by Amber Kell
Frey looked around sharply, his sword lifted.
I wanted to rush back to the house, lock the door, but this was my life. Despite the stinky apartment and the attack on campus, I couldn’t spend it holed up in my house—and there was no guarantee I’d be safe anyway.
I opened the door, the creak loud and reassuring in the stillness. I blew out a breath of relief at this sign of normality. “Okay, I’ll snip some basil and rosemary. Just take a sec.” Warm water dripped from the ceiling onto my face. Damn, I should get by more often and open the windows in here. There was a lot of built-up condensation.
“Bailey!”
I whirled, saw Frey staring at me.
My hand came away from my cheek wet with fresh blood. I looked up. “Something’s…bleeding?”
The thing exploded from a hanging basket stuffed with fanciful horn plants—brown feathers, claws, screaming as it went for me. It was huge in the small space, its shadow blocking the weak sunlight.
“A hawk!”
“It is infected; that is why it bleeds. You must leave this place!” Frey roared.
I grabbed the garden rake.
Blood drops, whooshing air. I fell back, seeing the bird’s eyes, red and seeping as it raked the air above me. “Jesus!”
The hawk smashed itself against the glass wall, crazy to escape, again and again before it fell, giant wings mangled sticks.
I panted, “Still alive.”
“It suffers.” Frey knelt. He whispered something in his guttural tongue, reached out and touched the hawk.
It crumbled, dark wet ash.
A single bloody feather drifted to the greenhouse floor.
“What the fuck!”
Frey was on his feet again. He gripped my arm. “We return to the house now.”
“Yeah, okay.” I was leaning on him. Why was I doing that? I was fine. I wasn’t hurt. “It attacked us. A wild bird. Why would it do that?”
He shoved me back in the kitchen, slammed the door behind us.
“And then you… It was ash. You touched it and—”
He dragged me to a chair.
“I don’t…understand.” My face felt stretched too tight and I was hot. My head echoed my drumming blood.
“Breathe.” His hand was clamped around mine, squeezing. Remembering how he’d touched the hawk, I jerked mine back.
“You are pale.”
Frey got my noodles, which I hadn’t eaten. As I sat there, staring at him, he began to spoon them into my mouth. I ate. I didn’t know what else to do.
After a while I tasted the spice he’d raved about. “You take the idea of comfort food to a whole new level,” I said.
“You are yourself again.” He put aside the food, cupped my cheek.
I squeezed my eyes shut. It was that or give in to the terrible urge to cry and I didn’t do that. Not since Dad’s funeral.
He pulled me close. “I will not let harm come to you.”
“Fuck, I’m scared. I just can’t find my footing. This is all too much. But I’m scared, Frey.”
“I know.”
“And I…don’t want you to get hurt protecting me.” The ball in my gut had been growing. His laughter, his adorable confusion, his beautiful blue eyes.
“It is a plan.”
I was gripping his bare shoulders, my face pressed to his freshly cut hair. Oh, yeah, Candy had made use of the conditioner. It felt like silk.
“What?” I blinked, losing track for a moment. “What is a plan?”
“Candy says not getting hurt is a plan.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Just don’t, okay?”
He brought me water in the same bowl he’d eaten noodles from. I drank it without bothering to tell him where the glasses were and then sagged back in the chair.
“You are recovered, guide?”
“Not hardly, but I need to know what the hell just happened. That bird…”
“It is the second part of the darkness that comes through the door you opened,” Frey said. “You were attacked by the Skirmisher first. This was the work of the Whisperer.”
“The hawk was some kind of monster?”
“It was infected by the energy of the Whisperer. It used the bird to attack us.”
“Okay.” I nodded. I’d seen enough horror movies for this to make a weird kind of sense. “My prof said things come in threes. You, the wolverine thing with the glowing eyes and now this Whisperer.”
“Yes,” Frey said. “Two of us, two of them.”
“Dandy.”
“You are pale again.”
“When you touched it, it fell to ash.”
“A small ability.” Frey lifted his left hand. “I will not be able to make use of that gift for a day and a night, but I had to cleanse the bird of the infection or it might have spread.”
“To what?”
“To you, guide. That is what it sought, to overcome you, to share its blood with yours and make you part of the darkness and the hunger.”
Chapter Seven
My phone rang.
Frey snatched for his sword.
“Wait!” I didn’t need him smashing my BlackBerry. “It’s mine.”
I followed the theme from Star Wars back down to the lower level. I saw the caller ID with relief. “Professor Dunbar, I left you a message.”
“I was deep in research, Bailey.” Her voice was reassuringly dry. “I do that sometimes. It’s part of being a professor.”
“Yeah, look, I need to talk to you.” I looked at my Viking bodyguard glaring at me. “Uh, we do, I mean.”
“Do you mean your special visitor?”
“We’ve…had some trippy experiences.” My throat closed and my heart sped up. Frey reached out and touched my shoulder.
“Do you remember where my townhouse complex is?”
“You bet.” It would be okay, I told myself, willing my heart to just goddamn stop pounding so hard. It was going to be okay. We’d go see her and she’d have information. She’d tell me what to do.
