Dark Possession

by Carol Goodman

  “Nah,” said Adam. “Some girls got scared because they saw a mouse.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Rodent infestations can be bad around here. That must have been the odor I detected coming from Alpha House this morning.”

  “No worries,” Adam said, showing a lot of white teeth as he smiled. “We’ve put out traps.”

  I smiled back at Adam, despite the chill I felt at the implicit threat. I’d have to keep Ralph from going over there.

  “Well, if that’s all, let’s turn our attention to Bruno Bettelheim. What did you think of his assertion that the Little Red Riding Hood story reflects Oedipal conflicts during puberty?”

  Nothing galvanized students more than a good sex-symbolism debate. Half of them thought that reading sexual content into their favorite bedtime stories was heresy. The others were delighted to be talking about sex. The lively discussion took their minds off my supposed heroic exploits. Ruby Day took part enthusiastically, declaring that she liked the Little Red Riding Hood in Roald Dahl’s version, in which Red takes out a gun and shoots the wolf. Adam Sinclair remained quiet through most of the class period, until it was nearly over, when he said, looking straight at Ruby Day, “Little Red Riding Hood got what she deserved. You don’t go walking in the woods alone if you want to avoid wolves.”

  I was about to say something in response, but Nicky Ballard did it for me.

  “You could say that about the wolf, too. If you go around attacking defenseless girls, you can expect payback.”

  A good note to end class on! I saw that Nicky wanted to hang back to talk to me, but I told her it would have to wait because I needed to go see Professor Delmarco.

  “Sure, Prof,” she said with a sly smile. “I think it’s really great you guys are, like, fighting the man together.”

  “We’re doing no such thing, Nicky!” I said sternly, but she just kept smiling.

  I went upstairs to talk to Frank. I found him in his office, feet up on his desk, the sports section of The New York Times spread in front of his face.

  “Hey,” I said without preamble, “did you know that the whole campus knows about our exploits at Alpha House last night and they also think we’re a couple?”

  Frank lowered the newspaper and looked at me over the rims of his reading glasses. “Let me guess, you tried a memory-expunging spell on Ruby Day?”

  “Yeah, how’d you … I mean, it had the opposite effect.”

  “Don’t you remember what Soheila said about what happened when Dean Book tried to erase the tunnels from campus memory? It drove the memory into the subconscious, where it became lore. You and I are legends now. Frankly, I would have preferred to have become mythic for my athletic prowess, but being a badass counterrevolutionary’s not bad.”

  “But how are we going to protect the students if Laird knows what we’re doing?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Frank replied, folding his newspaper. “And as much as I hate going to them, I think we need to enlist the help of the creatures with the most practice in keeping a low profile. It’s time we went to the vampires.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FRANK WAS RIGHT: the vampires were our best bet for protecting the students from the Alphas. Still, it felt wrong somehow to entrust the welfare of a bunch of young people to bloodsucking creatures of the night—even if they were tenured college professors. Maybe especially since they were tenured college professors. Frank assured me, though, that in the eight years he’d been at Fairwick and keeping a close eye on the three Eastern European Studies professors, Anton Volkov, Ivan Klitch, and Rea Demisovski, they had never fed from a student or an unwilling adult. And even though the vampires had secretly joined the Grove, they had not supported closing the door to Faerie. Anton had explained to me that the upyr, the ancestors of the vampires, had originally dwelt in Faerie, but had become so enamored of humans that the Fairy Queen banished them and commanded a witch to curse them to an eternity of darkness and living off human blood. (A story not unlike the nephilim’s origin story, it occurred to me now.) Anton had admitted that his kind had taken their anger at the fey out on humans but that a few more-enlightened vampires had come to Fairwick, seeking a different kind of existence. When the door to Faerie closed, the vampires could not be banished to Faerie, but Anton knew that the nephilim despised his kind. It was only a matter of time before the nephilim drove the vampires out of Fairwick or destroyed them, so the vampires were motivated to help us. Still, I always felt a little uneasy around Anton.

