Love Is in the Air (11 page)

What protection could his flesh serve against the beast’s claws?

CHAPTER 32

A snort from the beast straightened her spine to the point of pain. Did the sound indicate an action of resolve, or frustration?

Then the moist heat moved on. At first a step at a time, then a heavy trot, until the reddened glow died off altogether. As Tyr released his hold, Sal braved a glance toward the west. With unnatural speed, the beast’s glow disappeared into the thick of the oaks.

She turned to ask how the beast could move so quickly, but found Tyr’s jaw clenched. Fury played across his chiseled features. Back in Richard’s den, she had imagined a very different reunion. Like Tyr would actually be grateful for her help rather than chastising her.

“Have you misplaced your senses?” Tyr demanded. “I used your blood upon my blade.”

Sal could only shrug. Tyr’s silence command still held her throat.

Tyr’s tone dropped as deep as the beast’s growl. “You have marked him,” he said, staring into her eyes. “Do you understand?”

She struggled to speak, but couldn’t.

Tyr seemed to realize that his edict still held sway. “Speak.”

“So he… he knows my scent?” She stuttered out, her throat still not sure it could work properly. How did Praxis like that work? Did Tyr convince her brain that she had no voice, or did it impair her vocal cords? Such things were easier to think of than Tyr’s frustration.

“You are a part of him. He can sense you.” Tyr ground his teeth. “I used the last of his blood to mask your presence.”

Sal could sense that the situation was far worse than his words implied.

“I don’t understand.”

“Then you shouldn’t have fought my command,” Tyr hissed.

Sal couldn’t help but sound tinny and defensive. “I didn’t, damn it. It was the laptop.” Her voice gained strength, as he looked confused. “The scrying box
you
awoke. It awoke me.”

She watched his shoulders slump, the anger gone out of his posture.

“It made me remember everything, because it recognized a pattern to the deaths.” Tyr’s expression gave her no clue whether he understood or not. She continued, “And from there, I think… I… I think I figured out where the beast is headed.”

“The beast has no purpose. It hunts and feeds.”

That was Tyr’s mistake. Just like she had underestimated her laptop, he was woefully ignorant of the beast’s capability.

“Then how do you think I found you?”

For the first time, surprise registered on Tyr’s face. He opened his mouth, but as if he were under the silence command, he simply shut it again.

“He wasn’t tearing through the City haphazardly. The deaths were leading him to a statue. One used in a gruesome murder nearly a century ago. It is buried among those oaks under an elder tree.”

Tyr’s face clouded. “Those killed, were they women?”

“Yes,” she answered, but wasn’t sure why that mattered.

“Did they trust the man who killed them? Did they love him?”

“I guess. I mean, Theo was courting them. That’s how he lured them to the church, under the guise of a marriage proposal.”

Tyr stumbled back, his words barely a whisper. “It cannot be.”

“I don’t see the significance.”

Tyr seemed beyond her words, lost in his own thoughts.

Finally, when he did speak it was with a tone as soft as the fog nestled around them. “To leave one’s time is not a simple thing, but if you have the knowledge, you need only have the blood of bitter grief.”

He looked up into her eyes. “But to go back? To find your exact place along the axis of the stars… that you need the blood of not only one with the purest love, but of one who has been betrayed by that very love. You must collect the essence in that singular moment, when the heart is torn asunder.”

Sal began to comprehend why the beast coveted the sculpture. She had thought he wished it for the horror, but its desire was much more complicated than that.

Strength infused his voice again. “He must not be allowed such power.”

CHAPTER 33

As direct as Tyr’s words were, his body seemed conflicted. A brewing storm clouded his normally crystalline eyes. A struggle raged within. What a titan battle it must be. She could feel duty clash with desire.

His feet wished to carry him to battle, yet something rooted him in place.

Sal waited but couldn’t take his pained gaze any longer.

“Follow the arrow until it matches up with this number.” She pointed to the Bourtree coordinates on the GPS device. “He’ll be there.”