I retraced my steps and turned off the stove. “No time for pasta.” But Frey looked a little forlorn so I made him a giant peanut butter and honey sandwich—local unpasteurised honey of course. “Did you know honeybees pollinate most of our food? They are under pressure from all the pesticides used so we’re in danger of losing them,” I said.
“What is this?” Frey’s eyes were closed and he had an orgasmic look on his face.
“Peanut butter.” I snagged my wallet and keys. “Food for the gods, right?”
“Right,” Frey said.
Frey was every bit as reluctant the second time to get in my Smart car, but I gave him a stern look. He sulked once we were in motion, and I had to admit his hulking body was squished like his sandwich.
“You called me the guide,” I said. “But see, you’re wrong. Professor Dunbar is the one who really knows what’s going on. She can help us. She knows about the Celtic symbol I messed with so she’ll totally fix this.”
“She is a druid?” Frey asked. “A wizard of your time?”
“Um, no. She’s a professor at my school.”
“But you are the guide,” Frey said, predictably now.
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, taking a right and heading out to the little island that was home to a few town homes built back in the seventies. Pretty good life, living on a beach, the cedar homes bleached like driftwood.
I parked on the street and took a deep breath. My hands didn’t want to leave the steering wheel.
“Okay, let’s go see her.” I opened the door, feeling exposed.
The ground squished under our feet as we walked past wilted planters.
“I know she can help us,” I told Frey. “If I’d listened to her…well, you and me would never have woken up together.”
“That would be disappointing,” Frey said.
When we got to the door, I knocked and we waited. I was aware of the soft sounds of the ocean, smooth as a lake and the faint hush of salt air. The c
edar tree beside Professor Dunbar’s house creaked as it shifted in the breeze.
I knocked again, beginning to tense up. “She’s probably on the phone.”
When she still didn’t appear, I tried the knob and the door swung open. Inside was dark.
Frey hefted his sword. “Behind me,” he ordered and his breath was visible in the dim light. A chill had breathed out from the open door, like the frozen breath of a dragon.
“But I just talked to her—” My mouth had dried up. I had the same freaky feeling I’d had back at my dorm, like it was the last place I wanted to enter. “She was fine. She’s expecting us.”
Frey entered and damn, if he was going in, I had to and I didn’t want to. I wanted to go home to Mom’s and lie on my bed and read a paperback romance, haze out the past day. I reached out and flipped a switch by the door. Nothing. The hallway light didn’t come on.
“Professor Dunbar?” I called. I reached out and gripped Frey’s arm. “Wait.”
“I cannot.”
“No, we’ll go in but we need something first.” I sprinted back to the car and opened it, grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment. When I switched it on, Frey looked briefly disconcerted at the beam of light.
“It’s too dark to go in without it.”
Frey nodded. “The guide provides the way.”
I grimaced, but yeah, I guess you could look at it that way. Not that a flashlight made me Merlin.
Frey went in first, sword raised, while I shone the light into the hallway. The powder room door was closed. I tried it, flipped the switch…and nothing. It looked like the power was out. I could see dim lights through the gathering mist outside other town houses, so it looked like only Professor Dunbar’s was affected.
“Clear,” I said, shutting the door behind me.
“Clear?” Frey asked, forehead wrinkled.
“Yeah, it’s what cops say when they sweep a room and don’t find anything.”
Frey still looked confused but he lifted a shoulder as if to say, who can understand this strange guide of mine?
“Remind me to watch some TV with you soon. It’ll be nice and numbifying.” A tapping sound came from the kitchen. Tap-tap…pause. Tap-tap-tap. I didn’t want to go in there, but Frey made that decision for us, pushing open the swinging door.
I spotted her laptop on the kitchen table, screen open and lit up. Something sizzled from a frying pan on the stove. “Dry. She burned whatever it is dry.” I switched off the oven, seriously creeped out by the silent house. “What is that sound?”
Something warm and wet hit my face and I screeched, dropping the flashlight. Frey gave a battle cry and I heard the swing of his sword. The flashlight rolled back and forth, throwing light, moving shadow.
Throwing light in an arc over the palm of my left hand.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Hang on…” I was kneeling on the kitchen floor. My body had just taken over, decided to get me out of range of flying claws or whatever came next. “It’s water. It’s just water, not blood. The floor is soaked here.”
Frey picked up the flashlight warily and then handed it to me as if afraid he’d disrupt its magic. It dripped in my hand, but I shone the beam around the kitchen. “Not coming from the sink.” I raised the light, shot it to the ceiling. “Coming from the second floor. You can see it seeping from the corner.”
I wiped my upper lip where sweat prickled. “I guess we better…go up there, check it out.”
Frey was already striding through the kitchen, shoving the door open and heading for carpeted stairs that went to the second level of Professor Dunbar’s town house. I’d come here a couple of times with my Mom, but I’d never gone upstairs.
It was concern for him that made me keep moving. I couldn’t leave him alone. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I ever did that, he’d fall.
Plus I was worried about my teacher. She might be sarcastic and cynical, but that just made her my type of person. I was sure Candy would be just like her in twenty years.
“Frey, slow down!” I called when his broad back went out of range of my light. “I’m the fucking guide,” I muttered.
“I heard you, guide.” His voice teased me. Here in this awful waiting place of dripping water and icy temperatures.
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 s
he 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.
