The Professor

by Alexandria Clarke

  “Nicole Costello?”

  I whirled around at the unexpected voice. A man had emerged from the shadows of the trees in the side yard, but I didn’t bother to get a better look at him. Instead, I made a panicked running start for the house. When he realized what I was doing, he leapt into action. He lunged forward like a bullet and closed in on me just as I reached the porch steps. My feet swept out from under me. He had wrapped his arms around my waist, dragging me down to the cold, damp grass. His weight immobilized the bottom half of my body, but I managed to free my hands. I grabbed his head, pressing my thumbs to his eyes with every intention of doing whatever I had to do in order to free myself.

  “I don’t want to hurt you!” he insisted, and with a grunt, he heaved himself far enough away from me to dislodge my threatening fingers. He trapped my hands, crossed my arms, and used his body weight to pin me to the ground. My head knocked against the bottom porch step, stunning me for a moment.

  With the stranger’s face in such close proximity to my own, it was impossible to ignore his features. He was an older man, late fifties maybe, with graying hair and electric blue eyes. Despite his age, his grip was strong, and judging by the efficiency of his offense, he had studied some kind of martial art. He wore dark clothing, but unlike the Raptors, he did not drip with the appearance of wealth. The fabric around the collar and sleeves of his jacket had been worn down, and the shabby, navy sweatshirt underneath smelled of woodsmoke and cheap aftershave. A thin, gold ring encircled his left ring finger. I opened my mouth to yell, but he clamped a hand across my lips.

  “Listen to me,” he whispered, his blue eyes flashing as they scanned Eileen’s house for signs of movement. “Listen.”

  I bit his thumb. He yelped, yanking his hand away from my mouth. “Who the hell are you?” I spat, still struggling to free myself from beneath the deadweight of his body.

  “If I tell you, will you stop trying to run off?”

  “That depends,” I answered. “I don’t take kindly to being tackled.”

  He sighed and sat up, but his knees remained stapled to either side of my hips to ensure my cooperation. “My name is Henry Danvers. I’m married to your mother.”

  Prologue

  In the past several weeks, I had been physically accosted so many times that it was starting to feel commonplace. So when a strange man called out my name from the shadows of a dark night, fight went out the window, and I let flight do its thing, making a wild bid for the safety of the house behind me. Unfortunately, my pursuer seemed to be expecting this. Before I knew it, he had tackled me to the ground, and as I wrestled to free myself, I wondered if maybe one day, I’d be able to walk outside to my car without having to resort to sticking my fingers into somebody’s eye sockets to free myself from their clutches. But that day did not seem to be drawing nigh, and judging by my attacker’s ease in dismantling my defense, he had been trained in some higher level of combat, the likes of which I had no hopes of competing against.

  “Who the hell are you?” I demanded, pinned against the frozen ground beneath the weight of the stranger.

  “If I tell you, will you stop trying to run off?”

  “That depends. I don’t take kindly to being tackled.”

  He took a deep breath, propping himself up so that I had a little bit more mobility in my upper body. His knees, however, still framed my hips, trapping me against the scratchy, dead grass. I considered my options. If I jerked my thigh up and angled it just right, I might have been able to hit him in his weakest spot, but before I could go through with it, he spoke again.

  “My name is Henry Danvers,” he said. “I’m married to your mother. She’s alive.”

  Henry Danvers may have removed the majority of his weight from my chest, but his words knocked the wind right out of me.

  “What?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “Your mother,” he said again. “You are Nicole Costello, correct?”

  Wordlessly, I nodded, and when he realized that I wasn’t going to make another attempt to flee the scene, he shifted back on his heels and let me shuffle into a seated position against the porch steps of the quaint house behind me.

  “Natasha Petrov, your mother, is my wife.”

  “My mother is dead.”

  Henry Danvers shook his head and reached into the back pocket of his faded jeans. He took out his cell phone, busied himself with the touch screen for a moment, then turned the phone around to face me.

  “This is a photo of you and your mother when you were two years old. It was taken a few days before she gave you up to your aunt,” he said. To my complete and utter shock, the phone displayed the exact same picture as the one that sat on the mantle above my aunt’s fireplace while I was growing up. My mother, at that time only twenty-four or so, held me up to face her at eye level, our noses touching and our smiles wide. “And this,” Henry continued, using his index finger to swipe across the phone screen, “is a photo of me and your mother that was taken just a few months ago.”

  My stomach flipped as I studied the new picture. It had been taken on a clear, crisp day in front of a beautiful white farmhouse. The front yard was littered with vibrant red and orange leaves, and on the wraparound porch of the house, Henry Danvers stood with one arm casually slung across the shoulders of a woman who was unmistakably my mother. She had aged, of course, but the shape of her face and her impeccable posture remained the same. Gingerly, I took the phone and zoomed in on my mother’s face.

  “That’s impossible,” I whispered.

  “Not quite,” said Henry, reaching for the phone. I leaned away from him, hugging the phone closer, unable to tear my gaze from the photo. “Believe me, your existence was a bit of a surprise to me as well.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t either. It took me a while to put all the pieces together.”

