by C. M McCoy
“You’ll read this then and return it to me once you’ve finished,” Woodfork instructed, and Hailey nodded slowly, unable to tear her eyes from those words.
“But . . .Professor,” she said in a small voice, “this can’t be . . .” If Asher had no emotions, he could betray her tomorrow and never think twice about it. A twinge of fear in her belly robbed her breath.
She looked up at Woodfork, shaking her head.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “You’ll read the rest, yes?”
“But—”
“And return it to me once you’ve finished.” Woodfork turned his back, gathering some objects into a bag as Hailey stared, slack-jawed and unable to spit out a thought.
“That’ll do for an Envoy discussion for one day.”
“But—”
“And now . . .” He spun around, smiling. “Let’s go explore a dark tunnel.”
“Asher told me to stay out of the dark tunnels.”
“Huh,” he grunted. “He does worry after you. But! You’ll be perfectly safe. All we need is a robust spirit of adventure.” He dug around inside one of his desk drawers. “Aha! And some portable light.” He held up an Indispensable flashlight. “Our back-up will be the Indispensable Never-Fail Lighter,” he said, handing her a small bronze object.
“What is . . .how does it work?” The whole thing was smooth. She couldn’t even tell where the flame would come out.
“With breath,” he said, and Hailey frowned. “As if you’re blowing out a birthday candle, like so.” He took the lighter, and holding it out from his mouth, he blew a puff of air against it whereupon a giant flame popped into the air over the professor’s head, as if it belonged to an invisible torch. He handed the lighter back to Hailey, and the torch-less flame floated over her head.
“How do you put it out?” she asked, never taking her eye off the fire above her. “And where’s its fuel source?” She turned all around, still looking up at it, trying to figure it out.
“Simply hold your breath,” he told her, which she did with one eyebrow raised. To her astonishment, the flame snapped out.
“How is that possible? I mean, where’s the fuel?”
“Oh, you are a delight! A healthy dose of skepticism is always in order when one studies the science of the paranormal,” he told her. “After you,” he said as he opened his door.
She adjusted her backpack, and—
Wait. He was trying to distract her from asking about Asher. And she was falling for it!
Well enough of that.
She opened her mouth to speak but hesitated a bit too long.
“The fuel source is the Sun,” said the professor. “The Indispensable Lighter is simply a precision barrier breaker—a bomb of sorts.”
“A bomb?”
And once again, her curiosity betrayed her.
Woodfork nodded, indicating her to lead the way down the stairs of Olde Main.
“Indeed. It opens a discrete in-between, which doubles back on itself, effectively folding our dimension so that a bit of the fires from near the surface of our sun come through. And it attaches its position to the breath of the one holding the lighter—quite a feat of para-engineering. That was Pádraig’s project when he first arrived here. He’s been a very productive student for the Indispensable brand.”
“Indispensable makes a lot of things I’ve never heard of,” Hailey remarked as they reached the tunnels.
“Yes, well, of course it’s the University’s brand. Not much demand for it outside of the paranormal world, but our devices are wildly popular among the supernatural creatures of Earth. They sell very well in the hidden places of this world,” he said proudly. “Let’s try this one.” Professor Woodfork pointed down a dark tunnel to the right, which emitted a low, mournfully spooky cry.
Hailey peered into the darkness. “What do you think is down there?”
“Let’s find out, shall we?” He clicked on his flashlight, and Hailey blew a puff of air onto the lighter, igniting the nuclear sun-torch above her head.
Down the tunnel they went. As the moaning grew louder, it took on a more pathetic tone, like a cry for help. Soon they were right on top of the noise, but Hailey saw nothing that could be causing such a racket.
“Aha!” said Dr. Woodfork. “A moaning bookworm. Well, this isn’t normal.”
Hailey side-eyed him. Nothing about Bear Towne was normal, and she wondered if the professor knew that.
