Page 28 of Possessed

The girl blinked as if coming up through layers of essay test hell, and pointed at the ceiling. “He’s probably still in the dissection lab on the third floor—room 303.”

“Do you know if he has a class right now?” Lauren asked.

“No,” said the college coed. “Lab is done for the day.”

“Thank you,” Lauren said.

The girl smiled, nodded vaguely and hurried on her way from the building.

Raef called on the recesses of his college experience and accessed a few brain bytes that he hadn’t killed with alcohol poisoning. “Over here.” He led Lauren a little way down the wide hallway to an industrial-looking metal door that had been painted the same unpleasant yellow as the rest of the first floor. “It’s the stairwell that leads up to the third floor. If I remember correctly, and don’t quote me because halfway through my freshman year I changed my major from Environmental Science to Beerology, this is how we get up to the third-floor classrooms.”

“You went here?” Lauren asked as they climbed the stairs.

“For almost three years this is where I matriculated.”

“Which means you didn’t graduate,” she said.

“Not even close,” he agreed. “College and I didn’t agree.”

“Makes sense to me. OU and I had a fundamental disagreement, as well.”

“Which was?” he asked, realizing he was actually interested in her answer.

“Well, they thought their students needed to attend class. Even if said students couldnotattend class and just show up for tests and still make decent grades.” Lauren shrugged. “OU and I agreed to disagree.”

“You agreed to leave and they agreed to let you?”

Her smile was sly. “No, I agreed to let Mother endow a chair in the botany department, and OU agreed to give me a BS.” Her smile turned into a giggle. “A BS! It still makes me laugh. That’s exactly what it was—bullshit.”

“What about Aubrey?” He couldn’t seem to stop himself from asking.

Her gaze met his. He tried to read her eyes and found all he could decipher was weariness and a healthy dose of cynicism.

“Aub graduated with honors—withoutMother bribing anyone. She has always been the smart one.”

“And which one are you?”

“I’m the pragmatic one. Which one are you?” she fired back at him.

“I don’t have a twin.”

“Let’s pretend like you do.”

“All right. I’d be the grumpy one,” he said.

As he grabbed the metal handle of the door to the third-floor hallway, she said, “Really? My guess is you’d be the lonely one.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The smell hit him right away. It had been bad enough on the ground floor. Up here in the dimmer, cooler third-floor hallway it was downright disgusting.

Lauren wrinkled her nose. “Eesh, what is that?”

He glanced at her. “You were a botany major but you didn’t take any labs?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “I told you—Itooka bunch of classes. I just didn’tattendmany of them. So, what’s the smell?”

“Death,” he said. “Formaldehyde only preserves bodies for so long. It never completely covers the scent of decay.”