Instead, she braced a hand on his chest and levered him back several inches, until their bodies weren’t touching anywhere except at palm and wrist. Then she broke those contacts, too, dropping her hand from his chest and using it to pry his fingers off her wrist. He let go immediately, looking surprised to find that he was holding her at all. Which left them standing there at the edge of the hallway chaos, not touching anymore. But not moving either.
“Talk to me,” he said quietly, urgently.
She shook her head, denying more than just the question. “You’ve been on shift too long, doctor, with too many weird things happening. You’re imagining things.”
“Am I?”
“I’m just a linguist.”
“No, you’re not.” He leaned in, voice dropping. “You’re a top-notch Mayanist who hasn’t published anything in nearly three years, and who’s been on sabbatical for the past year and a half, since not all that long after your grad student protege got in trouble for defending a thesis on the twenty-twelve doomsday . . . which by my calendar is just over a week away. And that makes this outbreak—and your presence here—look awfully coincidental.”
Anna. Couldn’t. Breathe. “You had me investigated?”
“If you call spending five minutes on Google the same as having you investigated, then yeah, I did.” His features tightened. “Look, I’m not trying to freak you out or come off like Creepy Stalker Guy, but I was interested, okay? Even more so once you sent me the recipe for a wacky-sounding herbal mix that actually worked.” He lifted a hand, but then let it fall again without touching her. “That’s why I called you when Rosa came in and started spouting ancient Mayan . . . because I need to know what’s really going on here. Is this the beginning of the end, an army of darkness, or what?”
Close, she thought wildly. He’s too damn close. Not just to her, personally, but to the truth. The Nightkeepers weren’t sworn to secrecy, granted, and gods knew there were plenty of doomsday theories out there, but Dez would be furious if she blew this contact. Worse, he’d be disappointed.
Play it cool. You can do this. If she didn’t, the doctor would have to be mind-bent, and she didn’t want that. She just didn’t.
They were getting some sidelong looks from the hurry-scurry folk in the narrow strip of space separating the inner and outer tent rings, but nobody seemed to be paying attention to their conversation; they were too busy getting from point A to point B. Anna and David, though, seemed suddenly encased within a strange, human-made shield of privacy.
Think. She had to think. She couldn’t, though—not when her head was starting to pound, harder and harder, reminding her of when—
“I had an aneurysm,” she blurted.
His face blanked. “You what?”
She took his hand—warm and wide-palmed—and lifted it to her scalp so he could feel the ridged scar. “Surgery, a coma, long recovery, the works. I’m fine now, really. But by the time I was back on my feet, my cheating husband had divorced me, the university had put a perfectly good replacement in my position, and I realized that I wasn’t dying to go back anyway. I wanted something more.”
“Like what?”
“I’m working on a book about the ruins and their inscriptions. That’s why I remembered the carving that talked about a plague.” Again, the lies pinched.
“You’re writing a book.” His face had gone unreadable.
She eased out from behind his big body. This time he let her go, which brought a pang. Facing him now, with her back to the flow of traffic, she said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Curtis. I really need to go.”
“Dave.”
“Dave, then.” His name felt strange coming off her tongue, like it was too close to “Dick,” yet nothing at all like it. Not that she should be comparing the two of them, really. They were very different men and the situations were worlds apart. “All I know about the so-called Mayan doomsday is whatever I couldn’t avoid hearing from my grad student, Lucius, and the tripe that’s been in the media. As for the outbreak, I’ve told you everything I know, except for the stuff I’m going to go look up now, based on what Rosa was saying.” She spread her hands and met his eyes. “Seriously. I’m not hiding anything.”
It seemed like an eon before his shoulders dropped and he shook his head, chuckling a little at himself. “Shit. I could’ve sworn . . . well, maybe you’re right that I’ve been on shift too long. You wouldn’t be the first one to suggest I’m pushing too hard.”
“You should rest.”
“Yeah. I . . . yeah.” He raised a hand, hesitated as if surprised to see that it wasn’t wearing a glove, and then scrubbed his fingers through his thick hair, leaving it rumpled and standing on end. “Sorry I got weird on you. It was just that, back there in the room with Rosa, it was like there was something else in there with us. Some sort of presence, or power, or something.” He rolled his eyes, and his accent thickened. “My ma would say I’d been listening to too many stories again.”
Anna made herself ignore the tug of his voice, and the way it made her think of open spaces far away from ground zero. “I really do need to get going, and not because I’m in trouble. I promised to meet friends. Outside the quarantine zone,” she added when he started to frown. And that much, at least, was the gods’ honest truth.
“You’re taking proper precautions?”
“I am. I swear.” Just not the kind he was talking about.
“And you’ll call if you find anything else?”
“Absolutely.” Well, once Dez cleared it.
He hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Well . . . right. I guess I’ll see you?”
“I hope so.” And that, a little to her surprise, was also the gods’ honest truth.
Still, though, as they parted with a wave and one too many over-the-shoulder looks back, her stomach was tied in serious knots over the entire exchange. As she headed for the outer perimeter, she tried to figure out why she didn’t feel good about how that had gone down. She had kept him as a contact, talked her way out of a sticky situation, and managed to preserve her cover. So why did she feel like shit? Or, more accurately, why did she hate having to lie to a virtual stranger when she’d been lying to her friends and coworkers—and even a husband—for decades?
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. What matters is getting home and getting your hands on that skull. The thought brought a renewed buzz of excitement and a stir of magic, along with the nerves that came with the thought that she would need to tread carefully if she wanted to—
A big, bulky form stepped in front of her, and a deep voice boomed, “Excuse me, ma’am?”
She stopped dead, and an “oh shit” zinged through her at the sight of a security guard. It wasn’t the guy she’d waved her way past as she’d booked it out of the clean zone, but she had a feeling that had been her mistake. It’d gotten them talking, and they had realized that nobody had signed her in. Faking surprise, she blinked at him. “I’m sorry. Is there a problem?”
He caught her arm and turned her back the way she’d come. “I’m going to need you to come with me, please.” His voice was polite, his grip inexorable, and Anna found herself being force-marched past row after row of doors that all looked the same, while her brain raced. What the hell was she supposed to do now?
She had options, of course—she could knock him down with a sleep spell, use a chameleon spell, teleport away . . . But any of those things would send up some serious red flags for her already-suspicious doctor.
A glance at her comm device showed that there weren’t any blinking lights, no evidence that anybody needed her. So, as the guard ushered her through an unmarked door into a prefab steel room that held a desk, a couple of chairs, a huge wipe board scrawled with guard shifts and notes suggesting that she was in what passed for their security hub, she followed his orders without question, figuring she would go with the flow, do her best to smooth things over, and talk her way out of starring in an incident report.
Gods knew that in a place like this, with so many people coming and going, the left hand probably wouldn’t know what the right was doing half the time. Ten bucks said she could convince this guy that she’d been waved through the checkpoint on the strength of Dr. Dave’s name, asked some volunteer for help with her protective gear, and found him on her own. And if they couldn’t track down anyone to verify, they’d just figure it’d gotten lost in the chaos.
