Inside the shower, Haku let the warm water cascade over his shoulders. He stretched his neck from side to side, but the tension in his muscles refused to ease up. Letting out a frustrated puff of air, he lathered up a washcloth and rubbed it over his taut muscles.
Before Haku knew what he was doing, he imagined Maaya’s hands stroking his naked skin. Tilting his head up to face the stream of water, Haku closed his eyes. Envisioning Maaya’s handsome face and evocative smile, he dragged the soapy cloth down the front of his chest and across his belly. The washrag slipped from his hold, and his fingertips brushed along the crown of damp curls below his abdomen.
Taking in a shallow gasp of air, Haku dropped his hand lower. His probing touch found the source of the tension gripping his body. Haku’s cock was stiff and erect as he pressed up against his fingers. The organ jutted up almost parallel to his abs, and it ached to be held and stroked.
As one hand traced the length of his dick, the other fondled the heavy sac below it. Another small cry hitched in his throat as he fingered the sensitive area underneath his cock where his balls hung taut. A trickle of precum seeped out of his swollen head from the stimuli, running down his shaft with the shower water.
Haku whimpered. Masturbating alone in the shower with an image of that weirdo Maaya etched into his mind was wrong on so many levels. Funny how that realization didn’t stop him from rubbing the flat of his palm over his balls or slow down the pace of his strokes as he pumped his cock.
“Oh, God,” he moaned as the pressure built up in his groin. The rush stole the air from his lungs, his lips parting in a silent cry. In one hard burst, a spray of cum erupted from his cock. The thick fluid spurted through his fingers and coated his hands, waist, and the shower tiles.
Gasping, Haku collapsed forward. He leaned against the wall, his forehead pressed against the cool tiles as he struggled to catch his breath. “What’s wrong with me?” Haku demanded of himself. “I barely know this strange man ‑‑ or demon, for God’s sake ‑‑ who obviously has a power complex. Not to mention one hell of a nice ass.”
He cursed and smacked his head on the tiles. “Damn it, damn it.”
Chapter Nine
A towel wrapped around his waist, Haku stepped out of the bathroom. The shower had done nothing to make him feel better, but his cock was relaxed for a change. Unfortunately, the physical relief added to his emotional discomfort. It was one big cycle of “screwed-up-ness,” as Matt would’ve said.
With a guilty sigh, Haku flopped onto his bed. He stared up at the ceiling, strands of damp hair falling into his eyes as he tried to get his head straight. A knock sounded at the door.
“Haku?”
It was Matt.
Haku sat up and rested his elbows on his knees. He debated whether to answer or let Matt think he wasn’t here. Haku didn’t know if it was even safe for his lover to be around, not after Maaya’s threats. But when Matt knocked and called out again in a soft, dejected-sounding voice, Haku stopped being so indecisive. He crossed the room and opened the door about halfway.
His backpack slung over one shoulder and a paper bag in hand, Matt leaned in the frame. “Hey.” He grinned weakly. Except for a hint of shadows under his bright blue eyes, Matt looked okay enough for someone who’d been possessed and didn’t even know it.
“Hey.” Haku stared down at his toes. “You okay?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.” Matt straightened and shifted his backpack. “You didn’t show up for the morning classes, so I returned the students’ exams for you. I dunno, I was worried…” His words trailed off.
“Oh, yeah.” Haku lied, “I overslept. Sorry.”
“S’okay.” Matt offered him the paper bag with another hesitant smile. “I brought you lunch.”
“Thanks.” Haku took the sack.
They stared at each other during a moment of awkward silence. Matt ran a hand through his messy hair, and shifted his weight from one foot to another. His shoulders dropped. “Did I do something wrong?” he blurted out. “Last night, I ‑‑ did I ‑‑”
“No, it’s cool,” Haku said quickly, cutting him off. He moved away from the door to let Matt in. Leaving the paper bag on top of the writing desk he shared with Foster, Haku made a beeline for the closet to grab some clothes.