“You see,” continued the professor as Hailey squatted next to him, “he’s bookless . . .and it appears . . .” With his thumb and forefinger, the professor touched what looked like a fat inch-worm and raised a tiny object. “Yes. You see, it appears his eyeglasses are broken,” he explained, showing Hailey a teeny pair of spectacles. “We’ll get these straight over to I-MET for repair, and then we’ll bring them back along with a book.”
He handed the tiny glasses to Hailey. “Otherwise, if we were to neglect this little guy, he’d morph into a tunneling earworm—I believe you’re familiar?”
Hailey nodded.
“You see, the dark tunnels are where various creatures come when they have . . .issues. Second-year students spend an entire semester sorting out the ones they can, and of course avoiding the ones that are too far gone.
“Those,” he said, waving his finger in the air, “are the ones that become killers.” He held up his flashlight. “They hate the light. As you can see,” he told her as he shined a light on the bookworm, “our little friend here does not shy away from the light, and so he’s still redeemable.”
“What do bookworms do?”
“Read, mostly. And drink tea.”
“Out of tiny cups?” Hailey tried to imagine it.
“Actually—and you’ll find this in the library—they can suck down a normal size cuppa in less than a second—it’s remarkable to witness. It does make them swell, though, and some of them swell to an enormous size. But, they are very gentle creatures,” he said as he started down the main corridor.
Soon they’d be topside again, and Hailey would miss her chance to ask what she really wanted to know. Or not know. Truthfully, she didn’t want to confirm what she’d read, and he’d probably just shut her down again anyway, but it was now or never.
“Professor,” Hailey said, gathering her courage, “you wrote in your book that Envoys are emotionless . . .” She drew a breath but chewed her lip, rethinking this whole line of talk as she envisioned Asher listening in through Woodfork’s head.
“You want to know if Asher is capable of love.”
“Yeah . . .” she sighed, feeling exposed. “I mean, he seemed to want me here yesterday, but now it seems he’s just kicked me out of the university.”
“As you’ll read in my chronicles, the Envoys came to this Earth devoid of emotion, but as the centuries passed, they became infected with feelings. It’s new to Asher—to feel. In a lot of ways, he is emotionally like a child—very easily injured. Be patient with him, Hailey. I believe his feelings for you are genuine.”
The tunnel opened to the Olde Main stairwell, and Dr. Woodfork led them into the darkness behind the stairs, where a large, rusty door hung with the letters I-MET painted in bright white.
Inside sat a crooked reception desk and a few tattered chairs under dim light, like the waiting room of a haunted doctor’s office. The professor tapped a “ring for service” bell, which called forth a shrouded figure, who held his hand out as if he were expecting them.
“This won’t take long,” the professor told Hailey after the ghoulish figure disappeared.
“Do you know where I can find Asher?” Hailey couldn’t stand it when someone was mad at her. Mostly, she wanted to straighten out her expulsion and find out why it was suddenly “unsafe” for her there. Honestly, she thought she’d handled things pretty darn well so far. In fact, the more she tho
ught about it, the more her Irish blood boiled. He had a lot of nerve expelling her!
“The Observatory, I believe,” Woodfork answered as I-MET presented a repaired set of teeny eyeglasses. The ghoul also handed the professor a paperback book.
Hailey frowned as they made their way back to the dark tunnel. “The Observatory’s off limits to students, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and I would not disturb him there.” He handed her the glasses.
Very gently, she placed them onto the face of the bookworm and set the paperback in front of him. Immediately, the groaning stopped—the worm flipped open the book—and both the book and the worm vanished.
“Where’d he go?”
“The library, most likely.” Woodfork beamed at Hailey. “Well done.”
Following her successful rehabilitation of the moaning bookworm in a dark tunnel, Hailey had every intention of disturbing Asher at the observatory, and headed out the doors of Olde Main via the red-buttoned out-between with quite a bone to pick.
