Space Invaders (21 page)

I flashed him a grin, but pointed to the drawer for pans. “Can you get me two pans, the big one and the smaller for sauce?”

He was hesitant, as if cooking were an esoteric art and he’d offend the gods if he made a mistake, but I coached him into setting the table while the water boiled.

“We need some fresh herbs. I’ll go out to the greenhouse,” I said.

Frey gripped my arm right away, tugging me so close to him I could feel his heart beating against my chest. My throat closed up and I was suddenly molten with lust. Geez, his blue, blue eyes staring down so sternly into mine…

“Where do you go?” One of the braids in his blond hair fell forward. I wanted to reach up and play with it.

I jerked my head towards the glass house beyond the patio. “Greenhouse. Mom insists on growing most of what she cooks. She could tell you all about the stuff they spray vegetables with, how it’s much better to grow your own.”

Frey still looked confused. “Spray?”

“Guess all they had in your day for fertiliser was manure.”

“With the occasional saucy boy chopped up to improve the fields,” he said.

I laughed, wanting to hug him.
Do not fall for this guy,
I reminded myself.
You can’t keep him.

“You will not leave the house.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not without my body between you and what threatens,” Frey said. He disappeared down the stairs and came back with his shorts and his sword. He should have looked ridiculous, but the scars on his body and the hard glint in his eye proclaimed him a seasoned warrior.

And he was willing to die. For me.

“Okay, we go together,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Forget it, Frey. You’re here because of my screw up. And I’m not letting you get killed because of it.” I had to head downstairs to gather my clothes, shoving into them. Frey had left me the purple tie-dye T-shirt, but it wasn’t hard to live with the flat, smooth planes of his muscled chest instead.

“You wish to go to the house of glass?”

I realised I’d been staring at him again and flushed. “Yeah.” I felt stupid when we exited the kitchen, heading past wicker furniture that had moss growing on it since it had seen so many years. The flowers were gone, leggy leaves flattened to the planters. Everything was familiar but I felt a chilly feeling drag up my spine.

It was so quiet, not even the hush of the tree branches moving together in the breeze off the ocean.

Frey looked around sharply, his sword lifted.

I wanted to rush back to the house, lock the door, but this was my life. Despite the stinky apartment and the attack on campus, I couldn’t spend it holed up in my house—and there was no guarantee I’d be safe anyway.

I opened the door, the creak loud and reassuring in the stillness. I blew out a breath of relief at this sign of normality. “Okay, I’ll snip some basil and rosemary. Just take a sec.” Warm water dripped from the ceiling onto my face. Damn, I should get by more often and open the windows in here. There was a lot of built-up condensation.

“
Bailey!
”

I whirled, saw Frey staring at me.

My hand came away from my cheek wet with fresh blood. I looked up. “Something’s…bleeding?”

The thing exploded from a hanging basket stuffed with fanciful horn plants—brown feathers, claws, screaming as it went for me. It was huge in the small space, its shadow blocking the weak sunlight.

“A hawk!”

“It is infected; that is why it bleeds. You must leave this place!” Frey roared.

I grabbed the garden rake.

Blood drops, whooshing air. I fell back, seeing the bird’s eyes, red and seeping as it raked the air above me. “
Jesus!
”

The hawk smashed itself against the glass wall, crazy to escape, again and again before it fell, giant wings mangled sticks.

I panted, “Still alive.”

“It suffers.” Frey knelt. He whispered something in his guttural tongue, reached out and touched the hawk.

It crumbled, dark wet ash.

A single bloody feather drifted to the greenhouse floor.

“What the fuck!”

Frey was on his feet again. He gripped my arm. “We return to the house now.”

“Yeah, okay.” I was leaning on him. Why was I doing that? I was fine. I wasn’t hurt. “It attacked us. A wild bird. Why would it do that?”

He shoved me back in the kitchen, slammed the door behind us.

“And then you… It was ash. You touched it and—”

He dragged me to a chair.

“I don’t…understand.” My face felt stretched too tight and I was hot. My head echoed my drumming blood.

“Breathe.” His hand was clamped around mine, squeezing. Remembering how he’d touched the hawk, I jerked mine back.

“You are pale.”