Their skin touched as the electronic compass changed hands. His hand lingered over hers. “You have faced grave danger to bring me this tiding, and I have no right to ask…”

She fought answering, knowing that she would lose.

“Anything,” Sal whispered into the mist, blaming his insidious tone for making her forget the rest of the world and her responsibilities within it.

Tyr’s hand returned to his knife pommel. “You have given of your blood, and now your knowledge, I can ask no more.”

Before Sal could convince him that he could, in fact, ask for much more, Tyr turned and set off at a full run toward the woods. Sal reached out but caught only wisps of fog. As the overhang dripped dew, she watched him disappear into the forest.

Sal knew that she should leave as well. With the beast so near and her scent in his nostrils, it wasn’t safe to stay, but her legs were leaden. Instead of heading to her car, she sat down on a barrel, not even caring about the loud
crackle
it produced.

The thought of getting into the SUV and driving back to Richard’s house felt so wrong. As though her real life had become incomprehensible. How Sal wished that she could blame it all on Maria’s death, but she knew better. True, she had lost much last night. But equally true, she had gained something almost as valuable.

These brief encounters with Tyr had awakened a desire. Not just physical desire. That, his leather and stubble had evoked easily, but a deeper hunger. A desire to live. Really
live
. Not to walk through life struggling to just make it to another day, hoping no one would notice that she wasn’t happy. Her real life had become nothing more than a boring interlude until Tyr sent her heart beating again.

In his presence, the fog became a living creature. The dark was not just the absence of light, but a keeper of secrets. With him gone, the world lost its sharp focus. Granted, she had always been an adrenaline junkie. All emergency jockeys were. How else did you handle the long, excruciating hours vacillating between pure boredom and sheer exhilaration? But this was different. It wasn’t a high. A pipe you took a hit off of. Their shared quest was the very air. Without it, she felt that a part of herself would die.

Tyr’s words echoed in her mind. “You have given of your blood, and now your knowledge.” So in some small way, she had helped him. Helped him challenge Maria’s killer. She could take some small comfort in that.

“Your blood and now your knowledge.”

Sal stood up abruptly.

Blood and knowledge. Anemia and encephalitis.

Her mind spun. She knew that the anemia had a purpose. Praxis. The beast needed blood to accomplish larger tasks that edicts alone couldn’t perform. But what did the brain swelling indicate? And why the shift in focus from blood to brain?

Why cause encephalitis when you wanted to know a statue’s location? With sudden clarity, Sal realized that the beast had never been hunting for blood. Instead, he needed what they held in their brains. Thoughts. Memories.

Dear God, the beast hadn’t tortured the information from his victims—he’d sucked a different form of essence from their gray matter. Not only that, but he was getting better and better, based on the autopsy reports. With each death, the anemia was less and the encephalitis worse. Like an intern learning how to place a Swan-Ganz catheter, the beast perfected his technique to pull knowledge from his victims.

But only half of them were related to the Park. Had those other deaths just been practice? Or had they been…

Her thoughts raced faster than her heart could keep up. Tyr hadn’t yet conceived that the statue might be only a single piece of a much more complex puzzle.

Damn, but she missed her laptop. Beyond its search engine, she needed its intuition. Its guidance. For that, she needed an Internet connection. While there were several museums in the Park, they had their own high-tech security systems. Sal didn’t think she could just stop by and borrow a terminal. No, she needed somewhere accessible and close.

Sal rubbed the grime off the boathouse window and spied inside. A little CPU was hidden in the far back corner. Given that it looked like a DOS model, she hoped it at least had dial-up. DSL seemed a little too much to ask for.

Which brought her to her next problem. She had already tried the doors and even the windows—and had found them locked.

But had she asked then to open?

Just as Tyr told her to “ask” the laptop, Sal closed her eyes and laid her hand upon the knob. Ever so nicely, she asked, “Please open.”

A jolt stung her palm as the knob turned, then caught.

“Come on, come on,” she urged, but the knob refused to go any further. Pissed, she jangled the door, hard. “Don’t do this to me!”

Apparently, yelling didn’t enhance her Praxis, since the lock held. What had she been thinking? Like she could pull a “Tyr.” He held a doctorate in Praxis, but it was her first day in kindergarten.

