The Angel Stone: A Novel (7 page)

I should probably get Frank, I thought, instead of confronting an intruder on my own, but I was already crossing the hall, my skin itching at the violation of my space. I charged into my office, banging the door wide open, and found Duncan Laird standing in front of my desk, looking up at my bookshelves.

“You really do have an interesting collection of folklore here, Professor McFay,” he remarked, unperturbed by my dramatic entrance. “But nothing on angels or the Bible. Have you ever considered doing a class on angels?”

“No,” I snapped. “How did you get into my office?”

“The same way you got into mine,” he replied, turning and smiling blandly. “If you look at your door, you’ll find the traces of my skeleton-key spell, just as I found yours.”

I touched the lock but saw nothing.

“Use the spell,” he suggested.

“Adulterina clavis,”
I whispered. An image of a skeleton key
with an ornately carved bow appeared on the handle—a much more elaborate key than the one I’d used on Duncan’s door.

“Really, my dear, don’t you recall the lessons on wards I gave you this summer?” He smiled lasciviously. Before I knew that Duncan Laird was a nephilim, I’d thought he might be my incubus, and I’d let him get … well,
a little too close
. The memory made my skin crawl. “If you’d paid attention
and
read Wheelock’s footnote, you would have learned that the one downfall of the
adulterina clavis
spell is that it leaves a trace of its user—a sort of caller ID, if you will. If you like, I can show you how to block it.”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said, leaning against the doorframe and folding my arms over my chest. “You’ve made your point. Did you have anything else to say?”

“Yes. I want to apologize for the behavior of the Alpha Delta Chi brothers last night. It’s come to my attention that some of them behaved rudely to female students. I’ve reprimanded them, as you suggested yesterday, and suspended their party privileges for the rest of the semester.”

“I saw the flyers,” I replied warily. “It sounds like you’re prohibiting all parties for the rest of the semester.”

“Well, yes, that seemed the most expedient course of action. If I permitted other parties on campus, the Alphas would no doubt cause trouble.”

“So expel them,” I said. “It’s not fair to punish the whole student body because the Alphas can’t control themselves.”

“It’s the safest course of action for now. You do agree that the priority should be keeping the students safe, do you not?” He smiled, showing a lot of white teeth. I shivered, feeling the implied threat behind his words.

“Yes, so why not expel the Alphas?”

Laird’s mouth remained stretched in a smile, but his eyes darkened. “That would be premature. They need to learn to
assimilate to … 
college life
. As part of their rehabilitation, I’ve ordered them to perform community service. And if all goes well, we can reinstate social gatherings in time for a Christmas party.”

“Christmas?” I repeated. “What about the Halloween party? It’s a Fairwick tradition—”

“A
pagan
tradition,” Duncan cut me off, all trace of his smile disappearing. “It’s time Fairwick gave those up. I would think that after your experience with monsters and ghouls you’d be the last person to want to celebrate Halloween.”

“I have a fondness for candy corn,” I replied.

“I’d get over it,” he suggested, moving toward the door. “There’ll be no Halloween party, and,” he added, tapping the lock on my door as he walked past me, “in pursuance of our mutual goal of making the campus safer, I’ve ordered all the locks to be changed to spell-resistant ones.”

When Duncan Laird was gone, I closed the door and sagged against it, my anger and outrage leaving me drained and deflated. I didn’t have time to recover, though; I was already late for my class. I’d have to talk to Frank later. I rushed down the stairs and into the lecture hall …

 … where I was greeted by a round of applause.

The last time that happened was when I’d canceled the final after being attacked by a liderc.

When the clapping stopped, I smiled and gave the students a puzzled look. “Gee, I’m excited about today’s reading, too, but I really think Bruno Bettelheim deserves the lion’s share of the praise.”

“No, Professor, that’s not why we’re clapping,” Scott Wilder objected. “It’s because you schooled those Alpha dudes. Epic!”
Apparently
epic
was the new
awesome
. I kind of liked it, but still …

My eyes flicked guiltily toward Adam Sinclair, who was leaning back in his seat, surrounded by empty desks. His ostracism was no doubt a result of my stink-bomb spell. His eyes were hidden by Ray-Bans.

“Did something happen at your party last night?” I asked innocently, taking out the folder of corrected papers.

“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.”

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.”