Time After Time (Cora's Bond) (6 page)

“Gah, don’t you hate those?” Lisette was asking. “Junk shoved under your wiper, I mean. It seems like half the time I park on the street down in the District, someone puts something under my wiper. And then I have a heart attack because I think I’ve gotten a ticket, but it ends up just being some jerk trying to sell me something I don’t want.”

Ignoring her, I turned the paper over with a knot of dread. And there, just I had had feared, were words in the familiar scrawling hand:

You’re Next.

Next for what? I thought bitterly. For being shot by a sniper? For suicide? For being mind-controlled by a vampire and forced to kill myself? A white-hot fury went through me, an unaccustomed emotion that burned away any traces of fear.

How did they dare come after me, follow me, threaten me? Whoever it was, I decided, would pay for it in spades. One way or another.

Silently, I handed the paper to Clarissa. She scanned over it, then crumpled it up with a sound of contempt.

“They couldn’t get to me in my dorm room anymore,” I said to her. “So they came after me here. What does it even mean?”

“Most likely?” Clarissa asked, making a dismissive motion as she tossed the tight wad of paper neatly into the trashcan near the door. “Most likely, it means nothing at all. They’re just trying to scare you.”

“They used to succeed,” I said. “But now...now I think I’m just mad. “

“What is it?” Lisette asked. “What’s all that about?”

“Nothing,” I said, speaking the word simultaneously with Clarissa—except the agnate’s statement had a whiplash of power behind it, and Lisette instantly settled back, looking idly around as if she’d forgotten that she’d asked anything.

“How can I find out who did this?” I demanded of Clarissa.

“The person who did this touched your car. There should be surveillance videos from the escort vehicle.” Clarissa nodded to another car, positioned a short distance away in the mostly empty lot. “You can have them sent in to Dorian, and he’ll send them on to one of his tech companies to see if they can get an ID.”

“Let’s do that,” I said. I pulled out my phone as I got into the passenger’s seat and used the house app to relay the instructions to the people in the escort car as Clarissa and Lisette took their seats.

As Clarissa was pulled out of the lot with the follow car behind, the guards indicated their agreement. A few seconds later, I got CC’d on a message to Dorian, and I opened the video of the event eagerly, hoping that I’d see...well, to be honest, I hoped that I’d see Cosimo busily writing me hate mail and sticking it onto my car. Instead, a young man with curling hair and different features appeared.

“Is that even a...you know?” I asked Clarissa softly, knowing that I could freely use words like
agnate
or
cognate
in front of Lisette but not wanting to say anything that would prompt Clarissa to rearrange my best friend’s memory.

She looked away from the road for a split second to take in the still I’d been studying so closely.

“I can’t tell,” she said. “It’s too grainy. There’s something familiar about him, but then again, most people look familiar after long enough.”

I looked at him again. He did seem familiar, with his light brown curling hair...but I was afraid that it was merely because I wanted him to. I sighed. “I don’t know. It’s not Cosimo, that’s for sure.”

Clarissa snorted. “You couldn’t have possibly expected it to be.”

“I guess not. But I hoped that it was, anyway.”

She pulled onto the highway. “I suppose there is that.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “What was it that you wanted to say again, Lisette?”

Power rang through those words, and Lisette, who had been humming tunelessly under her breath, brightened up. “I was just thinking, Cora, how you have enough money for grad school pretty much any place you want to go. Even if you don’t get a great fellowship or an assistantship or something.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I can go anywhere I want to go.”

I thought about the stress of this semester and how I was being torn in between Dorian’s world and my own...except that Dorian’s world was mine, too, and was becoming more so with every day that passed. I thought of the applications I’d received answers to the week before—not my application to Stanford or University of Chicago but the ones I’d mailed at the last minute, just before the deadline. When the first had arrived, the fat packet hadn’t felt like giving up, as I’d been afraid it would, but like another victory in my decision to take charge of my life and make the best choices for myself.