No matter her skill level, Sal still needed to get inside the boathouse.

She looked inside to find the little plastic latch closed tightly. The lock appeared so flimsy, yet it held the window firmly in place. She could use her elbow, smash a pane of glass, unlatch it, and be inside.

Too bad that plan didn’t take into consideration that Sal had her professional license to think about. It was one thing to sneak out in the middle of night for a surreal rendezvous. It was quite another to actually break the law.

Felony B&E wasn’t surreal. It was real with real-life consequences. A conviction could affect her license to practice medicine. The thought of losing that part of herself made her shrink away from the window.

Leaving wasn’t any more appetizing of an option. Something else very real had happened. People had died. Lots of them, and Tyr needed every advantage to stop the carnage. That’s where she and this window came to their little impasse.

Tyr could easily open the window. With a simple word and nudge with his voice, the pane would slide open. She doubted something this easy would even require blood. He may have called his skill Praxis, but it seemed so effortless that it appeared to be magic.

Taking a second, Sal thought of that word and its implication. What was magic? Didn’t remote tribesmen think a cigarette lighter magic? Advanced enough science always seemed magical. Just because she didn’t know how her television worked didn’t make it supernatural.

She was a scientist, and she needed to start thinking like one. What did she instruct her freshmen students to do when they felt overwhelmed by the width and breadth of medicine? Take the problem apart piece by piece. Break everything down into its smallest possible units. Observe the whole, but concentrate on the mechanism beneath.

Her mind raced to remember all the times Tyr had used his Praxis.

While he had asked, it wasn’t necessarily nicely. It was firm. A single word, spoken with clarity. When directed at her, she could remember the feel of his intent on her skin, ringing in her ears, in her head.

Most times he used his voice, but for others, he used blood. The office door he opened with a word, but with the NICU doors, he needed to smash a vial first. Was he augmenting his power? Using it like a Red Bull? Those NICU doors were not only locked, but pressure-locked—a much more complicated mechanism, which seemed to require that extra caffeine jolt.

Sal looked at the window again. She felt certain that it didn’t want her to break it, and Lord knew she didn’t want to. With the soft mists caressing her skin and the eerie quiet of the lake, Sal believed she just might be able to work some magic herself.

Placing her palms against the glass, Sal closed her eyes and concentrated on how badly she didn’t want to go to jail, and how much she would appreciate the window opening, but when she spoke, Sal made sure to use the same authoritative tone she used when scolding a tardy intern.

“Open.”

She opened her eyes to find the window just as shut as it was before.

With a sigh, Sal realized that she was going to have to do it the hard way.

Turning her head, Sal lifted her elbow to smash the pane, when she heard a creak. Panicked, she swung around. Had the beast somehow returned? For all her fear, nothing seemed amiss.

Quieting her nerves, Sal took a deep breath. The Park prided itself on its rich wildlife. It was probably just a stray possum or raccoon. Nothing to make her heart rate jump 37 percent.

Regrouping, she faced the window again. It had been hard enough to screw up the courage the first time to break it. Now she felt even more hesitant. Then she noticed the sill. Was there a slight crack between the wood and the frame? Testing the window, it gave, sliding open easily.

Sal snatched her hand away. She knew the window had been locked.

She saw it locked. Felt it locked. But here it was open.

Reaching out, she touched the glass again. “Thanks.”

What else did you say to a window?

CHAPTER 34

After searching for the little computer’s power switch hidden all the way behind the cabinet, interfacing the boathouse’s CPU with her laptop was no big thing. As if her computer already knew what was on her mind, it brought up the autopsies. It even had the Google search on top, just waiting for her to enter the other half of the names.

Sal resisted jumping to conclusions, but just three names deep into the list, and she found the link. Each of the dead was related to the San Francisco State University physics department.

As the screen responded as quickly as her fingers could fly, Sal checked the rest of the names. Building a timeline, she found that the victims had a more and more intimate connection to the school and especially to the Quantum Physics Experimental Research Laboratory.