Chapter 2
Yikes, Definitely No
When the door closed behind him, I realized that I should have protested his taking my property. A valuable artifact. I hadn’t. I wanted it gone.
I shivered and went to make myself tea. I would have tea and gingersnaps, and finish grading, and go to bed like a normal person to whom weird strangers did not happen.
Carrying my tea back to the main room a few minutes later, I noticed that his car was still parked across the street. Well, so what? He could sit there all night if he wanted. It wasn’t that cold. California winters barely merited the name. I still felt a twinge of guilt.
Luckily, I had grading to distract me. I shoved a biscuit in my mouth and grabbed an exam booklet. I marked all the single word answer sections first, too rattled to focus on essays. I had just finished the multiple choice section and was considering more tea when someone knocked.
Since I didn’t want my door kicked in a second time, I hurried to open it.
I was an idiot.
Blake stepped into my apartment like we were friends and he didn’t need an invitation, which was not at all the case. He certainly wasn’t welcome after the disturbing evening I’d had. The things the stranger had said about him were nonsense, but Blake was obviously up to something sketchy.
Perhaps the jar was stolen goods! That would explain both Blake’s sudden return to the States and his giving me the object.
“Blake? What are you doing here?” I backed away.
“Aw, you didn’t open your present, Reas. That hurts my feelings. Where is it?” He scanned the room and frowned, mocking expression slipping from his face. “Where is it, Denby? I know you didn’t leave it in your office.”
“What makes you think that?” I stammered, stumbling back as he strode toward me.
He sneered at me. “Don’t be stupid, Reason. You can’t fight me, you pathetic pansy.”
I was aware that he thought that of me; him saying it aloud was new. The university had harassment policies, and we weren’t meant to ignore them until we had tenure. This wasn’t the Blake I was used to.
He reached for me. I dodged around him and fled like the coward he had named me.
Out the door into the hallway and then onto my ass as I ran into another person, one substantially more solid than myself.
I adjusted my crooked glasses and looked up at Professor Durgan, a stocky geologist who adored fieldwork and was famously impatient with teaching. He had never liked me, but he hadn’t previously leered at me with a distended jaw full of jagged fangs.
I tried to roll to the side, but a meaty hand clamped around my ankle and dragged me off the floor, hanging upside down from an impossibly strong grip.
“Not yet; the vessel isn’t here,” Blake snapped at Durgan. “We need him to find it.”
Durgan snarled like an angry dog and shook me. My head banged against the floor, and my vision went spotty.
Then he dropped me. I scrambled backward, hand-elbow-heeling myself away from him until I encountered Blake’s shoe in my shoulder.
I thought he had kicked me and rolled to the side, but no more blows came. I looked up—the hallway at a dizzying angle—and saw that Durgan was fighting the stranger who had taken the pot.
The foreigner had a knife in each hand, one over a foot long and the other half that length. For a second, I thought Durgan also had two knives, then I saw that he was swiping with clawed fingers.
I shuddered, dizzy with disbelief and sick for and about Durgan—if he was Durgan and not some demon-ridden thing like the stranger had described.
And the stranger… I’d just met him, but I didn’t want to see him killed.
Didn’t want him to die, didn’t want my professor to kill him or to die himself. I wasn’t seeing any good outcomes here.
My vision went foggy around the edges. Blood roared in my ears, drowning out the hissing and snarling of the monster that had been Durgan.
Durgan swiped at his opponent, and then his hand was on the floor. I stared at it, thinking, ‘It’s a hand,’ and then ‘Shouldn’t there be lots of blood?’ and then the rest of Durgan hit the floor with a thud that made me flinch and bang my already aching head against the wall.
The man in black wiped his blade on Durgan’s flannel shirt and looked around. “Which way did the other one go?”
I hadn’t been looking at Blake. There were stairs at both ends of the hall. “I didn’t see.” My voice came out thin, far away. I realized, blurrily, that I was sliding sideways against the wall. The realization came because the icky hall carpet was suddenly touching me. Ew.
When I was in Durgan’s class, he’d barked at me: “Don’t be so damn fastidious, Denby! What kind of archaeologist is afraid to get his hands dirty?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I was useless. No help in demon attacks, terrible at fighting, a mediocre archaeologist, a disappointing son. I couldn’t even cook. “I can’t even cook,” I told the man who had just saved my life.
He picked me up from the floor and carried me into my apartment, leaning me against the wall just inside the door, where the coats cuddled me. “Look, I need to take care of the body before someone sees it. I’ll be right back. Lock the door and stay here, all right?”
“O-okay. What will you do with Professor Durgan?”
“Ah. One of your colleagues? And the one who fled, that was Bryant? My condolences. I suppose in that case, I should take the body further away from your address.”
He peeled up the edge of the cheap industrial carpet that lined the hall, and rolled it up with Durgan inside it.
He slung the body over his shoulder—and Durgan was not a small man—and repeated, “Lock the door, Doctor Denby.”
I obeyed.