Marching to the Observatory with an increasingly quickened pace, she swatted all thirty-five species of Alaskan mosquitos as she went, trying but failing to reach a particularly hungry one attached to the middle of her back. By the time she reached the off-limits building, she didn’t hesitate to barge inside to escape the hungry swarm of bloodsuckers.
“Asher!” she called.
She got no answer from the Envoy at the top of the mezzanine, who looked through a telescope in the middle of the day, undisturbed by her yells.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve—ignoring me now . . .after . . .” She had to catch her breath. “ . . .if you . . .think I’m leaving this . . .place . . .”
The room swayed a bit, and she staggered.
“ . . .I’m not . . .afraid of you . . . You’re . . .” She couldn’t believe she had to catch her breath again. “ . . .I’m not . . .” She forgot what she wanted to say and blinked hard before falling to her knees.
Asher landed with a metallic clang on the grating in front of Hailey, and she squinted to see him. Fingers of blackness crept around her eyes as Asher helped her crumple gently to the floor.
“Asher . . .” she breathed. “ . . .I don’t . . .feel . . .” As numbness spread down her legs and pins and needles jabbed her hands, Asher pulled a quill from Hailey’s back.
“It’s poison,” he said with no emotion, and then he paced away from her, looking thoughtfully skyward.
“Asher . . .” Hailey cried between gasps. She tried reaching out to him, but her arm didn’t budge. “Asher?” she called again, but he didn’t budge, either, and darkness caved in over Hailey.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Quill
“Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.”
The Bible, Romans 12:9
Asher held the deadly quill. But what he saw in his hand was the end of his suffering on Earth; he saw a way back into the Aether; he saw his home.
As Hailey convulsed and struggled for breath on his observatory floor, he pulled from his pocket a shiny black stone. That such a small trinket could slice open the great barrier between realms seemed fantastic. He had but to hold onto it for another minute to find out if it would work. That’s all it would take for the poison to rob the Earth of his girl. And while she writhed in agony against the floor, no doubt silently pleading for his assistance, Asher hesitated to give it.
The Envoy yearned for his home almost as much as the man he had become yearned for Hailey’s affection.
Asher replaced the stone in his pocket and knelt down next to his love. The comfort inside the Aether tempted him still, but the temptress before him commanded his heart. Taking her into his arms, he placed his lips against her forehead and repaired her delicate body, compelling beads of poison to drop from her eyes like tears.
Gradually, her breath came in an easy rhythm, and her heart beat in a slow, effortless cadence. She slept in his arms, and in holding her there, Asher found his home.
Hailey’s college career was off to a fantastic start, she despaired as she woke up with a misty-eyed giggle.
At the world’s premier school of paranormal studies, she’d already managed to fall out of a Luftzeug, survive a vacuum-glazed in-between, experience a tunneling earworm, live with a roommate from Hell, lose her clothes to a mal-tempered poltergeist, step on a carnivorous splinter, rehabilitate a moaning bookworm, and be shot in the back by a poisonous quill.
And she was only two days into her freshman year.
Before she opened her eyes, a tear escaped, and as it coursed across her temple, she imagined her bedroom in Pittsburgh, with Holly sleeping peacefully in her bed near the window and Uncle Pix cooking up the breakfast bacon. She could almost smell it.
Wait. She did smell it.
Hailey opened her eyes and confronted a splitting headache. Letting out a curt moan, she snapped them shut again and pinched the bridge of her nose to keep her brains from leaking out.
“This will help,” said Asher, who sat next to her.
“If I open my eyes, the light is going to crack my head open.”
Asher tenderly kissed Hailey’s forehead and an electric tingle enveloped her face. It was like he’d hit a release valve on her cranium and let the pressure out of her skull.
“That’s much better,” she said when he moved away. “Where am I?” As her eyes adjusted to the light, she realized she was in a strange, but richly beautiful house. She sat on a large, plush couch under a vaulted ceiling, facing a grand stone fireplace.
