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Sofie caught my hand. “Let me.”
Since she was the one with the gun, I nodded. I stepped back while she pressed a shoulder against the doorjamb, crooked her arm so that her pistol pointed toward the acoustic ceiling tiles, slowly turned the knob—
And burst into the office in one abrupt, practiced move. “Police!”
Her shout bounced back down the hallway. Nothing.
I peeked around the jamb, relieved. It was just my office, darker than usual and straightened up for the summer break.
No books strewn across the floor. No computer monitor lying on its face. No mysterious bad guy lurking in the darkness.
With a last look around the office, Sofie holstered her weapon. “That plays better when there’s a perp waiting.”
I went in, turning on the light. “Better you than me. I never much liked guns. Weapons are too patriarchal.”
She grunted, stepped inside, and examined my décor—a framed illumination of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath from Canterbury Tales; stone fleur-de-lis over the window; an imitation suit of armor in the corner with a mortarboard balanced on his tin head.
Above the inside of the door hung a slim, sheathed sword, not quite Asian enough to clash with the rest of the office.
Sofie looked meaningfully back at me.
I shrugged. “Well, we do live in a patriarchy now.”
I reached for the power button on my CPU, to check my files—then abruptly stopped, opening my hand to splay it across the computer case.
Wait a minute.
Warmth tickled my palm. “Someone’s been here.”
“What?” Even as she asked it, Sofie’s head came up and she was on guard again, glancing more closely at the filing cabinets, the bookshelves, the knight.
Anything that might hide an intruder.
“It’s warm.” I straightened, leaving the computer alone. “Someone was just here.”
I switched off the lights and went to the window. My office overlooked the campus quadrangle, not the parking lot. Still, the walkways were wide enough that service vehicles could use them for maintenance.
And sure enough—
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered, staring down at the dark car that waited smugly, not fifty feet from the building.
In a moment Sofie stood beside me. “Plymouth. Current model. Looks empty. I can’t see the license from this high up.”
“Then we need to get back down.” Now. A few minutes ago.
“Let me go first,” she said, heading for the door.
She stopped when I opened the window and said, “No.”
My office was too far from the stairway. It made sense to hurry. What if the car left before we made it down?
Leaning out, I had to really stretch, balancing on my stomach across the sill to reach the drainpipe I knew was there. Good thing I’d stretched out by swimming laps tonight.
“Are you crazy?” demanded Sofie.
I’d seen students climb this pipe more than once, despite regulations and safety concerns. I knew it would hold my weight. Probably. Then again, here I was grasping a copper drainpipe as I eased my knees out a window into sheer air, three stories up. So was I crazy?
Who knows? I’ve been wrong before.
I centered and balanced in order to slowly raise myself, then precariously stand on the windowsill. I touched the top of the sash for balance, then slowly shifted my center of gravity across to the drainpipe, my chest brushing ivy-laced brick. Just before the step of no return, I remembered that I was wearing sandals. I caught the heel strap of each on the inside of the windowsill to pull them off, one at a time.
One fell into the office. The other slid out the window, spinning in freefall down into the hedge at the base of the building, three floors below me.
Yeah. Gulp.
Not that I could’ve gotten back in if I’d wanted to. By now, gravity had pretty much committed me. Tightening my hold on the pipe, I swung my feet and knees across to straddle it. My toe caught on an edge of ivy. Stone bit into my soles. For a brief moment I simply clung there, deepening my breathing.
I’m in pretty good shape, but there’s a reason chin-ups measure men’s strength better than women’s.
Aunt Bridge, I thought firmly, breathing strength into my arms as I glanced down at the mysterious car. Sons of bitches.
Holding the pipe with my knees, I let go with one hand to reach down. I slid some—mostly controlled—then reached down with the other hand. The copper pipe felt cool and coarse under my palms as I descended, hand under hand. My arms vibrated with the strain, and my knees dragged against brick and ivy. I looked up and saw my window empty; Sofie had vanished. I looked down and couldn’t see where my sandal had landed.
Within ten feet of the ground I thought, Close enough. I probably could have slid—like a fireman’s pole but with ridges. Instead I pushed away in a leap and landed in a low, shock-absorbing crouch.
My bare feet safe on manicured grass, I straightened and spun for a better look at the dark car’s license plate. X1—
Then something hard pressed against the base of my skull—something like a gun—and my priorities shifted accordingly.
Chapter 3
“T hat’s better,” murmured a deep, muffled voice.
Not from my side, it wasn’t. I don’t like guns.
For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Not good.
“Fairy tales aren’t real, lady,” the man said in a smooth baritone. “And little girls break very easily.”
Breathe, damn it! You’d think, after training for years in Tai Chi, I wouldn’t clutch like this. Admittedly, some see Tai Chi as the Hello Kitty of martial arts, but you’d be surprised at its uses on the expert level. Unfortunately, Tai Chi requires a little thing called breath.
Then the man said, “That’s a good girl.”
I snorted with disbelief—which got me breathing.
Which made me dangerous.
I didn’t just have my balance—I owned it. I dropped my center of gravity. I spun, raising a hand, readying to redirect baritone’s gun into a safe direction as I took it, and—
“Police! Freeze!”
