Love Is in the Air (21 page)

Clearly, the beast didn’t need any of the physics she had to offer. Luckily, her laptop had already researched several of Hing’s projects. Sal only grasped about a third of the concepts, and even at that, she had no idea what the beast wanted with Lionel’s work.

Tyr looked over at her expectantly. She couldn’t disappoint him.

Wouldn’t
disappoint him.

“I’m not sure, but Hing is using the hydrogen atom as a—”

“Who is this Atom?”

Sal groaned. This was going to be a very long explanation.

Regrouping, she picked up a small pinecone from the side of the pathway. “Okay. Imagine this was so tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny that you couldn’t see it with your naked eye, but it was still there.”

Tyr frowned, but nodded.

“Now imagine that it’s hollow. In the middle would be a cluster, like seeds. That’s the nucleus.” Sal made sure he seemed to follow her. “On the outside is an even tinier fly, the electron, zipping around the seeds, forming the shell. But this covering is only an illusion. It’s there, but not there.”

“The shell is but the blur of the fly’s beating wings?”

Okay, maybe this wasn’t going to be as hard as she thought.

“Exactly.” This next concept was a little bit harder to grasp. “Now these flies can also zip around other seeds. Like my electrons are joining with air atoms then leaving and joining with your atoms. It’s a pretty accepted fact that over the course of a year a single electron has traveled all over the world and back again.”

Tyr inclined his head again. He was taking this way better than she thought a guy would who had started out thinking physics was a person.

“Right, now to the weird part. The space between the seeds and the fly you’d think would be empty, is instead filled with something called plasma, which is made up of…”

Well, Lionel’s paper implied it was filled with quantum fluctuations created by quarks and anti-quarks, gluons and anti-gluons, and a bunch of other high-speed particles Sal had never heard of before. She didn’t think her seed and fly analogy was going to hold up much longer.

“Never mind. Hing thinks this plasma gloms onto the electron, and the electron then takes a tiny bit of the plasma with it on its journey.”

“Of course,” Tyr said, nodding vigorously.

CHAPTER 67

Sal halted. “Of course? You mean you just understood that?”

“Did you not?”

At first she felt defensive, but then Sal just shrugged. “No, not all of it, really.”

“What you have named ‘plasma’ is essence. Your electron is nothing more than intent.” Her mind raced to finish the analogy. Tyr must have seen her struggling, as he continued, “This electron bathes in essence, then carries your will to another.”

Sal could have been embarrassed that the guy in leather was the one explaining science to her, but she wasn’t.

He frowned. “This Lionel speaks of nothing that the beast does not already know. His toils must have revealed greater truths.”

“Oh no!” Sal exclaimed as she scrambled to pull her laptop out.

Tyr stopped as well. “Speak your concern.”

“Oh, God, I didn’t make the connection. I didn’t understand the implications…”

Sal opened her laptop, and the screen bloomed with the video clip from Lionel’s website. She guessed that the laptop had forgiven her.

She hit “Play.”

As the scientists milled around a vat of clear, green gel, Sal hurriedly explained. “Hing is trying to prove…”

She couldn’t say it. Instead, she let Tyr watch as an eager grad student, the now-dead Mika, turned her back to the green vat. Lionel handed her a red ball. She closed her eyes, and put her other hand into the gel. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, the vat turned red.

“That plasma can be transferred from object to object.”

As the clip replayed, Tyr reached out and touched the screen.

“Only they’re not using blood,” she added needlessly.

His face paled as he blinked rapidly.

Sal gulped. “Am I right to assume that the limiting factor of your Praxis is the amount of blood you have with a specific emotion?” Tyr didn’t speak, but she had her answer. “What if the beast could use this gel rather than blood?”

“He could focus enough intent…” His eyes raised from the screen and found hers. “Generate enough force… to shatter the world.”

CHAPTER 68

With a knot in her stomach, Sal crept with Tyr down the hallway of the Atkins-Levine Wing. Suddenly, Tyr pulled out his knife. But why? Sunset was still a good hour away. The beast couldn’t be near. Could he? Then she heard it. Laughter.

By its bawdy nature, grad students’ laughter.