Frey got my noodles, which I hadn’t eaten. As I sat there, staring at him, he began to spoon them into my mouth. I ate. I didn’t know what else to do.

After a while I tasted the spice he’d raved about. “You take the idea of comfort food to a whole new level,” I said.

“You are yourself again.” He put aside the food, cupped my cheek.

I squeezed my eyes shut. It was that or give in to the terrible urge to cry and I didn’t do that. Not since Dad’s funeral.

He pulled me close. “I will not let harm come to you.”

“Fuck, I’m scared. I just can’t find my footing. This is all too much. But I’m scared, Frey.”

“I know.”

“And I…don’t want you to get hurt protecting me.” The ball in my gut had been growing. His laughter, his adorable confusion, his beautiful blue eyes.

“It is a plan.”

I was gripping his bare shoulders, my face pressed to his freshly cut hair. Oh, yeah, Candy had made use of the conditioner. It felt like silk.

“What?” I blinked, losing track for a moment. “What is a plan?”

“Candy says not getting hurt is a plan.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Just don’t, okay?”

He brought me water in the same bowl he’d eaten noodles from. I drank it without bothering to tell him where the glasses were and then sagged back in the chair.

“You are recovered, guide?”

“Not hardly, but I need to know what the hell just happened. That bird…”

“It is the second part of the darkness that comes through the door you opened,” Frey said. “You were attacked by the Skirmisher first. This was the work of the Whisperer.”

“The hawk was some kind of monster?”

“It was infected by the energy of the Whisperer. It used the bird to attack us.”

“Okay.” I nodded. I’d seen enough horror movies for this to make a weird kind of sense. “My prof said things come in threes. You, the wolverine thing with the glowing eyes and now this Whisperer.”

“Yes,” Frey said. “Two of us, two of them.”

“Dandy.”

“You are pale again.”

“When you touched it, it fell to ash.”

“A small ability.” Frey lifted his left hand. “I will not be able to make use of that gift for a day and a night, but I had to cleanse the bird of the infection or it might have spread.”

“To what?”

“To you, guide. That is what it sought, to overcome you, to share its blood with yours and make you part of the darkness and the hunger.”

Chapter Seven

My phone rang.

Frey snatched for his sword.

“Wait!” I didn’t need him smashing my BlackBerry. “It’s mine.”

I followed the theme from
Star Wars
back down to the lower level. I saw the caller ID with relief. “Professor Dunbar, I left you a message.”

“I was deep in research, Bailey.” Her voice was reassuringly dry. “I do that sometimes. It’s part of being a professor.”

“Yeah, look, I need to talk to you.” I looked at my Viking bodyguard glaring at me. “Uh, we do, I mean.”

“Do you mean your special visitor?”

“We’ve…had some trippy experiences.” My throat closed and my heart sped up. Frey reached out and touched my shoulder.

“Do you remember where my townhouse complex is?”

“You bet.” It would be okay, I told myself, willing my heart to just goddamn stop pounding so hard. It was going to be okay. We’d go see her and she’d have information. She’d tell me what to do.

I retraced my steps and turned off the stove. “No time for pasta.” But Frey looked a little forlorn so I made him a giant peanut butter and honey sandwich—local unpasteurised honey of course. “Did you know honeybees pollinate most of our food? They are under pressure from all the pesticides used so we’re in danger of losing them,” I said.

“What
is
this?” Frey’s eyes were closed and he had an orgasmic look on his face.

“Peanut butter.” I snagged my wallet and keys. “Food for the gods, right?”

“Right,” Frey said.

Frey was every bit as reluctant the second time to get in my Smart car, but I gave him a stern look. He sulked once we were in motion, and I had to admit his hulking body was squished like his sandwich.

“You called me the guide,” I said. “But see, you’re wrong. Professor Dunbar is the one who really knows what’s going on. She can help us. She knows about the Celtic symbol I messed with so she’ll totally fix this.”

“She is a druid?” Frey asked. “A wizard of your time?”

“Um, no. She’s a professor at my school.”

“But you are the guide,” Frey said, predictably now.

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, taking a right and heading out to the little island that was home to a few town homes built back in the seventies. Pretty good life, living on a beach, the cedar homes bleached like driftwood.

