The Demon Lover (37 page)

I pushed Frank away—or tried to. Frank’s chest was a solid obstacle. “Liam?” he asked, pursing his lips to keep from grinning. “Uh-oh. That probably didn’t look so good from his angle.”

“I’ve got to catch him.” I tried pushing Frank again and this time he stepped aside.

“I’m sure you’ll come up with a very reasonable explanation for why I had my hand down your shirt.” He was grinning now, not trying to hide his amusement. “Let me know what you come up with. I’ll be happy to back you up.”

I opened my mouth to reply but realized I didn’t have time to spar with him. “Just look into why all our students are getting sick,” I snapped as I left the room. “I’ll take care of Liam.”

I didn’t look back, but I could hear Frank’s laughter echoing in the stairwell as I ran down the four flights. I was hoping Liam had gone back to his classroom as there were twenty minutes left to his class period—what had he been doing upstairs anyway? Maybe he’d come up to get a book from his office?—but I found his classroom empty except for a tow-headed boy sleeping with his head pillowed on his arms.

“Hey.” I shook the boy’s shoulder. When he looked up at me blearily I recognized him from his tattoo as the Weezer fan who’d been snoozing in the infirmary earlier. “What happened to the creative writing class that meets in here?”

“Yeah, that’s my class, man. I’m here. I made it to class.”

“Uh-huh, good for you. So where are the rest of the students and where’s Mr. Doyle?”

“Liam? Hey, he’s cool …” The boy rubbed his eyes and looked around the empty classroom. “Hey, where’d everybody go?”

I sighed with frustration and turned to go but the boy grabbed my hand and pointed at the chalkboard. “Look, they left me a note. How cool is that?”

Written in Liam’s elegant old-fashioned script were the words:
Wilder, I canceled class due to low attendance. Go back to your room and get some sleep
.

I felt a lump in my throat reading the cheerful, bantering note. Liam must have written it minutes before he went upstairs and saw me with Frank. “How long ago …?” I started to ask Wilder, but when I turned around I saw he’d already fallen back to sleep.

I left Fraser Hall and crossed the quad, scanning the paths for Liam, but it was hard to make out the faces of the muffled pedestrians bowed under the heavily falling snow. I stopped in the library to see if he’d gone there, but the rooms where he usually sat were empty save for studying—or napping—students. His independent study with Nicky wasn’t for another hour. There was no place else to look but home.

I started off fast down the path to the southeast gate, but slowed when I went through it. I could see footsteps in the snow leading up to the porch steps, but none leading away. There was a light on in the front bedroom Liam had made into a study. So he
was
home. I clasped my hand to my chest, conscious for the first time of how hard my heart was beating, how afraid I’d been that he’d be gone. But my relief was quickly replaced by uncertainty. What was I going to say to him? How could I explain what he’d seen in Frank’s office? I could try telling him that Frank had been looking for a tick in my hair—but down my shirt? No, I’d never be able to tell that lie with a straight face.

Or I could tell him the truth: that I’d gone to Frank because I suspected the college’s resident (and tenured!) vampires were helping themselves to student blood—and maybe mine, too. Why not? I thought defiantly, marching across the street. No one had told me I had to keep the college’s secret. I could take him to Liz and Soheila to back up my story …

I stopped halfway across the street. Even if I managed to convince Liam that Fairwick was populated by witches and fairies, I could only explain what happened in Frank’s office by blowing Frank’s cover—first to Liam and then potentially to anyone I asked to confirm my story. If Frank’s cover was blown he wouldn’t be able to investigate what was making so many students—and myself—sick. And while I might find Frank annoying and arrogant, I also suspected that he was the most competent and efficient man to get that job done. I couldn’t compromise his ability to do it.

I walked the rest of the way across the street and up the porch steps more slowly. I opened the door, still without the slightest idea of what to say to Liam, and tripped over something in the foyer. Looking down I saw that it was a bird’s nest with a cracked blue egg inside. I stared at it, trying to figure out how it had come to be in the foyer, and then remembered that it was one of the “finds” that Liam had brought back from his poetry walks and left on the table in the foyer. I glanced at the table and saw that all the other objects that were usually there—the wooden bowl where we left our keys, the pile of spare change, the basket full of takeout menus—had been swept onto the floor. Clutching the house key in my hand because I didn’t know where to put it in all this chaos, I followed the debris up the stairs, my feet crunching on shards of blue glass from a bottle that had once stood on the windowsill on the landing, to the doorway to Liam’s study. He was at his desk, which was empty save for the round gray riverstones he collected and used as paperweights, gazing vacantly out at the falling snow. The cold gray light had washed his face of all color, blanching his skin as white as the cotton shirt I myself had washed and bleached and ironed. His black hair and eyes—sunken deep in their sockets—looked like part of the gathering afternoon shadows, as did the loose folds of his dark wool coat. He looked, in the pitiless winter light, as if he might vanish if I blinked my eyes.

