Thoroughly Kissed (4 page)

The poor pizza guy screamed and dropped the pizza. The thermal container slid down the brick steps, but didn't open.

Emma bent over and pulled Darnell off the boy's leg, but the damage was done. The delivery guy's jeans were torn and his skin was scratched and bleeding.

She tossed Darnell inside, and slammed the screen door shut. “I'm sorry,” she said. “But—”

“Jeez, lady your cat's nuts. I've never seen an insane cat before. Has it got rabies?”

Actually, it took her a moment to understand the delivery guy. He actually said, “Jeezladyyercatsnutsiveneverseenaninsanecatbeforehasitgotrabies?”

“No, he doesn't have rabies.” She was amazed she could sound so affronted. She'd never seen a cat act like Darnell either—at least, not a domesticated house cat. She'd seen nature videos of lions back when she was in her learning phase, and the leader often attacked anything that threatened the pride. Apparently, she was Darnell's pride.

The delivery boy was wiping at his legs.

“Look,” she said, handing him the cash. “I'm sorry. There's an extra tip in here—”

“They warned me you had a nuts cat, but I didn't believe them. I mean, what can a nuts house cat do? Hiss at you? Now I'm going to have to get shots.”

“He's vaccinated.”

“Yeah, but I'm not.” The delivery boy stomped to his car.

Emma looked up, and saw that Professor Found's front door was open. He was standing on the stoop, staring at her. He'd probably come out when the delivery boy had screamed.

She blushed again—three times in one day had to be some kind of record—and hurried back inside the house. Darnell was sitting in front of the fire, cleaning his face, looking quite proud of himself.

“You're not a lion. I don't care what you think of yourself. If you ever met a real one, you wouldn't know what to do.” Then she squinted at him. “You don't even look like a lion.”

Darnell stopped washing and glared at her. Apparently she had affronted his sense of self.

She shook her head and reached for the pizza. Then she realized she hadn't brought it inside.

She sighed and went back to the door. Sure enough, the pizza was still in its thermal container at the bottom of the stairs. She glanced at Professor Found's house. He was still on the stoop. When he saw her, he raised an imaginary glass to her.

Her face grew even warmer, but she wasn't going to count that as a fourth blush. The other one hadn't ended yet. She scurried down the stairs, grabbed the pizza, thermal container and all, and hurried inside her house.

How embarrassing. He'd seen her at her worst teaching, and then this. She had no idea how she would face him in the morning.

Maybe having Michael Found for a neighbor wasn't the good thing it had originally seemed like. Maybe he had arrived just to make her life a living hell.

Well, the only thing she could do was be on her best behavior in the morning. And maybe then, they'd get off to a better start.

Not that she wanted anything closer than a cordial working relationship.

Even if he was the best-looking man she'd ever seen.

Emma dreamed she was sinking. It was a pleasant feeling. She was on a soft surface, wrapped in a warm comforter, her feet nice and toasty. But everything was moving down, as if a hole had opened up beside her, and if she wasn't careful, she would roll into it.

Then she heard a muffled snore and felt hot breath on her neck. That feeling did not come from her dream.

She scrambled awake so fast she nearly did tumble into the hole.

She was on her back, staring at the white ceiling. Sunlight poured into the room, illuminating the quilts she had hung on the wall to give the place color. She still had that feeling of lying at the edge of a precipice.

And then she heard a whistled exhale. She turned her head to the right, and saw a huge black lion asleep on the bed beside her.

She screamed and tried to get out of bed, but the lion was lying on the comforter, and she was wrapped up in it as if it were a cocoon. She cursed as she tried to pull herself out, then finally scrambled backwards, hitting her head on the oak headboard.

The lion opened its eyes. They were golden, sleepy, and confused. It yawned and stretched, its hind feet sliding off the foot of the bed, and its front paws touching the tip of the headboard.

Then it yowled. If an animal could look terrified, the lion did. It raised its head to her, overbalanced itself, and fell off the bed with the loudest thump Emma had ever heard.

Just like Darnell would do if he were surprised.

She put a hand over her heart and peered over the edge of the bed. The lion was lying on its back, its head raised like a sea otter's, and was peering down at its body as if it had never seen it before.

“Darnell?” she whispered.

The lion made a plaintive mew, which, if the sound had been made by a house cat would have been small and sad, but since it was made by a lion, shook the entire room.

“Oh, my,” she said, putting a hand to her mouth. Poor Darnell. “Oh, my, Darnell, who did this to you? Why would someone do this to you?”

She peered around the room to see if there were signs of any magical person invading her bedroom. She no longer had any enemies, at least that she knew of. Aethelstan would never do anything like this, and neither would his sidekick, Merlin. Nora hadn't come into her abilities yet.