  Finally, I came back to earth. I thrust the phone back at Henry. “Why now?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why come looking for me now?” I asked. I stood up, dusting dirt from the seat of my jeans. “And why tackle me in the middle of the night?”

  “You clearly weren’t going to hear me out otherwise,” Henry said as he rose out of a crouch. “The second I called your name, you tried to bolt.”

  I crossed my arms. “If you knew anything about my life right now, you’d understand my current aversion to strange men.”

  His shoulders slumped forward, his spine rounding, and a sheepish look appeared on his face. “See, that’s the thing, Nicole. I actually know quite a bit about your life right now.”

  I looked him up and down. “How would you—? Actually, you know what? I don’t want to know.” I turned and trotted up the porch steps to the front door of the house. “Stay away from me,” I called to Henry over my shoulder. “And tell my mother—if this isn’t all some elaborate scam—thanks for abandoning me and letting me think she was dead. A-plus parenting.”

  “Nicole, wait. Natasha doesn’t even know I came looking for you.”

  I paused with my hand on the doorknob. “Why are you even here? What do you want from me?”

  He placed one foot on the first step of the porch, as if he wanted to follow me into the house, but then thought better of it. His boot moved back to the ground.

  “I want to help you,” he insisted, his sharp blue eyes softening. “Please. I think we could be beneficial to each other. Besides, I know how much Natasha suffers from having to give you up.”

  “Then why did she?”

  “For your own protection.”

  “From who?”

  “Please, Nicole. It’s a long story.” Henry ran a hand through his thick, graying hair. “May I come in? Hear me out for five minutes. If you don’t like what I have to say, then I’ll leave and you can pretend we never even met.”

  I hesitated in the doorway. “It’s not my house.”

  “But you’re staying here?”

  “Briefly.”

  Henry lifted his sh
oulders. With his hands tucked deep in the pockets of his denim jacket and his feet spread in a casual stance, he looked far from malicious. “I promise not to piss on the toilet seat or anything like that.”

  My instincts warred. On one hand, I had been taken by surprise one too many times in the past several weeks. Letting my guard down now could be the biggest mistake I’d ever make. On the other hand, if Henry really did have a way to help, what good would it do to refuse him?

  “Five minutes,” he promised again.

  “I don’t trust you,” I said.

  He seemed to take this statement as some kind of invitation inside. He nodded, stepped onto the porch, and said, “You’ll learn.”

  25

  As soon as Henry set foot inside, his eyes roved the modest house as if taking notes on the layout, decor, and possible exit routes. It was a calculating look, one that made me even more curious as to what Henry had to say for himself. He paused in the act of shaking off his denim jacket, his gaze locked on the living room. There, on the floral patterned sofa, my boyfriend, Wes, dozed, snoring fitfully through his mouth. His face was a portrait of bruises. Earlier that day, his nose had been broken, and if I knew my adversaries as well as I thought I did, he’d been tortured emotionally throughout the twelve hours in which they had kept him hostage. At the sight of him, finally relaxed and safe, my heart swelled in my chest.

  Henry raised an eyebrow at Wes. “Rough day?”

  “You have no idea.”

  I beckoned Henry into the kitchen. As I warmed two mugs of water for tea in the microwave—the whistle of the kettle was sure to wake someone—he hung his jacket across the back of a chair and settled down at the kitchen table.

  “First things first,” he said. “Whose house is this? Is the owner going to come down the stairs with a shotgun and demand evidence of my credentials?”

  I leaned against the counter, watching the microwave clock count down so that I could catch it before it beeped, and asked, “You have credentials?”

  “Believe it or not.”

  “It’s my history professor’s house,” I answered. I wondered how much information to allow Henry. “Or his wife’s now, I guess. He was murdered.”

  Henry nodded. If this information was jarring to him in any way, he didn’t show it. “George O’Connor.”

  I squinted at him. “You know what? This might go faster if you tell me what you know. I agreed to five minutes. Start talking, Mr. Danvers.”

  “Please, call me Henry.”

  He smiled, waiting patiently for me to respond.

  “Fine,” I sighed. “Henry.”

  The microwave beeped. I had lost track of the minutes. Quickly, I wrenched open the door, hoping that the noise wouldn’t disturb Wes in the living room or O’Connor’s wife, Eileen, upstairs. I dropped a bag of chamomile tea in each mug then sat down at the table across from Henry, sliding one mug across to him.

  “Thanks,” he said, warming his hands around the steaming cup. “For the sake of background information, I feel like I should tell you that I didn’t know about you until pretty recently.”

  “How recently?”

  “I found out that Natasha had a daughter about three years ago.”

  “So not that recent. She never told you about me?”

  Henry shook his head. “Never said one word.”

  I thought I had distanced myself from the file in my brain that held the emotions concerning my mother, but now that it had been flung open, there was no denying the ache of resentment. Henry had done something that seemed impossible; he’d fallen in love and made a life with a dead woman. Meanwhile, I was being hunted by my mother’s old ghosts.

  “I didn’t know about my mother until just now, so I guess that makes us even,” I replied, absentmindedly dunking the tea bag in and out of my mug.

  Henry produced a wry smile. “I guess it does. Listen, Nicole. Before I start explaining, I need you to agree to one condition.”