“You sure?” Matt closed the door and leaned against it, his bag sliding to the floor. “I had these really weird dreams about you.”
“Oh yeah? Again?” Haku glanced over, his heart skipping a couple of beats. He chuckled nervously. “You’ve got an overactive subconscious, Matthew.”
“But they weren’t like the ones I usually have.”
“That’s probably a good thing.” Haku slipped into a black turtleneck and picked out a pair of tan slacks. “You dreaming about me naked all the time can’t be healthy.”
“Are you lying to me?” Matt asked quietly. “About last night? Did I hurt you?”
“Come on, be serious.” Haku looked away. “What’s giving you these weird ideas anyway?”
“Well, you’re a pretty sucky liar to begin with,” Matt said. “And it feels like you might be trying to bullshit me.”
Haku squeezed his eyes shut. “Everything’s cool.” He turned around, forcing a confident smile he didn’t feel in the least.
“Okay.” Matt rubbed the back of his neck, exhaling slowly. “I guess I’m just weirded out after everything that happened yesterday.” He perked up and pushed away from the door. “We still have to tell Professor Adler about it.”
“Yeah,” Haku agreed. “There are definitely a few questions I need to ask him.” He paused at the desk, remembering the paper bag. “But after lunch.” He grinned at Matt and pulled open the sack.
“Spaghetti-Os?” Haku pulled out the microwavable cup and popped the lid.
“You like those!” Matt said defensively.
“Half-eaten Spaghetti-Os?” Haku’s eyebrow twitched.
“I had to make sure they heated up okay.” Matt avoided making eye-contact.
“Thanks a lot.” Haku wadded up one of the napkins inside the bag and bopped Matt on the side of the head with it.
* * * * *
When Matt and Haku arrived at their professor’s office, the place looked like a beehive. Men wearing blue overalls and grungy baseball caps were lugging out boxes and office furniture.
“Hey!” Matt caught a glass separator funnel as it tumbled out of a crate overflowing with haphazardly placed lab equipment. “What gives?”
“All of this stuff is getting moved ‘cross campus for the other departments to pick up.” The guy balanced the heavy box on his other hip. He yanked the funnel from Matt’s hands and plopped it back in the crate. “Thanks.”
Dumbfounded, Matt gave the guy a blank look. “But this is our stuff.”
“Not anymore it ain’t. Sorry.” He trudged past Matt, followed by another member of the university’s maintenance staff, who had a rusty file cabinet on a hand truck. Haku skirted past them into the office with Matt on his heels.
“Professor Adler?” Haku ducked a piece of plywood as two more guys carried a disassembled shelving unit out the door. The office, which had also doubled as a lab room for their case interviews and Adler’s experiments, was in shambles. The tables with the black Corian tops were gone, stacks of cabinet-less file folders littered the bare floor, and scraps of unfinished inventions lay piled in the corners.
“Haku, Matt ‑‑ thank God!” Adler popped out from behind the desk, spitting out a couple of nails he held between his teeth. “I was hammering this to floor before they could cart it away. Beaglehole found a way around the board’s decision and is having our lab redistributed among the other departments.”
One of the maintenance guys came back in and tried to make off with another box of gadgets. Matt grabbed the crate, clutching it protectively. “Back off, dude.” He glared. “Seriously.”
“Okay, okay.” The man held up his hands and retreated, closing the door behind him.
“So what’s going on now with Fleahole?” Matt carried the box over to the desk.
“It doesn’t matter.” Adler straightened up and smoothed back some of the long, wiry gray hairs that hung in his eyes. “Beaglehole says we went over the budget last month with the iron, and he’s taking our supplies to make up for the deficit. But with the grant you boys got last night, we can settle this.”
Matt and Haku exchanged glances. “Professor,” Haku sighed. “Dannings lied.”
The older man blinked at them, adjusting his thick, black-framed glasses. “What are you saying?”
“There’s no money.” Matt rested his elbows on the edge of the box. “The bastard hosed us.”