Emma froze.
Come
into
her
abilities
yet
. She closed her eyes. Even if someone wanted to hurt her—and if they did, why had they gone after poor Darnell? (Unless that pizza delivery guy was actually a mage… but he was too young, and she would have known. At least, she thought she would have known. Oh, dear. Maybe all the pizza people…) Her eyes flew open.

Darnell was struggling, his gigantic paws in the air. There wasn't enough room on the floor for him to roll over.

She was the only one who had thought of him as a ferocious lion, and she hadn't mentioned that to anyone else. She wouldn't mention it to anyone else.

“Oh, Darnell, I'm so sorry.”

And scared. Her mouth was dry. She was twenty years too young for powers. She was only thirty.

At least, she was only thirty in years that she was awake. If she counted the years she had been in that magical coma, she was one thousand and forty.

Magic wouldn't work that way. It wouldn't count all those nonyears—would it?

“That's not fair,” she said.

Darnell mewed and waved his paws weakly. They were so big—bigger than her hand. She flopped across the bed and scratched his large stomach. His mane spread out on the floor like a nimbus of hair around his familiar—if much larger—face.

“We have to think this through, Darnell,” she said, continuing to scratch. He squirmed a little—tummy scratching was one of his favorite things—and then he started to purr.

She could feel the rumble all the way from the floor to the bed.

If it was her magic that had caused this, then she was in serious trouble. She hadn't studied. She didn't know how to control it. All she had were a few words and phrases that Aethelstan had taught her for emergencies.

She clenched one fist as she had seen Aethelstan do. “Change back,” she whispered to Darnell. “Be my house kitty again. Change back.”

His hind paw kicked the air in rhythm to her scratching. She had hit a good spot. But he was still huge, he still had a mane, and his tail had a tuft at the end of it that hadn't been there when they both went to sleep the night before.

“Change,” she whispered. “Reverse. Go back.”

Nothing happened. No light, no sound, not even a different feeling.

Her breathing was coming hard now. She couldn't leave him alone, not oversized like this. He would be able to break out of the house—heck, he would break the house and everything in it, and he wouldn't even realize he was doing anything wrong.

Then the authorities would come for him and do whatever they did to loose lions. Loose black lions. Loose black lions of a type that didn't occur in nature. He would be a freak and he would get all sorts of media attention and she would have trouble busting him out of wherever they held him and—

Oh, she had to clamp a hold on her vivid imagination. She had to focus.

And then she remembered a single word, one of the emergency words, that Aethelstan had given her. In the old language. He had said it meant “reverse.”

She sat up and waved her arm as she had seen him do, and uttered the word at the top of her lungs.

There was a bright white light, a crackle and sizzle, and then a small explosion. It felt as if something had left her and danced in the air before dissipating.

She sat for a moment, not wanting to look at the floor.

What if she had turned him into something else? What if he hadn't changed at all?

What if she had killed him?

A small black house cat with lovely gold eyes jumped onto the bed, and butted his head against her arm.

“Darnell,” she said and scooped him close. “Oh, Darnell. I think we have a problem.”

Darnell whined, then squirmed. His interpretation of the problem was obviously different from hers. His was that he wanted breakfast, and wanted it now.

If only she could recover that quickly.

She let him go and he ran to the bedroom door, then looked over his shoulder as if asking her what she was waiting for. She brought her knees up to her chest. It had been so long since she had had any real instruction in magic. She could barely remember what she knew about the arrival of powers.

Full blown. Out of control. Those were the phrases she had always heard. But she wasn't sure if getting magic was like going through puberty—did the changes happen in spurts? Or was she one day magic-less and the next day magical?

She didn't know.

Darnell yowled. She looked at the clock. It was too early to call Aethelstan in Oregon. Neither he nor Nora would appreciate a call at 5:00 a.m.

She wiped her hands on her nightgown. She had to handle this on her own, at least for a few hours.

And during those few hours, she had to meet with the new chairman of her department.

She hoped he would let her cancel.

***

Of course, no one answered the phone in his office, and Helen said he would arrive just a few minutes before nine. Helen had told her that Professor Found was a stickler for detail, and missing this first meeting wouldn't sit well with him. So Emma decided to go through with the meeting. After all, it would only take a few minutes, and she would use the rest of the time to call Aethelstan and see if she could find a short-term solution to the problem.

Besides, she had gotten through the rest of her morning routine without a hitch. Darnell seemed no worse for the wear. Her breakfast tasted fine. She had to put on a dress because all of her jeans and sweaters were dirty—and when she cursed her lack of housekeeping skills, the clothes didn't automatically get clean on their own.

Even when she encountered a morning traffic jam on University, the cars didn't miraculously disappear.

