“Gotcha. Okay. Good. I’ll see you around.”
I waited until the door creaked shut and I could no longer hear his boots. I knelt before the altar, curled against myself until my forehead touched the cool marble floor, and wished for the vastness of the ocean between me and all men of the air.
CHAPTER 18
I slept poorly. No sickening dreams whose reality I might deny—instead, I startled awake a dozen times, convinced that a particular camp guard loomed in the door to check on our slumber. Once I woke Neko as well, whimpering the man’s name, and she shivered and put her arm over me.
When at last I came down to breakfast, Trumbull had covered half the table with syllabi and lesson plans. “The library is a chaos of forgetful students and teaching assistants waiting to use the mimeograph machines. They all smell like chewing gum. The department can’t spare an assistant for me, of course.”
Her mundane exasperation startled a laugh from me, and eased the fog of fatigue. It was hard to hold on to my revulsion. Neko handed me a plate of fried eggs and a cup of tea. She sat beside Audrey, who’d finished her own breakfast and was reading the Sunday paper with pursed lips.
“Perhaps this isn’t a good day to brave the stacks,” I suggested. “Or will it be that bad all the time, now that the students have returned?”
“Last semester the bedlam was confined to their first day back,” said Trumbull. “If that’s typical, tomorrow should be safer.”
So, she’d arrived last summer. In four years or so, I’d need to come back to the university and see if I couldn’t help the real Trumbull through the shock of her return. For now, I needed to be on this Trumbull’s good side if I was to follow up on Caleb’s suggestion. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“If you’d asked earlier, I might have made you brave the crawling crowd. At this point, I just need to look over my notes, and do a last check for anachronistic insights. The same horrible low-level classes every semester—the price one pays for access to the university resources, and I gather the other professors feel much the same.”
“Ah.” I peered over her notes, sideways, but the last of my mathematics had been the most basic of algebra, two decades past.
Trumbull tapped her pencil on the table. “Well? Whatever you want to ask, it will at least be a distraction.”
I glanced at Neko and Audrey—but my desires here were a secret from neither. “We’re still discussing what to do about the spawning grounds, but Caleb and I thought—that is, we hoped you might be willing to help us retrieve our books. You’re as frustrated with the limited access as we are. Your people must have places where you store records in this era. Followers who help out when you want to do something authorities might not like.”
She snorted. “Certainly we have places to store temporary records. We call the local one Miskatonic University.”
I dropped my eyes. “Oh. But still…”
“Despite its inconveniences, we have long cultivated this place as a shelter and way station for knowledge worthy of preservation. One of our architects helped design the library. Our cultists, we choose primarily for tractability. They don’t know the first thing about even primitive archival technique. I have no interest in exposing your texts to the vagaries of amateur storage. And I think perhaps you underestimate the size of the collection.”
I let it lie, and wished I hadn’t spoken at all. The elders, if willing, could offer gold and magical support—but Trumbull’s resources were more suited to quietly moving well-guarded records. Or to keeping records well-guarded. Now that I’d mentioned it, she might well wield those resources against us. Even given a new spawning ground to support, the elders might not dare to gainsay her.
Someone knocked on the door, and Neko went to answer it. Trumbull didn’t even begin to rise. Had she ever actually received visitors, before we arrived?
Spector stomped snow off his boots before entering. Charlie followed.
“Where’s Caleb?” I asked.
“He’ll be along,” said Charlie. He eyed Trumbull. “Said he had someone to talk to.”
“Oh, good.” I hoped Dawson would listen—but was glad either way that Caleb had done so.
“George’s people are off the gate,” said Spector. He shrugged out of his coat. “That’s good, except that I don’t know where they are now. Best I could tell from last night’s dinner, they’re after something besides the obvious, but George didn’t drink enough to do more than hint.”
“Did he, perhaps, apologize?” I asked.
“George, apologize? Only if you count insinuations about what rock I turned over to find the lot of you. Begging your pardons.”
Trumbull shrugged. “You may assure him the low opinion is mutual.”
“Oh, I think he knows. Is that more tea? Wonderful—thank you, Miss Koto. I’m feeling a bit under the weather this morning.”
Spector reached past me to take the tea. Beneath his familiar lemon-and-soap, and the clean smell of snow still melting in his hair, I caught another odor startling in its greater familiarity: Charlie’s scent mixed with his. I frowned. Had Charlie fallen again, or needed help along the walks? But this smelled like a lengthier exposure, and less recent.
Charlie still struggled with his coat and cane, and I went over to help him. I inhaled deeply and found lemon and soap tangled in his hair, and a male arousal not his own. The fear, though—that was entirely Charlie.
“Come outside,” I said, abruptly changing course on his coat. “I need to talk.”
As soon as the door shut behind us, I put a hand on his arm. “Are you hurt?”
“What?” He jerked back. “No, I’m fine, why?”
More gently, I asked, “Did Spector hurt you?” He seemed disinclined to answer. “I can smell where he touched you.”
Charlie’s face reddened, and he lowered his voice. “Miss Marsh, you can’t just—say these things—in public.”
Scattered masses of students passed on the other side of the street, but none ventured across to the faculty row. “No one’s in earshot, unless they have ears as good as mine. I just want to know whether you’re all right.”
He swallowed visibly. “Yes. I’m all right. Yesterday was … a long day. He offered to share his scotch, and we got to talking, and—I’m sorry.”
“For what? I suppose I could fault your choice of lovers—” I paused and considered Spector. What did I hold against him? That he’d attempted to recruit me, and backed off when he realized the insult. That he made use of me, in ways that benefited both of us. That he worked for a state that had hurt me, and done his best to ease that hurt and to ensure it wouldn’t be repeated. “But I don’t. He makes me uncomfortable, but he’s working, harder than most ever bother, to be a good person.”