“Oh no,” Adler moaned, rubbing his forehead. “This isn’t good, boys. Not at all.”
“Well, the bright side is that Haku and I had an encounter with some kind of inter-dimensional demon last night.” Matt withdrew a jar full of the creature’s ashes from his backpack as he explained what happened. He tossed the canister to Adler. “Check it out!”
“Oh, my.” Adler unscrewed the cap and sniffed at the contents. “No sulfur or brimstone, but there’s a hint of acidity in the odor. And something else…”
“Sandalwood?” Haku asked quietly from his seat on top of a pile of banker’s boxes full of old school papers. From the tone of his voice, he sounded strained. Matt gave him a puzzled look, but Haku glanced away.
“No, not exactly.” Adler pulled open the desk drawers until he found a petrie dish. “I can run some tests to see what it’s composed of. Matt, pass me those goggles.” He pointed to the box Matt was leaning on.
After sorting through the bits of partly assembled gadgets, Matt found a pair of oversized night-vision goggles from the early nineties. To say they’d been modified was an understatement ‑‑ so many buttons and toggles ran down the sides at each temple that the piece of equipment looked more like it belonged in a sci-fi flick than in a science lab.
“I don’t remember these.” Matt flicked a red toggle, and a blue glow lit up the lenses.
“They’re new.” Adler grinned. “Started them the day before yesterday. Those goggles can pick up trace residues of ectoplasm or interspatial distortions from the astral plane.”
“Sweet.” Matt handed them over.
Adler put on the goggles and toggled a few more switches. “Damn.” He took them off and handed the goggles back to Matt. “These ashes are too old already. If there were any traces, they’ve worn away from exposure to our realm.”
“Crud.” Matt frowned. “There might be something at the site where we encountered the thing, though. I’ll head back and ‑‑”
“No!” Haku snapped. “There’s nothing at the site. I was there today.”
Surprised, Matt stared at him. Haku went down there, without him? He frowned. “You didn’t have these cool goggles. Maybe you missed something.”
“I said there’s nothing there,” Haku said sharply. “This was probably an isolated case. Drop it and stay away from that place.” He turned to Adler. “Are the archives still in the library, or did Beaglehole have those removed?”
“As far as I know, the archives haven’t been touched.” Adler moved away from the ashes and reached into an old fashioned, rusted over medicine cabinet behind his desk. He pulled out a bottle of antacids and popped a few of the tablets.
“Good.” Haku folded his arms across his chest. “Matt, you can look in there and see if there are any creatures in the catalog that match what we saw.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I am.”
“But ‑‑”
“Damn it, Matt, can you listen to someone other than yourself for a fucking change?” Haku pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, his dark eyes flashing.
It took Matt a few seconds to get over the harshness of his lover’s outburst. “Sure,” he said, distracted. “The archives are a great place to start, Haku.”
“Yeah.” Haku turned away to avoid looking at him, busying himself with some folders in a different box. Adler, who’d watched the exchange in silence, cleared his throat.
“Does anyone else want some Russian tea?” he said in a phony cheerful voice. “I found a carton of Tang while they were clearing boxes out of here.”
Matt moved away from the table. “No thanks, Professor. Maybe later.” He walked out of the room without looking back. But he held the goggles against his chest, keeping them from view.
He didn’t know what the hell was going on with Haku, but sitting in the frigid library and going through moldy newspaper clippings was not how he intended to spend the rest of the afternoon. Not when the answers to all their questions waited to be uncovered on that film lot.
Adler snatched a hotplate and small copper kettle from the top drawer of another filing cabinet the maintenance men were taking. He took a bottle of water from his battered leather satchel and filled the pot with it. He let out a sigh and leaned against his nailed down desk. “I should have known Pearce would jerk us off about that grant.”
“It’s not your fault, Professor,” Haku said, looking away from the ashes Matt had saved, still certain he could detect the scent of sandalwood ‑‑ the same scent that lingered on Maaya. “What did Dannings study in college?”
