Glass Houses

the American continents…. She flipped pages. More about corn. She didn’t know you could write so much about one plant.

Beside her, Professor Wilson swore softly under his breath, and she looked up, startled. His face had gone pale, except for two red spots high in his cheeks. He quickly faked a smile and held up a finger striped with red. “Paper cut,” he said. His voice sounded high and tight, and Claire followed his stare to see Angela and John moving closer, watching the professor’s finger with eerie concentration. “It’s nothing. Nothing at all.” He groped in his pocket, came out with a handkerchief, and wrapped it around his bloodied finger. In trying to attend to that, he knocked the book he’d been reviewing to the floor. Claire automatically bent to pick it up, but Wilson’s foot hooked around it and scooted it out of her reach. He bent over and in the darkness under the desk…switched books.

Claire watched, openmouthed. What the hell was he doing? Before she could do anything stupid that might give him away, there was a ding from the elevator across the room, then the rumble of opening doors.

“Ah,” Wilson said with evident relief. “Time to go, then.” He reached down, picked up the hidden book, and slipped it into his leather satchel with such skill Claire wasn’t absolutely sure she’d seen it. “Come along, Neuberg.”

“Not her,” John said, smiling cheerfully. “She gets to stay after class.”

“But—” Claire bit her lip and made desperate eye contact with the professor, who frowned and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Sir, can’t I go with you? Please?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Come along, I said. Mr. Hargrove, if you don’t like it, please take it up with management. I have a class.”

He might have pulled it off, too, if Angela hadn’t been so sharp-eyed, or suspicious; she stopped him halfway to the elevator, opened up his portfolio, and took out the book he’d stashed away. She leafed through it silently, then handed it to John, who did the same.

Both of them looked at the professor with calm, cool, oddly pleased eyes.

“Well,” Angela said, “I don’t know, but I think this may be a violation of the rules, Professor. Taking books from the library without checking them out first. Shame, shame.”

She deliberately opened the first page and read, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and then flipped carefully through, stopping at random spots, to read lines of text. It all sounded right to Claire. She flinched when Angela pushed the book at her. “Read,” the vampire said.

“Um…where?”

“Anywhere.”

Claire recited a few lines in a faltering voice from page 229.

“A Tale of Two Cities,” John said. “Let me guess, Professor…a first edition?”

“Mint condition,” Angela said, and plucked it out of Claire’s trembling hands. “I think the professor has a nice retirement plan, composed of screwing us out of our rightful profits.”

“Huh,” John said. “He didn’t look quite so dumb as that. Got all those degrees and stuff.”

“That’s just paper smarts. You never can tell about what’s really in their heads until you open them up.” The two of them were talking like he wasn’t even there.

Professor Wilson’s pale skin had a sweaty gleam on it now. “A moment of weakness,” he said. “I really do apologize. It won’t ever happen again, I swear that to you.”

“Apology accepted,” Angela said, and lunged forward, planted her hand on his chest, and knocked him flat to the floor. “And by the way, I believe you.”

She grabbed his wrist, raised it to her mouth, and paused to strip off his gold wristwatch band and toss it on the floor. As it rolled, Claire’s stricken eyes caught sight of the symbol on the watch face. A triangle. Delta?

Her shock broke at the sound of the professor’s scream. Grown men shouldn’t scream like that. It just wasn’t right. Fright made her angry, and she dropped her book bag, took the canister off her shoulder, and yanked off the top.

Then she threw liquid nitrogen all over Angela’s back. When John turned on her, snarling, she splashed what was left at his face, aiming for his eyes. Wilson rolled to his feet as Angela collapsed, shrieking and thrashing; John reached out for him, but she’d managed to hurt him, too—he missed. Wilson grabbed his satchel and she got her book bag; they ran for the elevator. A very surprised professor—someone she didn’t recognize—was standing there, openmouthed; Wilson yelled at him to stand aside, leaped into the cage, and pressed the DOWN button so frantically Claire was afraid it would snap or stick or something.

The doors rolled shut, and the elevator began to fall. Claire tried to get her breathing under control, but it was no good; she was about to hyperventilate. Still, she was doing better than the professor. He looked awful; his face was as gray as his hair, and he was breathing in shallow, hard gasps.

“Oh dear,” he said weakly. “That wasn’t good.”

And then he slowly collapsed down the wall of the elevator until he was in a sitting position, legs splayed loosely.

“Professor?” Claire lunged forward and hovered over him.

“Heart,” he panted, and then made a choking sound. She loosened his tie. That didn’t seem to help. “Listen. My house. Bookshelf. Black cover. Go.”

“Professor, relax, it’s okay—”

“No. Can’t let them have it. Bookshelf. Black—”

His eyes got very wide, and his back arched, and she heard him make an awful noise, and then…

Then he just died. Nothing dramatic about it, no big speeches, no music swelling to tell her how to feel about it. He was just…gone, and even though she pressed her shaking fingers to his neck, she knew she wouldn’t feel anything, because there was something different about him. He was like a rubber doll, not a person.

The elevator doors opened. Claire gasped, grabbed her books and the empty silver canister, and sprinted down the blank cinder-block hallway to the end, where a fire door opened into bright afternoon sunlight.

She stood there for a few long seconds, just shaking and gasping and crying, and then tried to think where to go. Angela and John thought her name was Neuberg, which was good—she supposed not so good for Neuberg, if one existed—but they’d find out who she was eventually. She needed to be home before that happened.

Bookshelf. Black cover.

Professor Wilson had been in that room for seven years, sorting through books. Probably slipping out those he thought might be worth something on the black market.

What if…?

No. It couldn’t be.

Except…what if it was? What if a year ago, or five years ago, Professor Wilson had found that book the vampires were so intent on having, and decided to hang on to it for a rainy day? After all, she’d been basically planning to do the same thing, only for her it was already stormy weather.

She needed his address.

It wasn’t far to the Communication Arts Building, and she ran as much of the way as she could before the pain in her still-bruised ankle and still-raw back made her slow down. Two flights of steps brought her to the offices, and she passed up Professor Wilson’s closed and locked office to stop next to the cluttered desk out in the open between the corridors. The nameplate read VIVIAN SAMSON, but everyone just called her Dragon Lady, and the woman sitting behind it had earned the name. She was old, fat, and legendarily bad-tempered. There was no smoking in all university buildings, but the Dragon Lady had an overflowing ashtray on the corner of her desk and a glowing cigarette hanging out of the corner of her red-painted lips. Beehive hair, straight out of old movies. She had a computer, but it wasn’t turned on, and as far as Claire could tell from the two-inch-long bright red nails, the Dragon Lady didn’t type, either.

She ignored Claire and kept on reading the magazine open in front of her.

“Um—excuse me?” Claire asked. She felt sticky with sweat from the run in the heat, and still kind of sick from what had happened at the library. The Dragon Lady turned a page in her magazine. “I just need—”

“I’m on break.” The red-clawed hand took the cigarette out of the red-painted mouth for a trip to the ashtray to shed some excess. “Not even supposed to be here today. Damn grad students. Come back in half an hour.”

“But—”

“No buts. I’m on break. Shoo.”