If her powers had arrived full blown and out of control, something else would have happened by now.

She stopped only briefly in her office before going to Michael Found's. And during that time, she got annoyed at herself for adjusting her skirt, and brushing loose strands of hair into place. It felt like she wanted to impress him, and not because he was the new chairman of the department. Maybe she'd be able to forget how handsome he was, and concentrate instead on letting him know that she wasn't as flaky as she seemed.

Her high heels clicked on the concrete stairs as she made her way to Professor Found's office. When she reached the top, she felt calmer.

Helen sat at a large desk in a vast open area that in any other profession would have been known as reception. But she wasn't a receptionist. She guarded the copy machine, the fax, and all the other equipment, and let a graduate assistant handle the phones.

She waved a hand in greeting as Emma passed. Emma started toward Mort's office, but Helen pointed her in the opposite direction.

Emma walked down the narrow corridor, reading the names beneath the numbers on the steel doors. Ultimately, she didn't need to: Professor Found's door was open, and he was waiting for her inside.

His office was a surprise. It was bigger than hers—which she expected. All offices in the administrative section of the building were large—but it seemed warm and friendly. Bookshelves covered the walls, and plants hung off every available surface.

The furniture was ergonomically designed—she recognized the styles from the ads—except for the reading chair in the corner. It was upholstered with thick heavy cushions that bore the imprint of Michael Found's body. A footstool sat in front of it, and books spilled off the table beside it onto the floor. She couldn't see the titles from the door, but not all of them seemed like scholarly tomes.

He was standing behind his desk. He wore jeans and a red and black checked flannel shirt that accented his flat torso and his blond hair. Up close, his eyes seemed even bluer than they had in the lecture hall—the bright blue of a summer sky.

“Professor Lost,” he said.

“Professor Found.”

She suppressed the urge to giggle. No wonder the students had started cracking jokes.

“I've read your book.”

Her breath caught in her throat. She had been planning to ask him to reschedule the meeting, but she wanted to hear what he thought of her work first. “I hope you enjoyed it.”

His fingers formed little tents on the desktop. His gaze hadn't left her face, but it felt as if his expression had gotten even more remote. “Close the door, please.”

She stepped inside and pushed the door shut with her foot. A compliment usually didn't take a closed door. She braced herself. This wouldn't be the first time a man had tried to take advantage of her small stature behind a closed door, although until that moment, she hadn't thought Michael Found the type.

“Your book,” he said slowly, “is the biggest pile of bunk I had ever read.”

She wasn't sure she had heard him correctly. He wanted her to close the door so that he could trash her book? No one had trashed her book. It was a critical and popular success. It had gotten her offers from some of the best universities in the nation. It had gotten her this job.

“Bunk?” she said softly.

“Bunk,” he repeated. “The research is shoddy, the conclusions poor and the study of paganism has absolutely no basis in fact.”

No wonder he had looked so interested in her comment about magic the day before. He had read her book. She had discussed some of the systems in Chapter Fifteen.

“All of my work is based in fact,” she said.

“Not according to your footnotes. I'm familiar with those sources. Many of them contradict what you've written.”

“Maybe you should have cross-checked them,” she snapped. “They support my argument.”

“Your argument is that no one knows what happened in the early Middle Ages except you.”

“I'm not the first scholar to say that what remains from that period is open to interpretation.”

“But you are the first to say that an entire system of apprenticeship existed in the non-Christian religions.”

“I didn't call them a religion!”

“Which is another flaw!”

They had both raised their voices. She took a step closer to him. What an arrogant idiot he was. She had read his credentials in the course guide over pizza the night before. His specialty was world history from 1600 to the present day. He had no right to criticize her.

She took a deep breath. All of her friends had warned her at various points in her life that her temper flared too quickly. She didn't need to lose it in front of her department chairman, not during their first meeting.

“It was the Christian Church that labeled a lot of those practices as religion,” she said as calmly as she could. “The church was working on converting people who had never heard of it. The record is biased toward that conversion.”

“History is always written by the winners.”

“Do you always speak in cliches or is this something you're just doing for my benefit?”

His blue eyes flashed. “I'm not planning to do anything that will benefit you, Professor Lost.”

She straightened her shoulders. She was dangerously close to losing her temper. That last sarcastic sentence was the first sign that she was about to lose control. She had to hold onto it. If she got mad, he would never forget it. People who were on the receiving end of her wrath never did.

“I'm not asking you to do anything to benefit me,” she said softly.

He flattened his hands on his desk. “I'm in charge of the hirings and firings here, and frankly, I'm not pleased with anything about you.”

She crossed her arms. “You're not in charge of hiring or firing. The university has committees for that.”