Space Invaders (22 page)

When I reached the top of the stairs he was waiting for me, but he had his back to the wall, his sword lifted.

“The water has to be coming from a bathroom.” I looked down the narrow hallway which had Persian runners and framed ethnic art. Like my Mom, the professor often travelled and liked to collect stuff.

All the doors were closed. Of course. Frey shoved the first one open and I opened the second one. Looked like her home office. A desktop was humming and a cup of coffee still had steam curling from it. I saw her BlackBerry sitting on the desk, as if that was where she’d left it after talking to me just a short time ago.

“One more door. Has to be the bathroom.”

Frey turned the knob and water gushed out, pink water, like my Mom’s favourite cochineal dye bath. But not only water. Professor Dunbar screeched, hands lifted like weapons, blood-red eyes streaming.

She took Frey down, gnawing horribly at his neck as if she wanted to rip the flesh from his jugular and then feast on it.

She and Frey rolled, smashing a hall table into kindling, while she gave another horrible sound of thwarted hunger.

“Be…ware, guide,” Frey croaked. He hit her with his elbow. Her head snapped back but she barely seemed to feel the blow.

I snatched a lamp, yanking it free of its plug, running after them. They were fighting at the top of the stairs now and I caught the click of Professor’s teeth as she tried to bite Frey again.

“Dead. Dead. Dead,” she muttered.

Frey’s head made contact with the next stair down. He gasped, eyes squeezed shut.

I brought the lamp down on Professor Dunbar’s legs and she turned on me, smiling while those weeping pupil-less eyes held mine. “Naughty.”

Frey grabbed her, fighting to subdue her. The muscles in Frey’s arms strained. “Salt,” he muttered. “Bailey!”

I couldn’t get past them to the kitchen. I ran back to the bathroom, hoping Professor Dunbar was into the same things as Mom…and found muscle-relaxing sea salt in a tin by the tub. I didn’t stop to shut off the overflowing water but squeaked down the hall in my soaking shoes.

She had Frey completely under her now and blood dripped from her eyes onto his skin. I opened the tin and tossed bath salts into her face.

She screamed as steam rose and her skin melted.

“Hate, hate!” she snarled at me.

I tossed more salt at her, driving her from Frey. “Bailey…leave now,” he croaked.

“Oh hell no,” I said. I glared at the thing that had been my teacher and a friend of the family. “Want more seasoning or are you done?”

She hissed at me and then slithered down the stairs, crawling backwards with her eyes on me. She disappeared from sight and a second later I heard the front door crash open.

Frey sat up, retrieved his sword. I dropped the flashlight and put my arm around him. His heart was pounding as hard as mine. He was bruised, one eye swelling, his mouth bloody. Scratch and bite marks peppered his chest and neck. “God, Frey,” I whispered. “Oh, God.”

His lips were a pale line. He closed his eyes, sucking in breath.

“What can I do to help?” I touched his cheek.

“You are unharmed?”

“Yeah, you took the brunt of it.”

He nodded, as if that was fitting.

“Stupid bastard.”

His eyes shot open. “I am not a bastard.”

“Uh, right. Sorry, I didn’t mean it literally.” He was prickly over all kinds of weird shit that was meaningless in today’s world. Probably it was just as well he wasn’t staying. He’d be the Mork to my Mindy at any campus party I brought him to.

“We cannot…” I helped him get to his feet and he swayed. “Be sure she has left this place.”

“Right.” I helped him lean against the wall. He gripped his sword, his gaze on the stairs. “I’m going to turn the water off. And then…I guess we better, like, investigate. Try to find out what went down between Professor Dunbar being fine and dandy and turning red-eyed cannibal.”

“It is a plan.”

I kissed his shoulder and his eyes widened. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

“No reason,” I mumbled, heading off to the bathroom. I shut off the taps in the sink, grimacing at the icy water. There were a few pink splotches, still looking like dye residue.

When I didn’t immediately return, Frey appeared in the bathroom door.

“What happened to her, Frey? She’s a monster.”

“She was infected,” Frey said. “She is a pawn of the Whisperer now. It reaches for the buried darkness inside, twists it with fear.”

The miasma of a spiritual car wreck clung to the little room.

“Can we get her back?”

