He might have pulled it off, too, if Angela hadn’t been so sharp-eyed, or suspicious; she stopped him halfway to the elevator, opened up his portfolio, and took out the book he’d stashed away. She leafed through it silently, then handed it to John, who did the same.
Both of them looked at the professor with calm, cool, oddly pleased eyes.
“Well,” Angela said, “I don’t know, but I think this may be a violation of the rules, Professor. Taking books from the library without checking them out first. Shame, shame.”
She deliberately opened the first page and read, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and then flipped carefully through, stopping at random spots, to read lines of text. It all sounded right to Claire. She flinched when Angela pushed the book at her. “Read,” the vampire said.
“Um…where?”
“Anywhere.”
Claire recited a few lines in a faltering voice from page 229.
“A Tale of Two Cities,” John said. “Let me guess, Professor…a first edition?”
“Mint condition,” Angela said, and plucked it out of Claire’s trembling hands. “I think the professor has a nice retirement plan, composed of screwing us out of our rightful profits.”
“Huh,” John said. “He didn’t look quite so dumb as that. Got all those degrees and stuff.”
“That’s just paper smarts. You never can tell about what’s really in their heads until you open them up.” The two of them were talking like he wasn’t even there.
Professor Wilson’s pale skin had a sweaty gleam on it now. “A moment of weakness,” he said. “I really do apologize. It won’t ever happen again, I swear that to you.”
“Apology accepted,” Angela said, and lunged forward, planted her hand on his chest, and knocked him flat to the floor. “And by the way, I believe you.”
She grabbed his wrist, raised it to her mouth, and paused to strip off his gold wristwatch band and toss it on the floor. As it rolled, Claire’s stricken eyes caught sight of the symbol on the watch face. A triangle. Delta?
Her shock broke at the sound of the professor’s scream. Grown men shouldn’t scream like that. It just wasn’t right. Fright made her angry, and she dropped her book bag, took the canister off her shoulder, and yanked off the top.
Then she threw liquid nitrogen all over Angela’s back. When John turned on her, snarling, she splashed what was left at his face, aiming for his eyes. Wilson rolled to his feet as Angela collapsed, shrieking and thrashing; John reached out for him, but she’d managed to hurt him, too—he missed. Wilson grabbed his satchel and she got her book bag; they ran for the elevator. A very surprised professor—someone she didn’t recognize—was standing there, openmouthed; Wilson yelled at him to stand aside, leaped into the cage, and pressed the DOWN button so frantically Claire was afraid it would snap or stick or something.
The doors rolled shut, and the elevator began to fall. Claire tried to get her breathing under control, but it was no good; she was about to hyperventilate. Still, she was doing better than the professor. He looked awful; his face was as gray as his hair, and he was breathing in shallow, hard gasps.
“Oh dear,” he said weakly. “That wasn’t good.”
And then he slowly collapsed down the wall of the elevator until he was in a sitting position, legs splayed loosely.
“Professor?” Claire lunged forward and hovered over him.
“Heart,” he panted, and then made a choking sound. She loosened his tie. That didn’t seem to help. “Listen. My house. Bookshelf. Black cover. Go.”
“Professor, relax, it’s okay—”
“No. Can’t let them have it. Bookshelf. Black—”
His eyes got very wide, and his back arched, and she heard him make an awful noise, and then…
Then he just died. Nothing dramatic about it, no big speeches, no music swelling to tell her how to feel about it. He was just…gone, and even though she pressed her shaking fingers to his neck, she knew she wouldn’t feel anything, because there was something different about him. He was like a rubber doll, not a person.
The elevator doors opened. Claire gasped, grabbed her books and the empty silver canister, and sprinted down the blank cinder-block hallway to the end, where a fire door opened into bright afternoon sunlight.
She stood there for a few long seconds, just shaking and gasping and crying, and then tried to think where to go. Angela and John thought her name was Neuberg, which was good—she supposed not so good for Neuberg, if one existed—but they’d find out who she was eventually. She needed to be home before that happened.
Bookshelf. Black cover.
Professor Wilson had been in that room for seven years, sorting through books. Probably slipping out those he thought might be worth something on the black market.
What if…?
No. It couldn’t be.
Except…what if it was? What if a year ago, or five years ago, Professor Wilson had found that book the vampires were so intent on having, and decided to hang on to it for a rainy day? After all, she’d been basically planning to do the same thing, only for her it was already stormy weather.
She needed his address.
It wasn’t far to the Communication Arts Building, and she ran as much of the way as she could before the pain in her still-bruised ankle and still-raw back made her slow down. Two flights of steps brought her to the offices, and she passed up Professor Wilson’s closed and locked office to stop next to the cluttered desk out in the open between the corridors. The nameplate read VIVIAN SAMSON, but everyone just called her Dragon Lady, and the woman sitting behind it had earned the name. She was old, fat, and legendarily bad-tempered. There was no smoking in all university buildings, but the Dragon Lady had an overflowing ashtray on the corner of her desk and a glowing cigarette hanging out of the corner of her red-painted lips. Beehive hair, straight out of old movies. She had a computer, but it wasn’t turned on, and as far as Claire could tell from the two-inch-long bright red nails, the Dragon Lady didn’t type, either.
She ignored Claire and kept on reading the magazine open in front of her.
“Um—excuse me?” Claire asked. She felt sticky with sweat from the run in the heat, and still kind of sick from what had happened at the library. The Dragon Lady turned a page in her magazine. “I just need—”
“I’m on break.” The red-clawed hand took the cigarette out of the red-painted mouth for a trip to the ashtray to shed some excess. “Not even supposed to be here today. Damn grad students. Come back in half an hour.”
“But—”
“No buts. I’m on break. Shoo.”
“But Professor Wilson sent me to get something from his house, but he didn’t give me the address. Please—”
She slapped the magazine closed. “Oh, for God’s sake. I’m going to wring his neck when he gets back here. Here.” She grabbed a card from the holder on her desk and pitched it at Claire, glaring. “If you’re some nutcase, it’s not my problem. You tell His Highness that if he wants to roll around with undergrads, he can damn well remember to tell them his own damn address from now on. Got it?”
“Got it,” Claire said in a very small voice. Roll around with… She wasn’t going to think about that. Not at all. “Thank you.”
The Dragon Lady puffed a cloud of smoke out of both nostrils and raised eyebrows plucked into more of a suggestion than an actual form. “You’re a polite one. Go on, get out of here before I remember I’m supposed to be off today.”
Claire escaped, clutching the card in her sweaty fingers.
Chapter 13
“Y ou know,” Shane said twenty minutes later, “I’d feel a whole lot better about the two of us if you didn’t think I was the go-to guy for breaking and entering.”
They were standing on the professor’s back porch, and Claire was peering through a murky window into an equally murky living room. She felt a flash of guilt about the breaking-and-entering part—but she had called him—just before her heart did a funny little painful flip and she heard him say again in her head the two of us.