I parked on the street and took a deep breath. My hands didn’t want to leave the steering wheel.

“Okay, let’s go see her.” I opened the door, feeling exposed.

The ground squished under our feet as we walked past wilted planters.

“I know she can help us,” I told Frey. “If I’d listened to her…well, you and me would never have woken up together.”

“That would be disappointing,” Frey said.

When we got to the door, I knocked and we waited. I was aware of the soft sounds of the ocean, smooth as a lake and the faint hush of salt air. The cedar tree beside Professor Dunbar’s house creaked as it shifted in the breeze.

I knocked again, beginning to tense up. “She’s probably on the phone.”

When she still didn’t appear, I tried the knob and the door swung open. Inside was dark.

Frey hefted his sword. “Behind me,” he ordered and his breath was visible in the dim light. A chill had breathed out from the open door, like the frozen breath of a dragon.

“But I just talked to her—” My mouth had dried up. I had the same freaky feeling I’d had back at my dorm, like it was the last place I wanted to enter. “She was fine. She’s expecting us.”

Frey entered and damn, if he was going in, I had to and I didn’t want to. I wanted to go home to Mom’s and lie on my bed and read a paperback romance, haze out the past day. I reached out and flipped a switch by the door. Nothing. The hallway light didn’t come on.

“Professor Dunbar?” I called. I reached out and gripped Frey’s arm. “Wait.”

“I cannot.”

“No, we’ll go in but we need something first.” I sprinted back to the car and opened it, grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment. When I switched it on, Frey looked briefly disconcerted at the beam of light.

“It’s too dark to go in without it.”

Frey nodded. “The guide provides the way.”

I grimaced, but yeah, I guess you could look at it that way. Not that a flashlight made me Merlin.

Frey went in first, sword raised, while I shone the light into the hallway. The powder room door was closed. I tried it, flipped the switch…and nothing. It looked like the power was out. I could see dim lights through the gathering mist outside other town houses, so it looked like only Professor Dunbar’s was affected.

“Clear,” I said, shutting the door behind me.

“Clear?” Frey asked, forehead wrinkled.

“Yeah, it’s what cops say when they sweep a room and don’t find anything.”

Frey still looked confused but he lifted a shoulder as if to say,
who can understand this strange guide of mine?

“Remind me to watch some TV with you soon. It’ll be nice and numbifying.” A tapping sound came from the kitchen. Tap-tap…pause. Tap-tap-tap. I didn’t want to go in there, but Frey made that decision for us, pushing open the swinging door.

I spotted her laptop on the kitchen table, screen open and lit up. Something sizzled from a frying pan on the stove. “Dry. She burned whatever it is dry.” I switched off the oven, seriously creeped out by the silent house. “What
is
that sound?”

Something warm and wet hit my face and I screeched, dropping the flashlight. Frey gave a battle cry and I heard the swing of his sword. The flashlight rolled back and forth, throwing light, moving shadow.

Throwing light in an arc over the palm of my left hand.

“Wait!” I yelled. “Hang on…” I was kneeling on the kitchen floor. My body had just taken over, decided to get me out of range of flying claws or whatever came next. “It’s water. It’s just water, not blood. The floor is soaked here.”

Frey picked up the flashlight warily and then handed it to me as if afraid he’d disrupt its magic. It dripped in my hand, but I shone the beam around the kitchen. “Not coming from the sink.” I raised the light, shot it to the ceiling. “Coming from the second floor. You can see it seeping from the corner.”

I wiped my upper lip where sweat prickled. “I guess we better…go up there, check it out.”

Frey was already striding through the kitchen, shoving the door open and heading for carpeted stairs that went to the second level of Professor Dunbar’s town house. I’d come here a couple of times with my Mom, but I’d never gone upstairs.

It was concern for him that made me keep moving. I couldn’t leave him alone. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I ever did that, he’d fall.

Plus I was worried about my teacher. She might be sarcastic and cynical, but that just made her my type of person. I was sure Candy would be just like her in twenty years.

“Frey, slow down!” I called when his broad back went out of range of my light. “I’m the fucking guide,” I muttered.

“I heard you, guide.” His voice teased me. Here in this awful waiting place of dripping water and icy temperatures.