Yearnings: A Paranormal Romance Box Set (64 page)

She turned to Tyr. “I know who the beast’s next victim is and exactly where he’s going to be.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER 66

Tyr set a hard pace as they climbed the winding path through the university’s campus. They angled toward the Atkins-Levine Physical Science Research Wing. Even though the hot afternoon sun had mellowed as the sun sank lower on the horizon, it was still warm, given they were practically running straight up one of San Francisco’s infamously steep hills.

The professor’s office hours, held in his lab, weren’t until seven o’clock, and the sun didn’t fully set until eight, when the beast would begin his hunt, but try telling that to Tyr.

Finally hitting a patch of level ground, they were slowed by a cluster of other pedestrians. Sal repositioned her laptop bag and caught her breath.

Tyr also paused to survey the tree lined, park like setting around them.

“
You have certainty that this is Physics’ home?”

Given the pace that Tyr had kept them at since exiting the bus, they hadn’t exactly had the opportunity to discuss the finer points of the quantitative sciences. So as not to be conspicuous, they continued at a much slower pace as they headed to the building.

“
Quantum physics isn’t a place, but a discipline. A science,” Sal clarified. “It attempts to explain … well, the unexplainable.”

“
Why then, does the beast quest for such knowledge?”

Sal sighed. He wanted an answer which she wasn’t qualified to give. Granted, she had taken physics in college, but it had been the “physics for poets” edition. The easy-on-the-eyes version where you calculated the stress point for a lever or the volume of a champagne glass. There had been nothing theoretical about it. They built simple circuit boards and demonstrated why ice skaters who pulled their arms in spun faster.

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.