“I have never succeeded.” He reached out, pushed the hair out of my eyes. “But for you, we can try, Bailey.”

“I like it when you call me by my name,” I said. “Not just guide.” I felt like a boat that had been safely moored, but now I was cast adrift, rocking away from all signs of home. “She was going to tell me how to fix this. She knew stuff.”

“Her knowledge remains stored in this house?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Maybe we can get some ideas off her computer. Wait!” I left the bathroom, feeling a spurt of energy despite the bruises and the heavy feeling in my heart. “She took the Celtic symbol I made. She said it had to be neutralised or something. Do you think that’s why she’s infected?”

“I don’t sense the door here, not like when I came through it to your bedroom,” Frey said. “And if she knew what it was, she would have taken steps to shield herself.”

I looked out the window at a little garden pavillion on the rocks.

“Maybe she put it there, close at hand but not close enough to pose a danger to her. Why do we need it, anyway?”

“It is the way we send the creatures not of this world back to the void,” Frey said. “And also, it is the door that will take me back to where I sleep.”

“Oh.” And suddenly I hoped we wouldn’t find it.

Chapter Eight

“Oddly, I don’t feel like goin’ out there right at the moment.” As I watched from the window, fog swirled in from the sea, covering the little garden pavillion so it became as elusive as the island of Avalon.

“The mist is unnatural. The creature waits for us,” Frey said.

When he put his arm around me, I was conscious of how cold my feet were, how tired I felt. All this shit had happened in such a short span of time. One day I’d worried about when I’d get time to wash my accumulated dirty socks and cram for finals, the next…

“You are weary, guide.”

“I’m not the one who’s hurt.” I pointed out.

He raised one eyebrow.

“Wait!” I swung around in his arms, touching his face, his upper chest. “That scratch that ran over your neck. The bite mark…”

“Gone, yes,” he said. “It is another small talent, the healing, but like the other I will not be able to manifest it for a day and a night.” His eyelids fell heavy over his blue eyes. “And I need a brief time to recover my energy.”

I felt abruptly protective. Frey was still a mystery to me with his hidden talents married with his vulnerability. He was also slumped against his sword. My Viking was about ready to keel over.

“You need your long boat in a hurry.”

He blinked. “Oh. This is humour?”

“Apparently not. There’s a couch in the prof’s home office,” I said. “Let’s secure the house and then you can rest there while I check through her notes, see if I can find something to help us.”

Frey’s face was like whitened bone under moonlight. Sweat sheened his forehead. He nodded and slumped at the top of the stairs as I went down and locked the front door, checked the back. I put down some towels in the kitchen, mopped up. I brought more up with me to the bathroom upstairs and took off my socks and shoes, leaving them to dry out while I cleaned up the bathroom.

“If we reconstruct from the hot pan in the kitchen and the still-steaming coffee in her office, she was cooking dinner and having coffee up here while she went through her notes. She’d probably just got off the phone with me when the, uh, Whisperer came calling.”

Frey was on the couch now, arms around his knees. He’d stripped out of this clothing again, his beautiful body muscled and distracting with all those yards of silky skin. I wanted to kiss the tiny wisp of white blond hair between his nipples. He nodded, eyes almost closed as he watched me. He looked as if I’d worn him out after a bout of vigorous lovemaking, and how weird, that I’d use that word in my head. ‘Lovemaking’. It wasn’t something I had any experience of, except in the books I read.

“I guess the healing thing really drains you, huh?”

Frey nodded. “It could have been worse, but the poisoned blood touched my skin.”

Touched his skin, because he’d made damn sure it hadn’t touched
mine
.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I need no thanks.”

“I disagree.” I cleared my throat. “I’m going to see what I can find out from her notes. She used some kind of shorthand I’m not sure I can decipher, but she left her files open, so I may score there.”

“I trust you.”

He trusted me, Bailey, not the guide. It gave me a glow, even when I looked over my shoulder and saw he’d fallen asleep. His sword was beside the couch, there if he needed it, but he was out like a light.

It was good not to be alone as the fog hugged Professor Dunbar’s town house like felting wool, snug and stifling. A dog snarled just beyond that soup, and I wondered if it had been infected. Would it attack Frey and me if we tried to leave the house?