“Liam …” I said.

He raised his hand without turning to me. “Don’t,” he said. “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”

“You do?” I stepped softly into the room and perched on the edge of the chair we’d bought in Bovine Corners a few weeks ago.

“Yes. I know we’ve gone too fast … that I never gave you time to get over breaking up with Paul. It’s natural you should have second thoughts.”

“But I don’t!” I cried, getting to my feet. “What you saw … It’s not what you think. Frank …”

He winced at Frank’s name and held up his hand again. I noticed this time that it was trembling. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about what you may or may not have done with Frank Delmarco. It’s what you said to Nicky Ballard that upset me.”

“What I said to Nicky?” I sank down into the chair, searching my mind for what he could mean. “I talked to Nicky about her breakup with her boyfriend …” And then I remembered. “She thought that finding a new boyfriend was the best cure for heartbreak because she thought that’s what I had done.”

“And is it?” He turned now. His eyes were rimmed with red, the only color in his face. “Is that why you’re with me? As a cure for heartbreak?”

“No,” I said. “I know that’s how it might look from the outside, but you and me coming together … I know that had nothing to do with Paul.”

“But you said we might be a mistake.”

“Nicky said that to you?”

“She wrote about it in the journal she turned in today.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to recall exactly what I’d said to Nicky. “I think what I actually said is that you and I are old enough to deal with the consequences of our mistakes. I didn’t mean that us being together
was
a mistake.”

Liam tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “From what I saw in Frank’s office today you seem to be having second thoughts.”

“Hey, a minute ago you said you didn’t care about that! Anyway, it wasn’t what it looked like.”

Liam laughed. The sound startled me. “That’s exactly what the unfaithful lover always says in the movies when he or she gets caught.”

“Oh Liam, please, this isn’t a movie!” I was beginning to get exasperated. “Sometimes I think you’ve learned everything you know about love from the movies.”

The minute the words were out I remembered Jeannie and the things Liam had learned from his time with Moira, but it was too late to take it back. Liam was already getting up and reaching for the duffel bag at his feet, which I’d missed seeing until now.

“Liam,” I cried, reaching for him, “I didn’t mean …” But when I laid my hand on him he jerked his arm away as if my touch had burned him. He held his hand up in front of his face, fingers clenched into a fist, his eyes dark and wild in his pale face. Then he turned and left, so quickly that I felt the air stir from his coat as he whipped around. I stood staring after him until a sharp pain in my hand drew my attention. I looked down and saw that I’d slipped the toothed end of the house key between my fingers the way Annie had once shown me to do if I was afraid someone was following me. Part of my brain had been so frightened by Liam’s reaction to my touch that I’d been ready to attack him.

THIRTY-FIVE

I
didn’t get much chance to dwell on the fight—or on that surprising flash of violence I’d seen in Liam’s eyes—because fifteen minutes after Liam left Mara showed up for her work-study assignment. Most college freshmen would have taken my failure to show up at my office as an opportunity to take the afternoon off, but not Mara.

“I was sure you’d want to get some more work done on the Dahlia LaMotte papers. They are so very fascinating.”

Normally I would agree, but the last thing I wanted to do that afternoon was catalog the romantic fantasies of a reclusive spinster—especially with Mara, who had a way of zeroing in on the most erotic passages of LaMotte’s fiction. I hadn’t really intended for Mara to read the more salacious material in the handwritten manuscripts; I’d only asked her to make a record of how many pages LaMotte wrote each day. I wanted to see if LaMotte wrote more as the book progressed, if she was sometimes blocked, and how much time she took off between books. But it was impossible to keep Mara from reading the material and she often picked the raciest scenes to read aloud, asking for embarrassing explanations of sexual terms. Whenever she came across a word she didn’t know she would come sit beside me—quite
close
—and point to the word. I wondered sometimes if she wasn’t deliberately trying to make me uncomfortable, or if she might even be trying to make a sexual advance. It made for some long, awkward afternoons, but on this afternoon she did make an interesting discovery.

“I’ve noticed,” she said, looking up from the yellow legal pad on which she kept her page tallies, “that there’s a correlation between Miss LaMotte’s output and the sex scenes in the book.”

“Really?” I asked, intrigued—and impressed at her use of the word
correlation
.

“Yes, look …”

Mara came over to where I was sitting on the floor and knelt beside me. She put the yellow legal pad in my lap and reached across me, her arm brushing against my shoulder. “I’ve put asterisks wherever a romantic interaction occurs, one for a meaningful glance, two for a kiss, and three for actual intercourse …”

“I think I get the idea. What exactly is the correlation you see?”