Asher set a plate of fresh fruits, bacon, eggs, and toast on the ornately rough-cut coffee table in front of her.
“You’re in my home next to the observatory,” he explained with low volume, which Hailey greatly appreciated. “You’re still weak from the poison, but some food will help.”
With arms of lead, Hailey reached for the bacon and nibbled it slowly.
“I must leave you for a while, but I’ll return soon,” Asher said getting up. He turned to go but turned to her again with pleading eyes. “You’re free to leave this place while I’m away, but I wish you wouldn’t. Stay and eat and rest. I’ll escort you back to your room when I return.”
“Where are you going?”
“To tend to the one who hurt you.”
“You know who did this?” she asked, and Asher dropped his eyes.
“I knew before the quill hit you,” he confessed.
Hailey dropped her bacon, waiting on the edge of the couch for his explanation. She only spoke when he moved to leave without giving one. “What? How? Why didn’t you stop it?”
Asher stood with his back to her. “The human soul is not naturally evil,” he explained. “When a man or a woman begins down a path of bad behavior, it causes a disruption in their energy. It’s a lot like discord in music or clashing colors. An Envoy can hear and see it right away if one cares to. I’m always listening to my campus for such evil.” He faced Hailey as he continued. “Joanne had been plotting this for days, and she encourages others with this malevolence.”
“Joanne?” she said skeptically.
“Do you know her?”
“No, not really. I was sitting with Fin when she slapped him . . .”
Asher studied Hailey for a moment. “I’ve delayed confronting her to see you wake, but I must go now. She will tell me her motivation before I destroy her.”
Before Hailey could process the word “destroy,” he was gone—vanished into the shadows.
“Asher?” she called to the emptiness, but she was alone in his gigantic Alaskan mansion. She finally stood upright and walked twenty paces on shaky legs into his dining room. A chandelier of a thousand sparkling crystals hung over a long oak table with totem-carved legs.
That room shared an all-glass wall with what looked like an atrium of giant trees and lush greene
ry. Mostly hidden behind an ivy-draped tree sat a tall marble fountain.
“Whoa,” she marveled as she took it in.
On the other side of the dining room, Hailey found a long, window-lined hallway, which led her into another great room. Set up like a gallery with a large, upholstered bench in the center of it, the room also held an oft-used violin and bow on a stand next to the bench.
Lining the walls of that room from floor to ceiling hung pieces of glass masterfully painted and illuminated from behind so that they glowed warmly—one of a beaver dam over a stream near a serene grove of mighty oaks; one of a bluff overlooking a river at the foot of white-capped mountains; one of a lush field in the clearing of a familiar forest.
Hailey recognized them all. They were scenes from her dreams—exact replicas, and Asher had gorgeously painted and illuminated over a hundred of them. As she studied each one, a torrent of memories washed over her . . .conversations in the Aether, confessions she’d made, revelations Asher had shared, and—the black rock. The Envoy Cobon had killed Holly because of it, but it was Hailey’s death, not Holly’s that would send the Envoys home to the Aether. That’s why she was in danger. And Asher protected her from the other Envoys...because . . .
Interrupting her thought was a painting, which hung in the center of the largest wall—a piece of glass that was not an image from her dreams—one that transfixed Hailey: a six-foot tall image of two sisters dancing at an Irish pub—a perfect copy of the photo Asher had repaired and held for her on the day she’d arrived in Bear Towne.
Hands pressed to her chest, Hailey stared at it for several minutes until her chin quivered and a flood of tears filled her eyes.
Asher slid his hands around her waist, and she leaned into him. She hadn’t even heard him return. When he brushed his lips over her ear, Hailey tilted her head to them.
“I miss her so much.”
“I know,” he murmured.
“Asher, I don’t know who to trust here, and you . . . you were going to let Joanne kill me, weren’t you?”
He stepped back, gently turning Hailey to face him.