And okay, that cheery thought wasn’t getting me anywhere.

I’d been relying on Professor Dunbar to give me the answers, to get me off the hook. Now I’d have to rely on myself. I might have sloppy housemate skills, I might sleep through first classes in the morning, but I had top grades. I should be able to figure this out.

If I didn’t, Frey could get hurt again.

I looked at him, saw he’d curled into the foetal position. His skin was pebbled from the chill encompassing the house. I got up, found a hand-crocheted afghan and tucked it over him. His long hair was wrapped around his forehead, tumbled under one cheek. It was warm from his body when I touched it.

I grunted in disgust at myself. I was dithering because I was insecure. I wasn’t sure I would find anything.

The professor’s notes were awash. As I’d told Frey, she’d used some kind of shorthand I couldn’t read, but when I scanned the entry she’d been writing on her computer, I discovered it was a kind of journal. She used shorthand there too, but this I could follow.

B couldn’t be trusted not to fool around with the symbol I gave him, but I’d anticipated that, of course. He has the arrogance of the young. He had no idea that the door existed, or that because he is a natural guide, he is the only one who can open or close it.

Now I have what I want. The three are here, and I can use them to solve my little problem of being stuck in a rut. I deserved that promotion, not that fool they passed me over for.

The guardian won’t be a problem. From what B said, the Viking is focused on him, needs to protect him. I can use that.

Soon I’ll have exactly what I want.

I had to read it twice. It was like she’d reached through the screen and slapped me. I was young, arrogant…and easily manipulated.

She’d planned this, wanted me to fool around with that symbol from the beginning.

She’d wanted me to open the door.

“Guide,” Frey called softly. “Bailey, I can sense your distress.”

I looked at him. I didn’t know what to say. I’d thought it was bad that I’d done this by accident, but knowing I’d been used, that I’d just been a tool…

“She wanted you here,” I told Frey. “She wanted me to open the door.”

Frey sat up, offered me a broad, scarred hand. “I wondered.”

I stared at him.

“Bailey, you are…gentle. You do not expect this kind of betrayal.”

“You mean I’m an idiot.”

He tugged my arm. “Do not twist my words.”

“Did she want to become a monster? Was turning all red-eyed and bitey her ultimate plan?”

He shook his head. “She must have wanted to control the Whisperer, perhaps all three of us. Something went wrong with her plan.”

“You suspected she was involved.”

“You were so unaware when I woke in your bed. All of my other guides summoned me, expected me. At first you were groggy and then you merely thought I was an easy lay.”

I had to grin when he repeated the easy lay thing. I seemed to remember mumbling that when I’d first woken up. “I thought you’d come home with me from a party and I’d…somehow passed out and forgotten or you were a set up over my birthday.”

“You couldn’t let yourself see I was real.”

That was just too close to home.

“What could she gain if she somehow had control over the Whisperer?” I asked.

Frey rubbed his right eyebrow, lips pursed. “She could use its energy to influence others, to gain power or wealth. It is not the first time someone has tried.” He gave me a sober look. “There is no saving her, Bailey, not if she invited it.”

I nodded. “I figured.” I chewed my lip. “I, uh, told her I was going to meet you guys at Bono’s for coffee. That creature intercepting me wasn’t an accident. She sent it.”

“This knowledge hurts you.”

I pulled out the flash drive I’d inserted in Professor Dunbar’s computer, stuffed it and some papers into a plastic bag from the kitchen. “It was her Darth Vader moment. She failed.”

“Darth Vader?”

“I’ll fill you in later. Look, it’s too dark and spooky to try to get out on that rock right now and retrieve the drawing if she stashed it there, so I vote we head back to my place.”

Frey was on his feet. “It would be good to lie there with you.”

“Just remember, no furs.”

“You will keep me warm, yes?” I knew he was teasing me to try to help lighten things.

“I’d be happy to keep you warm. I’m thinking we’ll hit the big sunken tub upstairs. You’ll totally love it.”

I shut down the desktop and Frey dressed and I picked up my still-wet shoes and socks. We made a dash for the car and Frey didn’t make a big deal of folding back inside it into a cute Viking sandwich. I think he was too relieved we hadn’t been attacked as we made a break for it.