“I think he double majored ‑‑ archeology and anthropology.”
“Well isn’t that interesting?” Haku muttered. He sat on the floor in the space where his small desk had been and pulled his messenger bag onto his lap. He took out his laptop and began an online search for Dannings’s recent activities.
Unfortunately, all he could find were reports of Voyager Films and their various philanthropic donations. On a whim, he decided to try the name Maaya, but came up with only references to some Japanese pop star, and if there was one thing Maaya was not, it was a cute little woman. What the hell could Adler have taken that was Maaya’s?
Alexander the Great pissed his pants at the thought of fucking with me, so where does someone as miniscule as Dannings get off? It’s cheeky.
“I wonder,” Haku muttered to himself as he typed in a new string of keywords including the legendary Alexander’s name. He heard footsteps, then the sound of Professor Adler’s chuckle from behind caught Haku’s attention. “What?”
“Alexander. It reminded me of something.”
“What?” Haku asked, leaning forward as the fine hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
Chuckling to himself, Adler scooped some Tang into a mug of hot tea as he looked over Haku’s shoulder. “Pearce always had this fixation on discovering some relic or another from I don’t know how many thousands of years ago. I think he expected to be the next Indiana Jones or something, which is hilarious, because he’s never had a full head of hair since I’ve known him. Tea?”
“No thanks.” Haku wrinkled his nose at the concoction. “About Dannings ‑‑ what was he looking for?”
“Let me think.” Adler stirred the drink with a distracted frown while he tried to concentrate. “It had something to do with Alexander the Great, since Pearce was the man’s number one fan boy. In fact, I got the idea for that great practical joke after he obsessed over what ink Alexander used for his documents while he was in India.” He started laughing to himself again as he most likely pictured Dannings stained in ink.
But Haku tensed. “Hold on, Professor,” he interrupted. “Dannings was trying to research the time when Alexander tried to invade India?”
“I think so. Supposedly, there’s a legend that says Alexander was stopped by something at the Ganges, and that’s the relic Pearce was hoping to find.” Adler took a sip of the tea and grimaced. “Bleagh. It needs more cloves.” He moved back to his desk and set the mug down. “Sorry, Haku. History wasn’t exactly my scene, so I don’t remember all the details. Why the interest?”
Haku hammered away at the laptop, running searches through as many engines as he could to see if he could find a trace of this legend. “No real reason; jus
t curious to know what kind of man Dannings is,” he lied. The hairs on the back of his neck remained on end.
“Well, his precious ink is on display in university’s art gallery,” Adler said, causing Haku to glance up over the top of the notebook. “I’ll admit that discovery of his was pretty cool. He spent a whole summer in Beas to find it and got a bunch of grants afterwards, too.” Adler sighed. “The local officials sent all the artifacts over a couple of years ago and loaned them to the school for display purposes.”
“I’ve got to go.” Haku shut down his laptop and slipped it into his bag. He had to see this find Dannings had made over twenty years ago, and possibly uncover a few more clues.
“What about all this tea?” Adler pouted.
“Uh, Matt will probably be thirsty when he gets back. Bye!” Haku said quickly. Before his professor could offer him a cup to go, Haku darted out into the hall.
Chapter Ten
Shadows crawled along the empty lot as the sun set behind the abandoned transfer station, swallowing up pieces of crumbled bricks and garbage in pools of blackness. Matt jogged across the parking lot where the Voyager Film’s trailers hadn’t budged from their spot since the night before.
“Guess those guys aren’t coming back here anytime soon,” Matt mumbled to himself. Not after the scare Elaine and the other crewmembers had gone through. He stopped in front of the building and knelt down in front of the melted camera equipment and scorched cement.
Scratch marks from the demon’s claws had left jagged white streaks across the black patch on the ground. Thinking back on the attack, Matt rubbed the small cut at the corner of his mouth. That creature had moved so fast, and those scrapes on the ground had been done with some seriously sharp claws. But the only injury Matt had to show for it was a scratch no bigger than a shaving cut.
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