Page 90 of A Shade of Myself
“I’ll make room for this one.” I tapped my fist on the table. “I appreciate you finding this out before I brought something else into being.”
I walked Jude to the front door. There was an awkward moment where we would have normally hugged but we stood there. Then she moved in one way, and I moved in the other and we banged foreheads.
Jude rubbed her head. “Agree to just put this disaster of a day behind us?”
“Agreed.”
“I’ll visit Emmett tomorrow,” she said. “See if there’s any way to keep him safe…”
“You got this.” We fist bumped.
I shut the door behind her, leaning against it with a hard exhalation.
This visit had destroyed all post-Yoshi calm that I’d built up from my mundane chores. If I stayed home, I’d obsess over what I’d called into being, and how soon I could expect it to fuck up my life. I needed to do something to seize some measure of power back.
I smiled. I had just the thing.
After a quick dart through the KH, I stepped out onto the grounds at the college in Maine where James Learsdon taught. With the time difference between Vancouver and the east coast, the sun was already going down, bathing the sky in vibrant gold. It was a smaller campus, marked by tree-lined walkways and ivy-covered stone buildings with front pillars that were reminiscent of the Parthenon. I’d gotten the location of the archeology department online before I came, and it took me only a few minutes to track it down.
The cool, dim hallways were deserted this late in the evening. I counted off numbers on doors until I reached Professor Learsdon’s office. Even though a small sign taped to the door announced he was away for a couple weeks until the start of fall term, I sent Delilah under the crack at the bottom of the door frame.
Suddenly, a scythe appeared in Delilah’s hand.
Without thinking, I drew my cloaking over myself because that could mean only one thing. My quick instincts saved me because barely a second later, heavy footsteps echoed down the corridor, and two brawny vamps rounded the corner.
I pressed myself flat against the wall, surreptitiously calling Delilah back to me as one of them heaved his brick-like shoulder into Learsdon’s door. The frame gave way with a loud crack and the two stepped inside, while I peered in from the hall.
The professor’s doctorate was hung in a place of honor over his desk. On either side were photos of him on various archeological digs, his face lit up with an expression I recognized as the thrill of the hunt. Yet there was nothing to cement that this was the same person who’d come after me. I was trusting Ryann’s identification and my own deductions that an archeology professor would be interested in my magic.
Was his quest for the Ascendant not about what the amplifier could do, or even the physical object itself, but the same scholarly love of puzzles that had driven me to figure out what the Torquemada Gloves really were?
“This is a pointless idea,” said the vamp who hadn’t broken down the door, pronouncing “idea” as “idear.” He shook his head. “Learsdon isn’t stupid enough to leave hints about where he’s hiding and Dagmar’s kidding herself if she thinks he kept the real elixir formula from her. It didn’t work. That’s it.”
“You wanna tell Dagmar that?” This vamp dropped his “r” making it an “ah” sound.
Their New England accents calmed my fears that the two had followed me from Vancouver as did the fact that this had nothing to do with my past. But it made me think I was right about this Learsdon. What were the chances of there being some other person with that name sketchy enough to set up a magic trap where someone died and also have bloodsuckers after them?
The vamp I dubbed Mr. Ah yanked the top desk drawer out and upended the contents onto the floor, while Mr. R pulled file after file from the cabinet, raining paper down like a snowfall.
I skirted around the edges of the room examining documents as the vamps threw them out, mildly curious about this elixir they wanted, but the files were all student related. The destruction turned personal with the travel photos smashed to the ground and stomped underfoot. When the vamps started in on the books, shaking them out for hidden papers before dumping them on the floor and carelessly leaving footprints on covers, I saw red.
I held my magic in through sheer force of will, almost vibrating with the effort to remain silently hidden in plain sight.
Once they were satisfied with the carnage, they left, bitching about what they’d do to Learsdon if Dagmar took her anger out on them for this failed venture.
The vamps hadn’t exactly been quiet about this breaking and entering and campus security could show up at any time, but I couldn’t leave yet. Keeping one ear cocked for footsteps or voices, I rifled through indexes for any mention in Learsdon’s books about the Ascendant. I’d gone through a good dozen of the most promising titles with no luck when I heard the staccato of a walkie-talkie and booked it out through the KH. Home safely, but no wiser.
