I mean, I’d been raised by a bunch of professors and gone to a similar school. Once upon a time I had thought I could be happy in academia for the rest of my life. Before Samir and my wild years as a sorceress-in-training, plotting to make the world my bitch.
The campus was just outside Wylde proper and butted up against the border of the River of No Return Wilderness. Ezee’s office was in the oldest building on campus, a beautiful five story timber and river stone mansion that sat like a jewel in the middle of a grove of old growth Douglas Fir trees.
The sun was low in the sky when we arrived and the campus quiet in the spring chill. Here and there students walked in packs, talking to each other or with heads buried in their phones, and no one gave us much of a glance.
Ezee’s office was on the fourth floor. Levi had a key and let us in when knocking clearly showed his brother wasn’t in residence.
Books filled one wall on shelves bending a little under their weight. Two overstuffed leather chairs with brass upholstery tacks decorating them in knotwork patters on the edges were positioned by the desk in a way that invited one in for a cozy chat over a cup of tea about the mysteries of the universe, or, given Ezee’s area of expertise, a lively talk about American history and treatment of native peoples.
His desk was orderly, his laptop sitting in sleep mode and plugged into the spike bar on one side. A pile of papers sat waiting to be graded or handed back. There was a pink pen, uncapped, lying on the open area of the desk, as though Ezee had just set it down and was about to return to whatever he’d been writing. Even his desk chair was rotated toward the door, as though he’d only stepped out for a moment, and the Armani aftershave he used still hung in the air.
“Maybe he’s in the bathroom? Or we could check the library,” I said.
“It feels like he’s here. Somehow.” Levi shook his head and sniffed the air. “I think he’s close. I can’t tell. It’s like something is blocking my connection to him.”
The twins might be fraternal, but shifter twins were an almost unheard of phenomenon. It wasn’t a surprise that they were bonded in a magical way. We often joked that if you pinched one, the other would flinch. Or at least glare at you, if it was Levi. Flinching wasn’t manly enough for him.
“Do you know his computer password?” Harper asked.
“Is the Pope Catholic?”
“Okay, yeah, stupid question.”
Levi sat at the desk and unlocked the laptop. “Nothing immediate that I can see. Let me check his calendar. He writes down everything.”
“Can I help you?” A man’s voice from right behind me made me jump. Nausea twisted in my gut and I took a step back into the office as I turned and looked the guy over.
He was about my height, maybe five eight, pudgy, close to forty, with thinning brown hair and glasses that exaggerated the bulge of his blue eyes. He wore a brown sweater and a pair of faded khakis and looked utterly unassuming. Yet he set off my creep alert instantly. Maybe it was the nausea. Maybe it was the events of the last day.
“Hi, we’re looking for Professor Chapowits,” I said. Despite my no magic vow, I summoned a little of my power and tried to detect if this guy had any magic on him. Nothing. Damn. Maybe I was paranoid.
“He’s not here,” the man said. “How did you get into his office?” He seemed weirdly nervous, his eyes darting from me, to Harper, to Levi, and the computer.
“I’m his brother,” Levi said, swinging the chair around. “You are?”
“I’m Bernie uh, Barnes. I work here. That’s my office,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Ezekiel is gone for the day. You shouldn’t be going through his things.”#p#分页标题#e#
“He wouldn’t have left his laptop, and he’d be answering his phone,” Levi said. “Did you see him? What did he say?”
“I just saw him leave a little while ago. Maybe he was getting coffee. He likes to get coffee at the student café. You should try there.” Bernie Barnes, whose name sounded like a bad Stan Lee villain’s, smiled weakly at us, nodding as though he’d thought of something brilliant.
I really didn’t like this guy. He seemed desperate to convince us that Ezee wasn’t here and everything was fine. I studied him more with my magic enhanced vision. It wasn’t that I was getting nothing, I realized. I was seeing not just an absence of magic but an actual null void. He should have registered as a human, with the little ticks and flurries of ambient power that flowed around all life forms. But to my magical vision, it was like he wasn’t there at all.