Natural Consequences (50 page)

“…swing dancing?”

“Can’t tell if it’s East Coast or West Coast. I’m out of practice.”

Hauser pinched the bridge of his nose. “Keeley—“

“He’s in the classroom now. We’re good to go.”

“Okay. Let’s move out.”

* * *

He put the date on the first page of the notebook.
Class names didn’t matter; he’d recognize the subjects later just from whatever notes he wrote down. The notebook was only meant to get him through the day, anyway. He’d probably just tear out the pages he used and put them in the pockets of the leather jacket hung on the back of his seat on his way off campus later that day.

“So for the next few weeks, we’ll be tackling selected short stories from your anthology,” explained Professor Mayfield. She leaned against the table at the front of the classroom, holding up the thick text just in case anyone was confused. “This anthology was put together by some of the greatest minds in literature today.”

Alex tried to listen. Instead, his mind wandered as he looked at his pretty professor. Lorelei had taunted him over her, suggesting that he could woo her into a much less academic or professional relationship. He’d had a crush on her, sure; she was intelligent, educated, mature, pretty… all things he admired greatly.

Then she forced the class to read
The Glass Menagerie
. Emotional cruelty like that was unforgivable.

“These stories,” she said with almost breathless reverence, “contain a wealth of human emotion and human experience. These are what we mean when we call something
literature
.

“So you’ll put together a double-entry journal for each story, like so,” she said, holding up an example. “You draw a line down the center of the page, and when you find a particular passage moving or
if something strikes a chord within you, quote just a little of it on the left and then write your reaction on the right.”

He’d done these before. He wrote “short stories” on his notebook page and drew a short line down the middle. On the left he put, “Quote tale of human misery and helplessness here,” and on the right he scrawled, “Write down anger and disgust at assignment here.”

“Now, I have some slides to show you examples,” continued Mayfield as she moved back around the table for her laptop, “if I can just get the projector to work right again…”

Alex stared at his paper. He had no idea how he’d be able to focus on this sort of work. Creatures of the night
hunted him, he’d just started up another wild and unusual relationship, fragments and echoes of past lives were still settling in his head, and as if all that weren’t enough, there was still Rachel and Lorelei.

He felt a tap at his shoulder and looked over to his side. Dylan Jorgensen leaned in from the next desk over. “Didn’t we do exactly this in Ms. Uribe’s class?”

“Yup,” nodded Alex.

The burly classmate in the Twelfth Man jersey smirked. “I think I
liked maybe
one
of those stupid short stories in that class,” he huffed. Alex gave the briefest rise of his eyebrows in acknowledgment, but said nothing. Dylan added, “Think I was baked in her class most days, too.”

“Yeah,” Alex nodded quietly. He could believe that.

“One time I cut that class to hook up with Jocelyn.”

Alex bit his lip.
That
he did
not
believe.

Someone in a suit came into the classroom to speak to Professor
Mayfield, distracting her further. He had another man with him, also in a suit, looking calm and collected. Mayfield seemed surprised by whatever they told her. Alex faintly heard the door at the back of the classroom open, but didn’t look back. He sensed nothing wrong. Besides, not laughing in Dylan’s face required concentration.

“You know she hooked up with, like, eight guys at the end of our senior year, right?” Dylan added.

His first thought was to ask why that mattered. Dylan seemed to think it scandalous. Alex hardly saw anything wrong with it at all, even if it weren’t ridiculous. Jocelyn simply didn’t operate like that. Then he decided the conversation just wasn’t worth having.

He spared Dylan a glance. “I’m kinda over high school, man,” he smiled gently.

Before Dylan’s frown turned into a retort, he was cut off by a suited man who stepped between their desks. “Alex Carlisle?”

Alex looked up and immediately recognized trouble. Broad shoulders, a near flat-top haircut and a serious look that spoke of readiness for violence
all added up to bad news. He realized then that the second suited man stood on the other side of his desk, also right in front of him—and that two uniformed cops loomed over him at either side from behind.

He didn’t answer. All four of these men meant business. The suited man on his left kept one hand out of sight, maybe holding pepper spray or maybe something
worse.

Strong hands smoothly and firmly took hold of Alex at each shoulder, tugging his arms back in a compliance hold. “Oh, shit!” blurted Dylan. Other students voiced their surprise as well. Alex said nothing.

He couldn’t fight this. Not here. Legitimate or not, there was nothing he could do. Resistance could get bystanders hurt if things got crazy. He grimaced as the cops tugged him out of his desk chair. He should have seen this coming.

“Alex Carlisle, you are under arrest for assault
, arson, kidnapping and conspiracy,” said the blond with the near flat-top.

“Please, folks, just remain calm,” said one of the other cops in the room as Alex was guided into a standing position. The uniforms just seemed to multiply with each passing moment. “Everything’s fine, we have this under control.”

“Spread your legs apart. More.”

“Don’t do anything stupid.”

“People, just settle down, stay seated, everything will be fine.”

“We’ve got him. We’ve got him. Pat him down.”

“Get his notebook. And his jacket. Make sure we have everything.”

“You got any
more stuff here, dude?”

“No weapons down your pants, right? I’m not gonna get cut on anything?”

Alex stared straight ahead as he was held in place, patted down, cuffed and patted down again. The cops took his wallet, phone, keys and even the twenty-six cents in change from his pocket. Everything went into a plastic baggie held by one of the suited men.

“Okay, make a path, please,” bellowed ano
ther of the cops. “Make a path!”