“Well, look at the page tallies. In between the meaningful glance and the kissing scenes Miss LaMotte writes an average of ten to fifteen pages a day. For every book, see, I’ve cataloged them all this way.” She flipped the pages of the notepad and I saw scores of asterisks dotting the pages. So many kisses, I thought, trying to remember the last time Liam had kissed me. Would it be the
last
time? “Then between the first kiss and the intercourse, she writes an average of twenty to thirty pages a day, the number escalating sometimes to as many as sixty pages a day as she gets closer to the intercourse scene.”

“Really?” I asked, distracted from my memories of Liam’s kisses by Mara’s discovery. I picked up the pad and shifted my weight so that Mara wasn’t quite so close. “That
is
interesting.”

“What’s really interesting is that after the intercourse scene the page tallies decrease again. Sometimes she doesn’t even write anything for a few days. It’s as if she’s worn out.”

I flipped through the pages, each one representing one of Dahlia LaMotte’s novels. Mara was right. There was a definite pattern. It was as if Dahlia LaMotte became increasingly excited as the sexual tension between her characters mounted and then suffered a sort of sympathetic postcoital slump after they finally made love.

“Mara, that’s a really important discovery. Thank you very much.”

Mara smiled a rare smile and her cheeks glowed pink. She looked almost pretty. The poor girl, I thought, she gets so little encouragement, I really should make more of an effort with her … invite her over with some of the other students for dinner sometime … But not tonight, I thought, yawning. I just wanted to crawl into bed and go to sleep tonight.

“I want to go through these and think about what you’ve found,” I said, getting to my feet. “Why don’t we call it a day?”

Mara looked disappointed but then brightened. “Can we work again tomorrow?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, even though tomorrow wasn’t one of our scheduled days. I might as well throw myself into my work to distract myself from replaying in my head the fight I’d had with Liam.

After Mara left I made myself a cup of soup and took it upstairs to my bedroom to eat in bed. The house felt hollow and empty without Liam there. I went into his study and looked out the window across the street to the inn to see if there was a light on in his old room. There wasn’t. Had he gone somewhere else? Or taken a different room? Or was he there and sleeping soundly, undisturbed by our fight?

Before I left the room I noticed that he’d piled the gray riverstones into a small pillar—as if he’d been fashioning a grave cairn. They looked so eerie like that I unpiled them. I carried one of the stones into my bedroom, its cool, round weight somehow soothing in my palm.

As tired as I was I still couldn’t sleep that night. Even the racy Dahlia LaMotte manuscript of
The Viking Raider
failed to distract me. I’d come to the part where the heroine is finally to be ransomed back to her royal fiancé. Her Viking captor unlocks her room one last time the night before she is to leave and sweeps in …

 
… 
like a storm at sea come to capsize my resolve. “Will your young lord do this to you?” he growled, sinking his bristly face to my breasts and licking my nipples until they hardened, “or this?” grasping my hips and grinding his manhood against me, but then pulling back, teasing me as I thrust upward, hungry to feel the length of him inside me at last. Always he had held back this one last intimacy between us, preserving my maidenhood for my intended. But I no longer cared what my husband might think on our wedding night. I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him to me, begging him to come inside me. “Ah lass,” he moaned as he finally entered me. “You have conquered me. It is I who am your captive.”

And even though I knew full well that by the logic of these books the Viking and the Irish lass would end up together by the last page my eyes filled with tears when he gave her the key to her cell as a final parting gift and she read the note tied to it with a scarlet ribbon.

“I give ye the key to your freedom, lass, but can ye give me back the key to my heart?”

When I turned out the lights Liam’s side of the bed—how had we ended up with sides so quickly?—yawned like an icy crevasse I might fall into if I relaxed a muscle. I lay tensed, replaying our argument over and over, trying to come up with some other way I could make it come out differently, but instead I kept coming up with the same interlocking loops. I’d doubted that we were right together and told Nicky that we might be a mistake, and then I ended up in Frank’s office letting him put his hand down my shirt. I could try to explain that I was only trying to discover what was making me so tired and thin, but then mightn’t the reason I couldn’t sleep and I was losing weight be that I had made a mistake? Maybe Liam and I
had
moved too fast. What did I really know about him? There was always a piece of himself that he kept to himself—I’d thought at first it was the sadness over Jeannie’s death, or the part of him that wrote poetry, but when he’d drawn his arm back today I’d thought he was going to hit me. Had I sensed that potential for violence all along? Was I looking for a way out of the relationship? Was
that
was the reason I’d gone to Frank with the idea about the vampires, because really, I could have looked down my own shirt to check for fang marks.

I kicked at the sheets, which had become as tangled as my thoughts, and they fell to the floor and lay in the moonlight like snowdrifts. Was it still snowing? I wondered. I got up and walked to the window. No. The snow had stopped and the moon had come out, turning the snow-covered trees into gaunt skeletons, their shadows thrown across the clean white expanse of the backyard, reaching toward the house.

