Never After (School for Good and Evil x Reader)

Chapter 47

As midnight came and went, I sat calmly in the School Master's window, my hair wet, my ebony dress bunched at the knees as I pressed bare toes against the wall. I looked out at the fluorescent green bay, reflecting the shadows of two black castles, both dark and quiet.

Just this morning, I'd been reeling with doubts: from a school that turned Evers into Nevers, from a schedule that called me a teacher of Evil when I still didn't feel quite Evil.

I turned to the Storian over her storybook, painting a scene of Agatha, Tedros, and Sophie following a white rabbit through the Woods. With every minute, my friends were getting closer to school, closer to seeing me again, closer to convincing me to leave Evil behind forever . . .

And part of me wished to listen to them.

But another part of me, a much darker part, did not. I had felt it before—when I had sampled the power that accompanied the taste of blood, when I had killed. There was a part of me that wished to succumb to the pull to be Evil. Because the power that went along with it was intoxicating.

I smiled at the ring on my finger.

He was intoxicating.

***

But two hours earlier, I had been chasing after the School Master, as he crossed a green breezeway tunnel into the old Valor tower.

"Teach Evil? Teach Curses and Death Traps? Have you lost your mind!"

"It was the Dean's suggestion. Wish I'd come up with it myself, if only to prevent her the satisfaction of a good idea," Rafal groused, ascending the staircase carved HENCHMEN. "Now that I'm young, she's been treating me like I'm incapable of running my own school. Even had the gall to tell me that my flights over the bay are disruptive since students keep peeking out the window during challenges. I am the School Master, thank you. If I want to go for a spin, I'm perfectly welcome to—"

"Rafal."

My voice was so sharp that he stopped and stared down at me through the gap in the black staircase.

"Whoever this Dean is, she expects me to be a teacher at this school, but they will not listen to me! And I don't know the first thing about teaching. And Agatha, Sophie, and Tedros are coming to kill you and here I am in a nightgown, expected to give homework and grade papers—"

But Rafal was already at the lone black-marble door atop the staircase.

"Professor Dovey's office?" I asked.

But then I saw that the door once inlaid with a glittering green beetle was now inlaid with two violet, intertwined snakes. Beneath the snakes, letters cut from amethysts spelled out a single word:

DEANS

"There's more than one? But who are—"

The door swung open magically, revealing a thin, tight-jawed woman with a long black braid and a sharp-shouldered purple gown, studying a scrap of parchment at Professor Dovey's old desk.

"Lady Lesso?" I rasped. "But where's Professor Dovey?"

Then I saw the second desk near the window, identical to the first, which had never been in the office before. No one was sitting at it.

"Let me guess, Rafal. Took her for a joyride over the bay?" said Lady Lesso, not looking up from the parchment. "Supposed to have her here twenty minutes ago. Would be nice to prepare our new teacher before she assumes my old class, don't you think? Never mind. I'll take it from here."

Rafal scowled. "I believe I give the orders at this school, Lady Lesso. And I believe you forgot a 'Master,' along with your respect. Something your fellow Dean seems to have in spades."