Hardboiled: Not Your Average Detective Story (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 5) by J.A. Cipriano Page B

do was get through this class, then I’d have all of lunch to figure out what was going on.
    Besides, Caleb was a god now. He was probably fine . That’s what I told myself as I slid into my seat a moment before the tardy bell rang. I know, I know. Caleb was a god. A freaking god, but I had a nagging suspicion he needed my help, and as I stared up at Matthers, the urge to flee increased. Something about the way he looked at me was a little too unsettling.
    I was a Dioscuri dammit, and more than that, I was Lillim Callina. It was my job to stop supernatural bad guys, and I was sitting in an economics class where the teacher was prattling on about something called a derivative, and how it crashed markets because we had a fiat currency or something. I don’t even know.
    What I did know was that a freaking cyclops had accosted a girl just downstairs, and instead of tracking that guy down, I was here, pretending to be a goddamn high school student. That was crazy, right?
    “Miss Callina,” Matthers said, shocking me out of my reverie.
    “Uh, yes?” I murmured, realizing the entire class was staring at me, most of them with expressions between amusement and horror.
    “Would you like to answer the question?” he asked, glaring at me from beneath his busy orange eyebrows.
    “Sure, what is it?” I asked, smiling sweetly at him. You might say I’d been caught unaware in class before, and at least back at the Dioscuri Academy, playing cool always seemed to work best. Never surrender, never admit defeat!
    Matthers sighed, letting out a single exasperated breath. “I’d like you to explain how a lead, lag market works.”
    “Oh that’s easy,” I replied, smiling because I actually knew the answer. “That’s when you have foreign transactions that expect the price of the currency in the contract to fluctuate. Say I have one euro, and I agree to buy a candy bar from you next week for a dollar. Now, a dollar costs one euro, but for some reason, I expect the dollar to be worth half a euro next week. What I’d do is wait until next week to buy the dollar for half a euro. Then I’d use my dollar to buy the candy bar. That way, I’d have ‘saved’ half a euro.”
    The rest of the class stared at me like I had sprouted some sort of talking growth. I swallowed, looking around nervously as the teacher’s gaze softened. “That’s actually… a really good explanation of what I was talking about.”
    I felt my cheeks start to burn as I dropped my head against the desk to avoid the stares from the other students. I wanted to tell them that there was a really good explanation why I knew that. It was because since the Dioscuri operated all over the world, they often switched their funds from one kind of currency to another. Ipso, facto we all took classes on ‘Earth Currencies’ back at the academy.
    I looked up, glancing around the class. Most of them had gone back to ignoring me, but I still felt the need to let them know I wasn’t some kind of freak, as though knowing the answer to a question in class was freakish.
    “That is exactly why the financial markets are rigged,” Matthers said, raising one arm in the air as he spoke. “See—“ he was cut off by the phone. Its shrill cry echoing from the room, and for a moment, he stood there dumbfounded, like he was trying to figure out just what was making the noise. He turned woodenly toward the wall phone in the corner, staring at it wide eyed.
    Very slowly, he walked over to it and picked it up, staring at the receiver like it was a snake about to bite him. “Hello?” he asked cautiously.
    “Oh?” he said, glancing over at me a moment later, his lips twisting into a grim line. “Okay, I’ll send her right up.”
    He hung up and sighed. “Lillim, can you please get your stuff and head to the front office?”
    “Um… why?” I asked as the entire class turned to stare at me again. If this kept up, I was going to get a reputation and not one that was going to get