One of those shadows detached itself from the edge of the woods and scuttled across the lawn. The shadow-crab. I ran downstairs, threw a coat over my nightgown, and pulled on shearling boots over my bare feet. The fishing creel that Soheila had given me was in the kitchen, hanging from a hook by the back door.

I opened the door slowly, watching for any movement in the shadows. It might be lurking by the door, trying to find a way in to do away with Ralph. It could be hiding in the wedge-shaped shadow of the door that widened across the kitchen floor as I opened it. I waved the wicker creel over the darkened wedge and, when I was sure that I hadn’t let anything in, stepped out into the moonlit night, closing the door behind me.

The backyard was covered with a pure expanse of virgin snow, frozen on top with an icy crust that sparkled in the moonlight—everywhere but in the shadows. There were the shadows of the trees at the edge of the lawn, one thrown by the birdbath in the middle of the yard, a long oblong shadow in the lee of an old stone wall a few feet from the kitchen door, and a delicate tangle of shadows cast by an old lilac bush at the edge of the wall. I studied each shadow carefully, comparing it to the object that made it for any suspicious lumps or movement. There was nothing.

Then a wind moved through the yard, sifting loose snow across the icy crust and stirring the branches. One of the shadow branches cast by the old lilac seemed to swell. I stepped toward it, stepping across the shadow of the stone wall, and felt something brush against my ankle.

I looked down and saw the shadow-crab scuttling toward the back door. I dove for it with the creel open in my hands … and missed. The shadow-crab dodged and headed back toward the woods. I scrambled to my feet and chased after it, stumbling in the snow. The shadow-crab was light enough to move across the surface, but my feet crashed clumsily through the crust. If it made it to the woods I’d never catch it—and Ralph would pine away and die in the Boarderlands. It was nearly at the edge of the woods … about to merge with a large man-shaped shadow …

I reared back as the larger shadow stepped toward me and dropped the creel to the ground.

I looked up, fearing some horrible shadow-monster, but instead I saw Liam’s face, pale and dim in the shadows.

“Liam! What are you doing here?”

“I couldn’t sleep without you, so I went for a walk in the woods. Then I heard a noise from the house and thought somebody might be trying to break in. What were
you
doing?”

“You couldn’t sleep without me?” I asked, ignoring his question. “I couldn’t sleep without you either.”

He took another step forward to the edge of the shadows. The moonlight touched the top of his hair and the shoulders of his cream knit sweater, but his face was still in shadow and somehow wavery, as if he were underwater or dissolving—but then I realized that was because my eyes had filled with tears.

“Oh Liam, I’m so sorry, I don’t think we’re a mistake, and I don’t want Frank Delmarco or anyone else. I want
you.
”

He stepped toward me, full into the moonlight, his body taking shape in the light, and pulled me into his arms, which were icy cold, but when I slid my hands under his sweater and found his mouth I felt a spark of heat leap up to meet me. He moaned and slid his hands down my back and under my coat. When his hands found bare skin he gasped and lifted me off my feet. I wrapped my legs around his hips. He stumbled, but then he pushed me up against a pine tree, hard enough that the tree moved, feathery branches releasing a spray of snow and casting shadows across Liam’s face. When he pushed himself inside of me I smelled the sharp scent of bruised pine. The tree swayed in rhythm with us, joining our gasps and moans, as if the tree, the forest, and the whole shadowy night were party to our lovemaking.

After, Liam carried me upstairs to our bed and we lay side by side. I found I couldn’t keep my hands or eyes off him—as if I had to convince myself that he was real. When I closed my eyes I saw him dissolving into the shadows and I would startle awake as though I was the one falling backward into darkness.

I woke up sore
everywhere
, but when Liam ground his hips into my back I turned eagerly to him and we made love again—making me late for class and so sore I’m pretty sure I walked funny.

“Did you and Poetry Man make up?” Frank asked me as I hobbled past his office.

I looked anxiously up and down the hall to make sure Liam wasn’t anywhere nearby—I certainly didn’t want him to see me with Frank again so soon—before answering.

“We’re fine. He just had a jealous moment, but I explained that there was absolutely nothing to be jealous about and we made up.” I smiled brightly, hiding a wince. Even my lips felt sore and chapped from Liam’s kisses.

“Great,” Frank said. “Then he won’t mind if you come in here and sit down for a moment. I have something important to discuss with you.”

I glanced behind me again and noticed Frank smiling when I turned back. Then I strode firmly into his office and plopped myself down in the chair in front of his desk, wishing I’d finessed my landing a little more gently.

Frank got up and shut the door.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I objected.

Frank sat down on the edge of his desk. “We can’t risk anyone overhearing this. There’s more than your boyfriend’s delicate feelings at stake here.”

I opened my mouth to object again but realized I’d get out of there quicker if I didn’t argue. “What is it?”