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Despite the drama of the morning, the rest of my work day proved surprisingly uneventful. The brownie-eating professor brought in his wife...who was plump and cheerful and didn’t complain one bit about her husband’s dietary preferences. Meanwhile, yesterday’s female students returned with three friends in tow, and the shop gradually began to feel more like a cheerful meeting place and less like the cold, silent corner of campus it had initially appeared.
Feeding the masses warmed the cockles of my heart...but I still grew increasingly jittery as the day progressed. It was hard to remain in one place while my mind ran in several different directions at once, none of which involved pastries and all of which reeked of potential danger. So, at 3 pm, I dialed the same number I’d called far too often throughout the day, hoping for yet another status report on my absent sister.
“Still no trouble,” Lissa answered, not bothering to wait for my question this time around. The female shifter and her partner had been stationed outside Harmony’s apartment building within fifteen minutes of Andrea leaving my own premises, and their calm assurance should have dismissed all worries about my sister-in-law’s safety. And yet...I still harbored a sinking suspicion that something was going wrong out in the city while I whipped up frosting and poured cream into coffee cups within my insulated bubble here on campus.
“Are you positive?” I asked for the sixth time that day. Then racking my brain in an effort to guess what the stationed guards might have missed, I added: “What about the side entrance?”
“Marcia is standing right in front of it. And before you ask, neither of us has seen or smelled a hint of fur since we got here. This isn’t the shifter side of town. You can relax.”
Lissa’s frustration was evident in her clipped sentences, and I couldn’t really blame her. Staking out a human apartment building was a pretty low-level chore, and it wasn’t fair of me to suggest the shifters in question weren’t up to the job. Still....
“What about the roof? Would you be able to see if anyone took an aerial approach?”
“Have you even been here?” Lissa snapped back, her politeness finally wearing thin. “There’s no way to access the roof short of a helicopter. And I can promise you, I would hear a chopper if hypothetical miscreants tried to fly in and nab a human out from under my nose.”
“Okay,” I answered, dropping my head into one hand and letting the issue drop. The other shifter was right—I was being overprotective and a total pain in the butt.
So, after a much-needed apology, I forced myself to hang up the phone. I didn’t call to check in for the next two hours. And when quitting time rolled around, I didn’t take advantage of my spare hour between work and mandatory Greenbriar dinner to rush home and check on Harmony’s defenses as I’d initially intended.
Instead, I accepted the fact that the Garcia family was being guarded by pack. Since I’d also run out of avenues to explore with regard to Derek’s disappearance, I chose not to spin my wheels and instead headed in the one direction bound to soothe my tattered temperament.
I’d take Sebastien up on his invitation and drop by his office. The decision had nothing to do with the molten chocolate coloration of the human’s eyes, nor with his absence from the shop today. Instead, I told myself I was merely looking forward to talking about something other than werewolves for a change.
***
LIKE THE REST OF CAMPUS, the college’s psychology building was nearly empty at quitting time on a summer evening. So I wandered down dimly lit corridors for several minutes, searching for the room number from Sebastien’s card. And as I skimmed research posters lining the endless hallways, my eye snagged upon the long list of funders who had supported even the simplest of experiments.
Dad would have laughed at all the ten-dollar names, and I couldn’t resist perusing them now as I ambled past. I was vaguely familiar with the National Institute of Science and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA for short), but even the private scholarship funds seemed to require listings up to a dozen words long.
“Dorothy E. and Kenneth C. Upton Foundation,” I read aloud, trying to decide whether the couple had been clowning around by creating an acronym that turned into an invective when read backwards...or whether they’d just missed out on the joke. Humor aside, Derek—with his lone wolf’s obsession for making ends meet—might have been attracted to the seemingly endless funds made available by well-heeled college alums. Was my brother’s obsession with the campus merely an attempt to support his lavish lifestyle without having to sign on with an established pack?
The idea made intuitive sense...yet it still didn’t quite ring true. Maybe I just didn’t want to turn my brother into either a desperate loner or a money-grubbing scam artist, but my gut told me there was more to Derek’s interest in the college than the mere need for easy financing.
The answer, I suspected, lay with the key tucked away in my pocket. Fingering the cool metal, I considered trying it in every knob I passed. Surely the answer to Derek’s disappearance lay here on the campus he’d talked so much about.
And yet...how many doors existed in this building alone? And how many other parts of the city had Derek mentioned in passing during our dozens of chats? No, I needed to come up with a more structured approach to the current investigation or I’d continue getting nowhere fast.
Meanwhile, I turned a corner and discovered that the room numbers lining the hallway were finally heading in the proper direction. The clack of fingers on a keyboard drew me yet deeper into the complex, then I forgot all about my brother as I peeked through an open doorway and caught sight of the back of Sebastien’s enticing head.
I knew the professor could never be anything more to me than an intriguing acquaintance, but my breath still caught as I took in the sunlight glinting through my companion’s short yet tangled locks. My muscles relaxed for the first time all day as his scent wafted into my nostrils. And for an instant, my lupine half closed its eyes and sighed in contentment, as if we’d returned from a lone hunt to snuggle into the heart of our chosen pack.
Focus, Ember, I reminded myself. I wasn’t here to be sucked in by masculine beauty and I definitely wasn’t here to find a mate. I was hunting for my brother, and to that end I forced myself to tear my eyes away from Sebastien’s muscular form and peruse his workspace instead.
Unfortunately, what I saw made the human more intriguing rather than less so. Because the room was awash with plants. A well-trained ficus arched around the side of one large window while spider plants spawned babies in hanging baskets above his head. Along the opposite wall, a fish tank burbled with life, colorful swimmers darting out from amid the fronds of pond plants while colorful snails slimed their way up the insides of the glass surfaces.
“It looks like you’d rather be outside,” I said aloud, forgetting for a moment that my companion wasn’t a shifter and thus wouldn’t have heard me approach. Sure enough, Sebastien’s entire body jolted at the sound of my voice, his head swiveling toward me like that of a startled deer assessing its surroundings. But then a broad smile lit the professor’s face as he caught sight of me hovering in the entranceway.
“Ember,” he greeted me. “Come on in.”