  The first meeting of the campus safety committee was called for the end of the week, but when the time came, I sent Frank and Soheila an email saying that I had a migraine and couldn’t make it. Let Frank and Soheila handle the vampires, I thought, settling onto my library couch with a stack of books on Scottish folklore. I planned to spend the weekend combing them for any mention of or reference to the hallow door. I found none, but each night, as soon as I closed my eyes, often with a dozen old books of folklore sprawled across my bed, I was back in the Greenwood in the shadow of the ruined door in the arms of this new incarnation of my demon lover, William Duffy. I had the same dream every night for the next two weeks, waking up each morning with a bed full of heather and feeling as if I’d spent the night making love. It was all I could do to keep up with the demands of the new semester—learning my new students’ names, getting my classes used to my policies (yes, I really would dock them a grade for late papers; no, it wasn’t all right to text in class), and the added responsibility of protecting the female students on campus from the Alphas.

  For the most part, my students were polite, well-mannered young people. The biggest challenge was getting them to think outside the box and speak up in class, but they were soon all chiming in. The fairy-tales class worked especially well for the freshmen. They were, after all, venturing out on their own for the first time, leaving the safety of their childhood homes and setting forth into the unknown, much like Little Red Riding Hood heading into the woods for Grandmother’s house or Beauty embarking for the Beast’s castle. By the end of September, most of them had identified some topic to explore in the term’s final research paper. Surprisingly, it was Nicky Ballard, a sophomore and one of my best students, who came to see me with a problem one late September evening at the end of my office hours.

  “It turns out there’s just not a whole lot written about Mary McGowan.”

  “I know,” I told her. “I’ve been looking, too.”

  “Really? To help me with my project?” Nicky beamed as if she wanted to nominate me for Teacher of the Year.

  “Well, she sounds fascinating. I’ve never heard of a seventeenth-century female folklorist.” I didn’t mention that my interest in her stemmed from the fact she’d recorded the origin story of my demon lover. “Where did you first hear of her?”

  “In this book I found in a used-book shop in Edinburgh.” Nicky removed a book from her backpack. It was bound in soft burgundy leather, its spine stamped with a pattern of intertwining heather and thistles and the title, Scottish Ballads of the Borderlands, and the author’s name, Mary McGowan. I turned to the title page and my heart skipped a beat. On the facing page was an engraving of a rustic scene—the ruins of an arched doorway overgrown with thistles and climbing roses. It was the door from my dream. I read the caption beneath the doorway.

  The hallow door from the ballad of William Duffy.

  “I’ve read the whole book twice,” Nicky was saying, “but I don’t know what I should do next.”

  I tore my eyes away from the illustration and looked back at the title page; the book had been published by McGowan & Sons, Edinburgh. It was the fifth edition. The first edition had been published in 1670.

  “Look, the publisher has the same name as her and they published the first edition. Perhaps she was the wife or daughter of the publisher. Why don’t you try writing to The Center for the Book in Edinburgh? They might have records about McGowan & Sons that contain information on Mary McGowan. While you
’re waiting to hear from them, you should go back to the book. All these other ballads—Tam Lin, The Twa Corbies, Proud Lady Margaret—they’re all pretty standard except for William Duffy, which I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. Maybe there are details in that ballad that reveal biographical information about Mary McGowan. If you compare it to Tam Lin, which it so closely resembles, and examine the details that are different, you may be able to find out some clues about the author. Here …” I held out the book for Nicky regretfully. I liked the feel of the book in my hand, its leather cover smooth and warm to the touch, its pages softly dog-eared, and wanted to conduct my own research into Mary McGowan and her story that had somehow traveled into my dreams. But I couldn’t take it away from Nicky when it was the only copy of the William Duffy ballad.

  “You can keep it,” Nicky said. “I made a copy of the William Duffy ballad and the title page so I could makes notes on it.”

  “Oh, of course you couldn’t write notes in this,” I said, stroking my thumb along the smooth beveled curve of the pages. “But are you sure? It’s such a beautiful book.”