She forced Tyr’s knife back into its sheath. They weren’t going to need the weapon. They just needed to hide. Sal looked down the long, doorless hallway that seemed to stretch on for eternity. There was no way that they could make it into the lab before they were spotted.

Wait, hadn’t they passed a closet a few feet back? She tugged Tyr in the direction of the voices.

“What lunacy is this?”

She ignored Tyr and found what she was looking for. A small vented door. A maintenance closet. They slunk in just before the students passed by. Luckily, they were too busy arguing the merits of Captain Kirk over Picard to notice her and Tyr’s narrow escape.

Sal clutched her laptop to her chest as they squeezed into the tiny, cramped space. Tyr’s shoulder was shoved against her chin, and their legs were entangled with a mop and a DustBuster.

Once the footsteps faded, Tyr hissed, “Hiding does nothing to destroy the blasphemy.”

“No, but we’ve got to get a plan together.”

Tyr put his hand on the knob. “Whatever the number, they cannot stand against me.”

“That’s not the point,” Sal hissed and jerked his hand off the metal.

On the remainder of the walk, Tyr had been unwilling to listen to reason. His sole purpose was to find and decimate Lionel’s research project. Since they needed to come to the lab anyway, Sal hadn’t objected to the mad rush, but now? Now that he was ready to burst in there, blade bared, she had to talk him down.

“They’re innocent. They have no idea what they’re meddling with.”

“Enough!”

Sal barely realized he’d issued an edict as she blocked his advance.

His hand found her neck. “Do not think to thwart me in this.”

Tyr’s chest heaved up and down, barely containing his urgency, yet his touch on her neck wasn’t coarse or painful. It was just there, a physical connection between them.

She found his eyes in the dim light. “You came to me because you didn’t know my world. I’m telling you, this isn’t the way.” Sal paused long enough for the words to sink in. “Now, will you listen?”

Eyes flickering over her features, Tyr took a small step backward, allowing his hand to fall from her neck. While Sal was relieved that he had paused, she missed his touch.

Gathering herself, Sal said, “I want to eliminate this threat as much as you do, but there’s a lot to consider.”

“Explain.”

“I need time to learn if that’s Hing’s only source of gel in there. I also need to find out where he keeps all his backup data.” As Tyr shifted impatiently, Sal locked his gaze. “It won’t do any good to destroy this lab, when the beast could just find everything he wants across campus.”

“Then I am to stand by and whittle a carving?”

“No,” she said firmly as she nudged him deeper into the closet. “You’re going to figure out how to trap the beast.”

CHAPTER 69

Sal’s fingers flew across her keyboard, feeling a high akin to a caffeine buzz. She and her laptop had nearly merged into one consciousness. What she thought, he did. She wanted access to restricted interdepartmental budget files. Her laptop brought them up before she could even finish typing.

Tyr knelt beside her, an assortment of vials at his feet as he concocted a holding serum. Since this was the only hallway that led to the underground laboratory, the beast would have to pass directly by them. They needed to use the close quarters to their advantage.

Despite the thrill of discovery, Sal grew frustrated. It turned out that Lionel’s gel was created out of a variety of very commonplace compounds. While the exact formulation was apparently kept only in his head, the ingredients could be purchased at any chemical supply house.

“Destroying the lab won’t help. The gel looks pretty easy to make.”

Tyr just grunted as he swirled a vial, tilting it to check the contents.

Sal glanced down at her watch. Quarter to seven. Shouldn’t the professor be here by now?

“The passage is no more than two arms’ width?” Tyr asked.

“No.”

“Then we are prepared,” Tyr said as he corked the vial.

Sal stretched out a cramp in her leg. “So I guess we just have to wait.”

Tyr also flexed his legs before he sat upon the ground next to her.

While she tried to concentrate on her laptop to track down that elusive gel formula, Sal couldn’t help but notice his arm rub up against her shoulder as he breathed. She also couldn’t ignore how her pulse raced each time it happened, hoping that he might lift that arm just a few inches and drape it over her.

It was one thing to type when he was busy working on the blood, but now with him sitting so still beside her, she felt their cramped quarters.

Their proximity. Their bond.

She had to think of something else. And fast.