University of Maryland. Where I was already attending—and where I would be close to Dorian if I chose to go to grad school there, too. The Georgetown acceptance had arrived soon after, followed by the one from George Washington, which had been my backup plan.

The decision deadline was coming up for all three in a few months, and I’d already ditched George Washington from the serious contenders. But I still didn’t know for sure what I was going to do. There were factors at play now that were greater than the ranks of the schools—greater even than my desire to be near Dorian, if that was possible.

But I was taking charge of my destiny, even if it was shaping up to be something quite different from what I’d expected. And I was determined to be ready for it, whatever it might bring.

I
deposited the check—in the outside teller machine, despite Lisette’s exclamations of horror—and we parted ways with Clarissa and returned to our apartment building just as dusk was settling into full night. My last shifter guard lingered in front of the elevator as we entered our unit, waiting for Lisette to go inside before she took up her usual position.

For some reason, I had an itching sense of unease, like I’d forgotten something important, so I jumped on my laptop to check all the dates of my upcoming tests. There was nothing.

The feeling got worse through dinner, and as soon as I’d washed the dishes, I went to my room and tried to call Dorian. The phone rang—not just once or twice but at least half a dozen times before finally I was finally transferred to his answering service.

“Good evening, madam,” the familiar light baritone voice said. “How may I help you?”

“I’d like to talk to Dorian, please,” I said, suppressing my surge of apprehension. Since the first day that I’d woken in Dorian’s house, he’d never failed to take my call himself.

“I’m sorry, madam, but the master is in a meeting at the moment and is unable to speak to you. I’ll leave him a message that you would like him to contact you as soon as he is free, however.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Please do that. Thanks.”

I hung up, feeling more out of sorts than before. With nothing better to do, I started wading through the files that I’d lazily saved to my desktop, sorting and deleting with abandon. Half an hour later, my phone buzzed with an incoming text message, and I picked it up.

It was from Dorian, and my heart leaped to see his name. But all it said was,
We’ll talk soon.

My apprehension only got worse as the minutes ticked on into an hour with no more reply than that. Finally, I set my laptop on my bed and stood up with a noise of frustration, unable to bear sitting even one minute longer. I went into the living area, where Chelsea and Christina sat streaming Hulu on a laptop and Lisette puttered around in the kitchen. She’d announced over dinner her intention to make oatmeal-raisin cookies “as brain food, because they’ve got oatmeal and raisins, so that’s healthy, right?”

It was, by all accounts, a completely normal Wednesday night. So why did I feel so anxious that I wanted to climb out of my own skin?

I prowled around the room, stopping occasionally to peek at the parking lot between the metal slats of the miniblinds before starting up again. I could feel the gazes of my roommates on me, but I couldn’t stop moving as a sense of urgency built stronger and stronger inside of me.

Finally, Christina snapped the laptop closed with a noise of frustration. “I can’t even look at the screen with you circling around the room like a vulture,” she said. “Come on, Chels.”

Chelsea followed her into her bedroom, my weak apology following behind.

But even that didn’t make me stop until Lisette put the metal mixing bowl into the sink with far more force than was required. “Look, did something happen between you and Dorian?”

I shook my head, unable to put what I felt into words much less come up with a justification for it.

“Are you upset about your grandmother?” she hazarded.

I shook my head again.

“Okay, then I’m not being a jerk to let you know that I can’t cook in my bedroom, and you’re driving me nuts, too,” she said. “Either put a lid on it or go for a walk or something.”

But I couldn’t go for a walk—or at least I shouldn’t, not without my full complement of bodyguards.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go to my room, okay?”

She gave me a thumbs up. “Awesomesauce. I’ll see you when the Adderall you’ve OD’d on wears off or whatever.”

But once in my room, I found myself making tiny circles in the small clear space in the center of the floor. I took a deep breath and forced myself to stop with all my will, and then I just stood there, quivering, until my eyes landed on one of the boxes from my Gramma’s house that still crowded the room. Boxes that were mostly full of things that were of no use to me anymore, now that I was marrying Dorian.

