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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 hewashome. 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 toanyone 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 theedge 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 togetherwasa 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.