  “To tell you the truth, Professor McFay, I bought it for you.” I looked up, surprised, and saw that Nicky was blushing. “As a thank-you for helping me get the scholarship to St. Andrews in the first place. I thought you’d like the ballads and, well, when you read William Duffy you’ll see why I thought it was perfect for you.”

  She smiled slyly, and this time I was the one to blush, as if Nicky somehow knew of my dreamlike dalliances with William Duffy.

  Thanking her, I kept the book in my hand as we walked together out of Fraser Hall. I was surprised to see that it was dark already.

  “It’s getting dark early already and cold!” I shivered in my light corduroy blazer. “It feels like it was summer five minutes ago.”

  “Winter comes on quickly up here,” Nicky said, giving me the rueful look the natives reserved for city people. I noticed she had on a heavy red-and-black-checked fleece jacket. “You should dress warmer,” she said.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes. It made me happy to see Nicky feeling confident enough to hand out advice to her teacher—and I was touched that she would care. A year ago Nicky was nervous and unsure of herself, fearful that she very well might end up like her mother—a teenage mother with a drinking problem—and she would have if I hadn’t been able to avert the curse my ancestor had placed on her. “But speaking of motherly advice, I don’t think you should walk around the campus by yourself. I’ll walk you to your dorm.”

  “No need, Professor McFay. I already called Night Owl.”

  “Night Owl?”

  “Yeah, didn’t you get the email from the new campus safety committee? They brought in a security outfit from town called Night Owl to escort students at night.”

  I recalled receiving a half a dozen emails from the new committee Frank had formed with the Eastern European Studies professors, but, caught up in my own concerns, I’d ignored them all. Could the Night Owls be the vampires? But they weren’t from town …

  “Here’s my Night Owl now,” Nicky said, pointing behind me.

  I turned quickly, afraid that one of the vampires would be behind me, but found instead the wide, cheerful face of Mac Stewart. He blushed when he saw me.

  “Professor McFay, I didn’t know the call was for you. I’d’ve been here sooner. Where can I escort you? If it’s off campus, I can go get my car.”

  “The call’s from Nicky here,” I said, glancing at Nicky, whose eyes were flicking between Mac and me with undisguised curiosity. “But it’s nice to see you again, Mac. You and your family were so helpful this summer, looking for those missing fishermen.”

  In truth, the Stewarts, who were an ancient clan of stewards pledged to guard the woods, had helped to apprehend an undine who was seducing fishermen.

  “It was the most exciting time of my life!” Mac declared. “That’s why I convinced my dad and grandpa to start this security company to watch after people in the town and on the campus. See …” He patted the owl emblem stitched on the pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. “I named it after you.”

  “Huh? I don’t get it,” Nicky said. “What does an owl have to do with Professor McFay?”

  “Um, it’s sort of a private joke …” I said, glaring at Mac. I’d run into Mac one night when I was patrolling the woods after shapeshifting into an owl. When an undine tried to drown him, I transformed back into a human to save him. Unfortunately, when he woke to see a naked woman with owl feathers in her hair, he decided I was an owl princess and declared his undying love for me. “… Um, because I stay up so late … um, grading papers, which I have to go do now. You make sure Nicky gets back to her dorm safely, Mac.”

  “But what about you, Professor?” Nicky objected. “You shouldn’t be walking alone on campus, either.”

  “That’s right,” Mac eagerly concurred. “Why don’t you walk with us to the dorm and then I’ll walk you home?”

  The last thing I wanted was to be alone with Mac Stewart, but what kind of a role model would I be if I walked around the campus by myself at night when I was urging my students not to?

  “It will be my pleasure to escort Professor McFay home.”

  The voice, silky and urbane, came from the shadows beneath a nearby pine tree. A tall man-shaped figure detached itself and glided forward. It wasn’t a man, though; it was Anton Volkov, Eastern European Studies professor and vampire.