“So does dead blood run along familial lines?”

Tyr’s head snapped toward her. A deep frown etched into his brow. In her attempt to make random conversation, she’d struck a raw nerve.

“I’m sorry. I just was trying to understand the dynamic between live blood and—”

“A dead blood’s birth is rare and bodes only an omen to the family who sires it. Thereafter their line is terminated.”

Sal squirmed. In her attempt to defuse the tension between them, she’d only increased it. “I don’t understand.”

He faced forward, speaking to the cramped closet rather than to her.

“Once a dead blood is thrown, their lineage is aborted. Husband cannot lie with wife. Uncles may no longer lie with aunts. Any living relative to the tainted line thereafter bears no heirs.”

Tyr talked as if he discussed horse breeding, not a civilized society, a society that clearly needed dead bloods. So far, Sal had discerned that the dead blood functioned as at least the police, the border guard, and the healers.

“Why are they so afraid of you?”

“There is no fear, only tolerance. We are dead blood.”

She refused to accept that. “You say that, but if their hatred was so great, why keep any dead bloods alive? If you are so beneath live bloods, why don’t they just exterminate your kind?”

Tyr’s face clouded over. Even in profile she could tell his jaw had clamped down and his shoulders were drawn up in anger. “You know not of what you speak.”

“Really?” Sal queried. “Because by my take, even though you don’t understand what a threat you are to them, they sure as hell understand your power. The very people that disdain you have taken advantage of you.”

While he struggled to find the words to retort, Sal took her thoughts several steps further. Tyr’s society needed dead bloods. Without them, who would fight the beasts? Equally important, though, they needed the Praxis wielders under their control. How better to do that than through shame? Act as if a dead blood’s very birth were a sin, when in truth Sal guessed the higher muckety-mucks were relieved that one was born to serve their needs.

“I bet that dead bloods aren’t allowed to marry, either.”

Fury shook his frame. “Enough!”

CHAPTER 70

There was enough force behind the word that it would have been an edict if Tyr’s voice hadn’t cracked. Sal had gotten so caught up in her quest to reveal his society’s flaws that she’d forgotten he was a part of that society.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

He held up a trembling hand to stop her apology. Despite the desire to explain herself further, Sal sealed her lips.

The dark, cramped closet seemed all the smaller. Their strained silence filled the space, making it nearly claustrophobic. She risked a glance over to Tyr. His hand had fallen, but the stubble along his jawline still bristled. Sal almost wished she didn’t have this new appreciation for essence and intent.

She almost wished she didn’t understand that a part of Tyr’s pained plasma was very literally being carried over by electrons and depositing his ache in her heart.

Sal wanted to respect his desire to not talk about something so grievously hurtful. But she couldn’t just sit there without offering her support. Tentatively, Sal reached a hand out and placed it upon his.

Tyr flinched, and she nearly retracted her gesture, when his fingers entwined with hers, his grip a welcomed vise. They sat there in the dark for several heartbeats, allowing his essence of pain to be soothed by her intent of healing.

Finally, he took a shuddering breath. Hanging his head, Tyr licked his lips before starting. “Dead bloods must keep constant vigil, lest they taint a live blood with their Praxis, blade, or… seed.”

Nodding, Sal explained, “In my world, many clergy, priests, monks, and nuns take a vow of chastity. A vow of abstinence.”

Tyr snorted. “It is no vow, it is the law.”

No kidding,
Sal thought but didn’t voice. A society so afraid of such a powerful element in their midst would take the most logical step to keep them from multiplying their numbers. However, she could sense that Tyr’s anger rose from a much more personal issue than population control.

When the silence lengthened, Sal prompted, “You broke this law?”

She could feel the shame in his grip. His fingers dug into her palm, flexing and unflexing, seemingly without his notice. He didn’t seem eager to reveal his failing, yet the real struggle felt like he desperately did want to tell her.

“My beard hadn’t grown more than a dander when Dyn and I were arrived at a large duchy. The patriarch had succumbed to a fever, and despite a parade of witches and their brews, he’d fallen into a stupor. Dyn was known across the land for his ability to coax health from the gravely ill, so we were summoned.”