Holding his tongue and doing his best to hide his reactions, Alex still couldn’t help but look around as he was moved out of the classroom. The last thing he saw on his way out was Dylan Jorgensen and his cell phone.

“Holy shit,” Dylan babbled, “I am tweeting the
fuck
out of this.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” said one of the suited men as soon as they were outside the classroom. Alex meant to listen, but his eyes went out across the normally empty and dreary campus of wet, bare concrete
. He saw faces and cell phone cameras in many of the windows. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

They marched him down the concrete walkway, down the stairs and out to the parking lot. The suited men
held his arms while the uniformed cops moved out to the sides. Several police cars sat waiting, along with a couple of other unmarked vehicles. None of the officers taunted him. No one did anything out of the ordinary from what Alex knew of arrests and police behavior—most of it learned from television, of course, as he’d never been arrested. But so far, everyone played it perfectly straight.

He hoped, briefly, that this might be an honest, actual arrest rather than some move by any of the
various creatures of the night out to get him.

T
hey brought him to a van. Its side door rolled open. Inside, a man in a sharp, subtly pinstriped suit with a goatee leaned forward toward Alex with an open palm full of salt crystals and a wooden wand in his other hand.

Alex lashed out with a crescent kick that curved up into the man’s face. It was a great kick, one that would have made Drew proud. The force of the blow
sent its victim tumbling to the floor of the van.

He didn’t get any further licks in. The other two suits expertly bent him at the waist and slammed him face-first onto the floor of the van. He felt an elbow dig into the small of his back. Someone’s leg wrapped around his, preventing him from kicking. Both of these guys were larger and heavier than Alex, with leverage and
the skill to use it.

“We got him!”
someone barked over Alex’s back. “We’ve got him. Just watch for crowd control.”

“
Bridger, you okay?” asked the other.

“Unf. Yeah. Yeah, I’m… I’m okay.” Alex heard him shuffle up to his feet again, still having to crouch inside the van. “We’re not here to hurt you, Alex,” he said. “We’re the good guys.”

“Doesn’t fuckin’ show too well,” Alex growled. A strong hand held his head down on the floor.

“Carlisle, we do
not
want to hurt you,” a voice growled right back in his ear, “but you are wrapped up in all kinds of bad news and we can’t take any chances. We are not letting you go and we will not tolerate resistance.”

“Yeah, that sounds like good guy talk,” retorted Alex.
Still, something inside him asked,
What if that’s true? How else are they supposed to handle this?

“Do your thing,
Bridger,” said the other suit.

Alex
heard a language that sounded at once familiar and alien. Between his struggling and the voices of the other men present, he couldn’t make out specific words. He felt salt crystals fall across his head, and a moment later he felt a small splash of water on his scalp.

“We need to move.”

“I’m done,” said Bridger. “Let’s get him in and go.”

“Help us get him in the van,” grunted Hauser. His eyes darted over his shoulder to make sure the local cops wouldn’t hear as his voice dropped. “Gag ‘im and bag ‘im as soon as the door’s shut.”

* * *

“Jesus, you think there’s been a shooting?”

“Hope not, with all of us standing here at the windows.”

“Yeah, we’re being kinda dumb, aren’t we?”

“People, can you please return to your seats?” asked the annoyed professor. “I realize some of you are only just out of high school, but you should be past this sort of silliness by now. I’m not here to manage you.”

The crowd of students remained glued to the window. Only a few other students, mostly the older ones, stayed at their desks. Molly sat among the latter, happy to
take advantage of the distraction. It gave her a chance to close her eyes and prop her chin up on her hands.

Sleepy though she was from the previous night, she couldn’t complain for a
second. That was a good time. She looked forward to a repeat. In the meantime, the class of mostly kids who saw community college as the thirteenth grade of high school could ooh and aah about cops on campus all they wanted.

“Oh, hey, they’ve got a guy.”

“You know him?”

“No, but shit, they aren’t screwing around. That’s like six cops there.”

“I think I’ve seen him before.”

“Yeah, ohmygod, he’s that hot guy with the motorcycle.”

“You think he’s hot? Seriously?”

“Yeah, you know, it’s this thing called sex appeal? That stuff you
don’t
get from wearing saggy pants?”

“Hey, shut up, I look swag.”

“Mm-hm.”

Molly sighed. Stupid clueless teenagers.

Then her eyes snapped open. She burst out of her chair without warning, one hand clamping down on the strap of her book bag. Her desk wobbled in her wake, sending her abandoned notebook tumbling to the floor. The students crowding the open door never knew what hit them as she shoved her way through.

Both her classroom and her quarry were on the second floor of their respective buildings, separated by an empty and lonely courtyard and a lot of
inconveniently oriented walkways. She spotted only the backs of a pair of cops as they rounded the corner of the building opposite hers and descended its open staircase, headed for the parking lot.

Molly ran, cursing to herself all the while. Her boots weren’t bad for running, but they weren’t track shoes, either. With so many people still out watching or looking through windows, she couldn’t risk anything remotely flashy in the way of magic
. Even if it worked at all, the number of witnesses would greatly weaken such a spell. The only thing she could think of in her rush down the stairs and across the quad was a brief prayer for luck.

Doubtlessly, she knew, there was probably a better spell to cast
, and she would think of it ten minutes after it was too late. She ran.

Rounding the corner into the parking lot, she saw a couple of the police cruisers pull away. A van rolled on out into the street just as she got there, just behind a patrol car. Only one police unit remained. Her luck held.