  “Mr. Stewart.” He acknowledged Mac with a nod and a slight quiver of his long patrician nose. Mac tended to smell like chewing tobacco and hay. “Miss Ballard, I enjoyed your paper on The Master and Margarita. Such an original take on the devil.” And then, turning his glittering eyes on me, he bowed. His blond hair looked silver in the moonlight. “Professor McFay, I’ve missed your company at our security meetings.”

  “I’ve been b-busy with my classes,” I stammered.

  “Of course. But there are some matters that have come up that you should be aware of. I can catch you up on the walk to your house. Mr. Stewart and Ms. Ballard are right that you shouldn’t walk alone after dark. You never know who—or what—may be lurking in the shadows.”

  Like you, I thought. But he was right that I needed to know what was going on. Giving Mac and Nicky a brave smile, I joined Volkov on the path leading off campus.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” he said as soon as we were out of earshot of Nicky and Mac.

  “No! I’ve been busy with the semester start-up and … a research project. I’m trying to find another door to Faerie.”

  I hoped that mentioning the door to Faerie would distract him and change the subject, but he remained quiet; his face, when I glanced over at him, was as impassive as that of a marble statue. We were walking on the path to the southeast gate, a heavily wooded and isolated spot where I’d once been attacked by a giant winged creature. I shivered at the memory.

  Quick as a bird’s wings, Volkov’s jacket was off and around my shoulders. The silk lining was cool, holding no hint of warmth from its previous wearer, but it soon made me feel warm.

  “Okay,” I admitted as we reached the gate. “I have been avoiding you. I haven’t forgotten our deal.” Volkov had given me the name of the witch who had cursed Nicky Ballard’s family, and he’d told me he would ask a favor in return. I’d been afraid he would ask for my blood, but he had only requested that I speak to the Grove on behalf of the nocturnals. Then the Grove had turned on Fairwick and I hadn’t been able to carry out my end of the bargain. “I know I still owe you … a favor.”

  Volkov stopped past the gate and laid an icy hand on my arm to halt me. Once before he had used his touch to paralyze me, but I didn’t feel unable to move this time, just unwilling, held by the magnetism of his gaze. “That’s why you’ve been avoiding me?” he asked, his eyes holding mine. “Because you think I will ask for payment in some other kind?” He stroked a finger along my throat, from the base of my jaw to the rise of my clavicl
e. Although his skin was cold, his touch stirred a sensation of warmth under my skin, as if the blood in my veins were attracted by it, as if my blood were magnetically drawn to him. He’d said to me once that he would never demand anything of me that I didn’t desire, but, if he sensed my desire, would he take what he wanted without asking?

  “I know with the supply of Aelvesgold dwindling in this world, you must be …” I tried to think of a polite way of saying hungry, but he finished the sentence for me even more alarmingly.

  “Starving?”

  I nodded.

  He smiled. “It’s true that when my ancestors were banished from Faerie and cursed to drink the blood of the creatures we loved best, some of us tried to use Aelvesgold to stanch our hunger, but we have learned other ways to control our appetites over the centuries. Other creatures are not so … well equipped with alternatives. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We’ve been finding animals in the woods that have been savaged and drained of blood as if by some kind of beast.”

  “Drained of blood?” I asked, feeling suddenly woozy. “Could it be one of your kind?”

  “No!” he growled, so fiercely I had to keep myself from bolting. “There are talon marks on the victims. My kind”—he held up his long, elegant hands and twirled them in the moonlight—“are monsters in many ways, but we do not have claws. But something with claws is roaming the woods and feeding on animals. I thought you should know since you live nearby.”

  He lifted his eyes to Honeysuckle House and then to the woods behind it. The moon, just risen above the tips of the trees, cast long, branching shadows across my back lawn. It looked as though the woods were advancing on my back door.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be careful. I’ve only been going into the woods to take the tunnels—”

  “You might want to reconsider that path,” Anton told me. “The blood-drained creatures we’ve found have been near the entrance to the tunnels, and we’ve found smears of blood that seem to vanish inside them, as if …”