  “There’s always a condition, isn’t there? What is it?”

  “Don’t ask me how I found out about any of this.”

  I lifted an eyebrow, dubious. “How am I supposed to learn to trust you when you say something like that? Are you with the mafia or something? Is the Cosa Nostra going to bust in here and kick my ass? Because honestly, I’ve just about reached my limit.”

  He chuckled deeply, reaching for the bowl of sugar on the small Lazy Susan in the middle of the table. As he stirred a spoonful into his tea, he said, “Not the mafia, no, but what I do is classified. Your mother doesn’t know, and to be quite honest, I’m breaking the rules by contacting you.”

  “What rules?”

  “Didn’t I just tell you not to ask questions?”

  I considered his condition. Again, my internal alarm bells were going off inside my head. The whole reason I was in this mess to begin with was because everyone involved had harbored an obsession with secrets, but here I was, bargaining with the unknown yet again.

  I nodded. “Fine.”

  He took a sip of tea. “First off, how deeply are you involved with the Black Raptor Society?”

  I choked on a gulp of tea. It burned all the way down, scalding my throat. My eyes watering, I asked, “How do you—?”

  Henry gave me a pointed look.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, still nursing my blazing throat. “You cannot possibly confirm the existence of Waverly University’s most elite, notorious, and downright repugnant secret society with one throwaway question and then expect me not to ask how you discovered them.”

  “I know a lot about the Raptors,” admitted Henry matter-of-factly. “I know that your father, Anthony Costello, was once a member. I know many names of the current members, including a few that you might be familiar with. I know that since the society’s inauguration, they have embezzled, extorted, thieved, and murdered. I know that the society’s leadership has changed hands from Orson Lockwood to Catherine Flynn, albeit unofficially. And I know that because of your mother’s history with your father, the Raptors would greatly rejoice in the termination of your life.”

  My jaw had unhinged at some point during this short speech, and it was with no small effort that I managed to pick it up off the floor and reattach it to my face.

  “I have an inside source,” Henry said with a nonchalant tip of his head, as if this simple fact excused his extensive knowledge of my current affairs. “And unlike your inside source, mine has been trained by experts to avoid discovery.”

  “My inside source?”

  He took another sip of tea. “Lauren Lockwood. Orson Lockwood’s twenty-year-old daughter. You and her teamed up to take down the society, did you not?”

  “She didn’t agree with the route the Raptors were taking.”

  “A Raptor with a conscience,” mused Henry. “I never thought I would see the day.”

  “What do you mean she wasn’t trained to avoid discovery?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?” I pressed. My pulse quickened. This felt like bad news.

  Henry sighed, setting his mug of tea firmly on the table. “The Raptors took Lauren Lockwood into custody. From my understanding, they finally got wind of what she was doing.”

  I dropped my head into my hands. “Oh, God.”

  “She’s still alive,” Henry reassured me, and once again, the need to know where he got his information rose within me. “For how long, we don’t know.”

  “You said that Catherine Flynn runs the Raptors now,” I said, ignoring the growing restlessness in the pit of my stomach. “An hour ago, I watched someone run Orson Lockwood over with a car. Is that what you meant?”

  “Orson Lockwood was run down?”

  Finally, I possessed a piece of information that Henry didn’t. “In a parking garage just north of the Waverly campus. Is that what you meant?” I repeated.

  Henry shook his head. “Catherine Flynn has been moving in on her brother for a while now. Ever since she took the position a
s the dean of the history department, she’s been recruiting new Raptors to shape in her own image, much like she did when she was still attending school at Waverly. According to my source, a majority of the current Raptors now swear allegiance to Flynn rather than Lockwood.”

  “I thought she only had a few devoted followers,” I said. “I’ve dealt with them on more than one occasion.”

  “She has her favorites but has been instilling doubt in the more impressionable Raptors of Lockwood’s abilities to maintain the foundation of the society. However, she insisted that her Raptors maintain a united, devoted front in order to keep her brother ignorant and placid. It’s quite the clever ruse actually. No one ever said Catherine Flynn wasn’t devoted.”

  “Oh, God,” I said again.

  “The point is,” continued Henry, “I need to shut down the Raptors as quickly as possible. I have most of the puzzle put together, but there are a few missing pieces that I can’t move forward without. That’s where you come in.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers, breathing deeply. “Honestly, Henry, I don’t know what you expect me to do. So far, I just seem to be making everything worse.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t ask you for much,” said Henry. “I just need you to come talk to your mother.”

  I removed myself from my seat at the kitchen table so rapidly that my knee hit the underside of it. My mug tipped over, spilling tea across the red-and-white checkered tablecloth, but I barely processed it. My knee throbbing, I backed as far away from Henry as the quaint kitchen would allow.

  “No,” I said firmly.

  “Nicole, please understand—”

  “Is this what you came here for?” My voice shook as I steadied myself against the kitchen counter. “You wanted my mother and I to have some kind of heartfelt reunion complete with hugs and kisses? It’s not going to happen! Don’t you get it? She is a ghost to me. Dead! If she wanted to meet me, she had thirty years to make it happen.”