40. Office Hours #3
“You’re frustrated. Breathe.” Ciarán rifled through desk drawers and was lucky enough to find a box of bandaids. “These are for bleeding, right?”
He cleaned my hand with tissues from a tissue box on the cluttered desk, then ripped the bandaids open with his teeth. He slowly, gently applied the bandages while I breathed deep in an effort to calm my angry, racing pulse.
“We have your old wallet,” I said. “We can buy bus tickets, maybe. Or the train. It’ll take longer, but there’s no way I can get us on a plane. Not without identification for everyone.”
“We can try to find your father’s house.” Ciarán bandaged the final gash in my knuckles, and then raised my hand to brush his lips across my fingers. “You said he won’t have one of the fancy, large ones, but surely even assholes have to call somewhere home.”
He was right. I scanned the desk. There had to be some hint to his address in here somewhere. Maybe on an envelope, or a receipt in the trash.
I flexed my fingers against the bandages and pushed papers out of my way. Most of them were work notes, meeting reminders, and weeks-old to-do lists. I thumbed through them.
“These are fun.” Ciarán pulled a pair of sunglasses from beneath a pile of loose papers and held them up to peer through the dark lenses. “They’re like skal-goggles, right?”
“Those are sunglasses, and yes. Kind of. They keep the sun from burning our retinas instead of Skal. Can you hand me the trash can?”
There must’ve been a janitorial staff, however, because the trash was empty save for a fresh liner.
“Wren!” Ciarán’s warning sounded in my head, and I froze.
A dark shadow shifted on the other side of the door window as it came down the hall.
The janitorial staff?
No, the garbage can was already empty, so it had to be—
I managed to retreat as far as the window before the door swung inwards.
Maxwell Brenton, tall, brunet, and wiry, scurried into the office in an old t-shirt and cargo shorts. Reading glasses perched atop his head, and though he jumped when he saw me standing in his periphery, he collected himself near immediately.
“Office hours are Wednesdays and Fridays only,” he seethed, mistaking me for one of his students as he tossed a briefcase beside his desk.
He dropped into his chair and wiggled the mouse to wake up his computer screen.
“The semester’s hardly started, and it’s a weekend, for god’s sake. Who let you in here anyway?”
He paused when he noticed the bloodied tissue on his desk and prodded at it with the end of a pencil, frowning.
“Let myself in, actually,” I said.
He threw the pencil.
If he had been aiming at me, then perhaps that was where I’d inherited my own impeccable sense of accuracy. The pencil soared through the air, coming nowhere near me, and clattered to the floor in the corner.
“You!” Maxwell hissed. He lunged for where his phone had previously sat on the desk, but lucky for me, I’d thrown it in a rage not too long ago.
“You remember me?” I forced a blithe smile even as the disdain-laced words he’d spoken to me at our last meeting echoed in my memory.
I don’t want this…
My heart thundered.
My father.
I’d thought him akin to a celebrity once, and then he’d upended my world, my confidence, my trust in my mother with one short conversation.
But now, he was so small compared to everything else I’d seen in the last few weeks, and despite the accolades and awards for work that decorated his wall, he was so, so insignificant.
“You attacked your admissions officer! I heard all about it from the dean!” Maxwell ripped his keyboard from his desk to wield ahead of him like a weapon. “Is that what this is? You’re here to attack me next?”
“No.” The laugh that trilled through my lips surprised even me. Maxwell made a break for the door, but Ciarán slammed it shut.
My father noticed Ciarán for the first time, his eyes roving over the tattered Von Leer hoodie and then the stolen sunglasses that Ciarán now wore.
A thrill of excitement sang along our connection when Maxwell paled in fear and staggered back.
“Money,” he said and dug his hands into his pockets. He threw his wallet, and it was a better throw than the treatment the pencil had received. It bounced off Ciarán’s chest. “I—I have money! Take it! Just don’t hurt me!”
“I don’t want your money,” I said. “And I don’t want to hurt you. I’m here to kidnap you.”
Maxwell looked at the door again, and I knew he was calculating his chances against Ciarán.
Sure, he was taller than my Grimguard, and Ciarán was lean enough that the hoodie hid his musculature well, but as a world-renowned scientist, I would’ve thought Maxwell was better at making estimates based on so little empirical data.
Maxwell dropped a shoulder, preparing to charge, but then Ciarán lifted a finger to his stolen sunglasses and slid them down his nose to reveal glowing orange irises and black sclera.
My father fell back into his chair, balking, and I stepped forward to lean against the desk.
“Good news, Dad,” I said evenly, “You’re going to help us save the world.”