Damn. Sofie’s command surprised both of us. Worse, she stood where I’d planned to divert the gun. Using her distraction, I rerouted my movement into a full turn, stepping free from baritone and out of Sofie’s line of fire.
My new friend stood, dark and deadly, pistol pointed.
More guns. Goody. But I got a look at my attacker—tall, broad-shouldered, nice suit. Very nice suit. I should know, what with the company I’ve kept.
Interesting choice for breaking and entering.
It didn’t go with his black ski mask at all.
“Ladies,” warned baritone, glancing between Sofie and me, “You do not want to go there.”
Sofie said, “Put down the weapon and back away.”
Apparently not one to take orders, he swung his gun toward her. But I stepped smoothly back into Sofie’s line of fire and slipped his legs out from under him as he shot.
Four ounces of strength against a ton of force, as my sifu says. Appear, then disappear. You just have to sense your opponent’s weakness and know where to tap.
Baritone landed on the concrete with a surprised grunt and his shot—to judge by a crash of breaking window glass—went wild. Sofie lunged forward, shoving her pistol into his face. “Drop the damn gun!”
His fingers opened. His pistol clunked to the concrete.
Then I heard the sound of an engine, behind us.
“Down!” With a leap and a twist, I tackled Sofie to the walkway and rolled us behind a bench. More windows in Turbeville Hall exploded in a barrage of thorough gunfire.
The Plymouth hadn’t been empty after all.
“Damn!” Sofie yelled over the chaos, while baritone snatched his gun and ran. Maybe she could still have risked shooting him—if she wanted to shoot him in the back. He wasn’t our immediate threat anymore. Instead, she fired at the car once, twice, again.
The Plymouth’s passenger door opened, baritone leaped in, and it peeled down the service walkway. The last of the gunfire came from us.
“Damn!” Sofie repeated into the otherworldly silence that followed. We both sat up slowly, blinking against the heavy haze of gunsmoke. Nearby, from the hall, an afterthought of glass crashed from a broken window onto the ground. “If you’d gotten his gun, we could’ve printed it.”
That had been my idea, before she showed up with her admittedly expert grasp of the patriarchal value of weapons. I said, “X146.”
Sofie stared, then grinned. “You got the license?”
“The first four characters, anyway.”
“You go, girl!” She removed her radio from her belt, but I touched her wrist. “Don’t even think it,” she warned.
“I know you’ve got to call it in, and I know I’ve got to stay here for the report,” I assured her. “But do me a favor. Don’t mention my name on the emergency band.”
“Because…?”
“Because I know someone who might be monitoring it. Or has other people doing the monitoring for him. I don’t want to see him a second time tonight.”
Her dark eyes whitened. “Lex Stuart?”
That was no psychic hunch. “I knew it. He was behind all the attention the police gave me tonight, wasn’t he?”
“What’ve you got that has a man like Alexander Stuart throwing his weight around over a simple break-in?”
“It’s complicated.”
She grinned, clearly sensing a good story. “Let me just make this call,” she said.
“‘Little girls break very easily,’” I said, after Sofie disconnected.
She eyed me dubiously. “Come again?”
“That’s what our gunman said. Not, ‘real easy,’ but ‘very easily.’ He’s got a formal education…and an expensive tailor.”
“So you’re thinking he wasn’t just here to tag the building and maybe rip off some vending machines?”
“I’m thinking he was here to get my information on Melusine.”
“Meli-who?”
“A French fairy-goddess my aunt and I are researching. Either someone with a lot of clout doesn’t want us finding it, or they want to find it first so they can destroy it.”
“‘It’ being…?”
“The Melusine Chalice,” I clarified. “Her ‘holy grail.’”
We could hear sirens in the distance. This was going to be a long night, wasn’t it?
“I thought there was only one Holy Grail,” said Sofie.
“That’s in the classic version.” I wiped my palms where I’d scraped them on concrete, glanced toward the glass-littered bushes, and decided my shoe was history. “The Christian grail, there’s only one. Goddess legends aren’t so exclusive.”
“And some guys with a lot of clout would care because…?”
I was having trouble with that one, too. “Because they feel threatened? Or maybe…” My logical side winced. “Maybe they’ve heard the legends, that if enough of the goddess cups are brought together, woman-power in this world will increase a hundredfold?”
“Now that,” said Sofie, as several blue-and-whites sped into the parking lot, “would be sweet.”
We both raised our hands to show we were unarmed, and I nodded toward the mostly male police officers who clambered out of the cars.
I nodded toward her colleagues. “Ask them sometime if they agree it would be sweet. They’ll think we’re talking about power over them.”
Which made it our problem, even if they were mistaken.
Over the next four hours I filled out reports, gave statements and reassured my suspicious college president of my minimal involvement. My office was fingerprinted and, thanks to my “after my files” story, my computer taken as evidence.
Somehow, amidst it all, I managed to book a flight to Paris the next day. I got home with barely enough time to pack some necessities, like my passport and my emergency cash, before the airport shuttle picked me up.
