don’t disrespect Moxie again and don’t try to share our business anywhere, you can do what you want. You don’t have to stay here. I’m sure you could find a real job somewhere else. I won’t come after you for revenge or anything if you do.”Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

A small smile pulled at one corner of Contessa’s lips, but it was a moment before she responded. “I kind of figured that out. You kept threatening me, but everything I know about demons says that they almost never care about other people. I just don’t know what else to do. I’ve lived my whole life for the Torrin family, and now they don’t need me anymore.”

“Do whatever you want to,” Noah said. “So long as it doesn’t involve being an asshole.”

Contessa cringed slightly. “Yeah. Point taken.”

“Good. Never too late to improve. I’ve been making great strides in my own personal pursuit of self-betterment.”

Namely, not killing myself too often.

With that, Noah headed out and closed the door behind him. He didn’t know where Karina had gone, but he wasn’t particularly interested in finding out. She was probably still somewhere in the general vicinity, but the only thing on his mind now was a shower and a change of clothes – if only so he could flop on Moxie’s bed.

***

Noah flopped on Moxie’s bed. His dirty clothes – the only remaining set from the ones that Father had donated to him – laid in the corner of the room in a small pile. His shower had gone on for considerably longer than he’d planned it to, and he felt more refreshed than he had in ages.

“I should get a Bath Rune,” Noah said into the soft vines making up the sheet beneath him.

“That’s called a Water Rune, and you have one.”

“Oh. Right. That’s lamer, though.” Noah rolled over. A vine grabbed a pillow from beside him and smacked him in the face with it. He grabbed the pillow, wrestling it from the vine and sticking it behind his head. “Speaking of Runes – we’ve got more than enough money. Maybe we should look into buying the missing ones to fix your combinations, Lee.”

Lee looked up at him. She finished chewing the last of the jerky that they had left over from the trip, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Okay. We should save some in case Todd still needs a healing potion.”

“Naturally.” Noah sat up and leaned against the wall. The scratch of Moxie’s quill on paper broke the silence. She was hunched over her desk, still trying to figure out the exact specifics of her lesson plan for the next day.

“Do we need to have everything figured out by tomorrow?” Lee asked. “Don’t we have more time until everything officially starts?”

“There’s no official start,” Moxie replied without looking away from her work. “Most professors will get things kicked up this or next week, though. We’ll get a letter with information on the exams for the semester soon, so we should be ready.”

Noah watched her for a few moments, remaining quiet. Moxie was really putting a lot of thought into her role as a teacher, but she’d never wanted to be one in the first place. Evergreen had forced the role onto her.

I don’t want to undermine her efforts, but is this really okay?

“Moxie?”

Moxie glanced up, picking up on the tone of Noah’s voice. “Yeah?”

“Is this really what you want to do?” Noah gestured to her desk. “Teaching, that is. I know you feel responsibility toward Emily, and that’s important, but it’s almost as if you’re trying harder now than you were before, and that’s saying a lot.”

A second passed. Moxie lowered her quill, returning it to its resting place and leaning back in her chair to look up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. At first, I thought I’d just want to cut free once I was free of Evergreen. Then I got free, and I realized I didn’t know what else I’d want to do. It’s a lot easier to just… not think about it, you know? If I throw myself at this as hard as I can, then there’s less to worry about.”

“That doesn’t seem like the healthiest way to cope with things. I’m not sure if I’m the best person to be harping on that, given my ideal solution for most of the problems I face,” Noah said. “I don’t really have a good answer, but as I’ve said before, I’m sure Emily wouldn’t hold it against you if you wanted to stop.”

“I know that, but it doesn’t really change anything. Now that I’m actually the one doing the teaching instead of worrying about Evergreen over my shoulder, I guess it feels a bit different. I think.”

“Teaching is fun. It’s stretching and hitting your friends,” Lee provided. “And sometimes you learn stuff too.”

I’m not sure that’s the definition of teaching I’d want to go with.

“It’s certainly better than a lot of other things. I have been having a bit of fun trying to figure out what I’m going to spend time teaching now that I’m the one that actually gets to decide what it’ll be,” Moxie said. “This year is going to be interesting, especially with a new student. She’s not exactly the standard.”

“Far from it,” Noah agreed. “Based on how strong she was when we fought, she’s a Rank 3.”

“I think some of that power came from Wizen’s control over her, but she’s definitely at least a Rank 2 if not more. Well ahead of our current students – or at least, ahead of where they were before we left for our vacation.”

“Isn’t that gonna mess the tests up?” Lee asked. “She’s gonna stomp all the other students.”

That brought a grin to Noah’s face. “Can you imagine her dropkicking Edward? I haven’t thought about that little brat since we went to the Linwick Estate for the first time. I’d love to see the look on his face when he realizes that Isabel and Todd are Rank 2 already.”

“We’ll have to see. I don’t think Arbitage is going to let someone that much stronger than everyone else screw with the results of the exams, but who knows.” Moxie picked her quill up and got back to work. “Noah, do you want to handle most of tomorrow’s lesson? You might as well just introduce Alexandra to your… unique form of fighting.”

“Sure.” Noah shrugged. “You’ll just have to keep Alexandra distracted for a bit afterward while I’m using Sunder to help Todd, Isabel, and Emily. I’m not going to be sharing that around yet.”

“Logically,” Moxie said. “That’ll be fine. I’ll just sic Lee on her.”

“We could stretch,” Lee said, a spark of glee flashing in her eyes. “And then we could spar. It’ll be fun.”

For one of you.

“Sounds like a plan,” Noah said. He laid back down on the bed and yawned. “Okay. I think we’ve dealt with just about everything we need to for today. I’m going to make my new Runes now. Wake me up if anything important happens, okay?”

“Will do,” Lee promised.

With that, Noah grabbed his grimoire and opened the large book up in his lap. There were some new Rank 3 Runes waiting for him.