I started by dragging them all out, pulling them off my desk and my dresser and out from under my bed to pile them on the floor and on top of the mattress where I could sort through them.

Most were household goods that I’d kept in anticipation of living in an apartment or unfurnished grad housing next year, things I’d need when starting out in my own place—dishes, pots and pans, kitchen tools, linens, and the like. With the roiling feeling deep in my gut deadening me to everything else, those were easy enough to choose to discard. I grabbed the first one and marched into the living area with it. Lisette looked up from the kitchen with a deep frown and started to speak, but when she saw what I had in my arms, she stopped herself and pretended to be absorbed in flipping the cookies onto a kitchen towel to cool.

I stacked the boxes up against the window in the living room, and before I could change my mind, I sent a message through the house app to the butler Rojek to arrange for them and my Gramma’s old sofa and chair in the living area to be donated and the extra mattress stacked on my bed to be discarded.

Lisette probably thought that the boxes themselves and their contents were the source of my keyed-up state. But they weren’t. They were just a distraction from the gnawing, irrational fear that came from somewhere else.

From Dorian.

I let myself think it for the first time. I had no objective reason to believe that anything had happened to him, but what I felt ran deeper than reason. If he could feel strong emotions through our bond, why couldn’t I? Right now, I felt an overwhelming sense of danger, and it centered around him.

But there was nothing I could do about that, nor could I keep him from ignoring my calls and texts, so I put my fear to good use, plunging into boxes I hadn’t touched for more than a year.

Some things I knew without question I wanted to keep, like my box of off-season clothes. Others took more examination, like the four boxes from my old room. I snorted at the piles of stuffed animals and the high school trophies, and from them all, I took out the things that I really cared about and condensed them down into a single box.

The rest went out into the pile in the living room. It was long past time to let them go. All that was left then were two boxes of books—which were staying—and three boxes of sentimental items that had belonged to my grandmother.

Even in my agitated state, I couldn’t part with any of them. So I closed the boxes back up and shoved them deep under the bed on its cinderblock risers, along with the others I’d kept. But now the dresser and the desk and even the floor of the closet was free of boxes, and for the first time in over a year, my dorm room then looked like a place where someone actually lived rather than merely a place to store things, with hardly any room for me.

But it didn’t felt much like a victory, not even after I turned my agitation into a whirlwind of dusting and spraying and wiping. I couldn’t feel any kind of triumph with the constant warning buzz going off in the back of my head.

I kept checking my phone, expecting a call, a message,
something
from Dorian. I texted him back, and then a second time, and as the time crept toward midnight, I risked calling him again.

I got his answering service again, and if anything, the man at the other end of the line was even less helpful than before.

So I took my shower and climbed into my bed and stared across the tiny room that suddenly seemed too big for me. And at some point in the wee hours of the morning, I fell into a restless sleep.

I woke up to a nightmare-shadowed morning, feeling more tired than I had when I’d gone to sleep. My apprehension had grown to a state of physical nausea. I managed to stumble to my classes, but I didn’t process a word that the professors said.

When the promised call finally came right in the middle of my financial markets class, I practically elevated out of my seat as I answered it. Ignoring the professor’s disapproving gaze, I mumbled an apology and stumbled from the room, Clarissa shadowing me, as always.

“Hello?” I said. Or rather, I tried to say because the word had a hard time getting out of my suddenly dry throat. I swallowed and tried again. “Hello? Dorian?”

“I can’t talk long, but I wanted to return your call.”

Even though his voice was perfectly neutral, almost flat, I sagged against the wall at hearing it, closing my eyes.

“Why haven’t you called? What have you been doing?” I demanded. My voice was too shrill, and another student passing in the hall gave me a contemptuous look.

I’m a crazy girlfriend?
I snarled the thought at his retreating form.
Let’s see how you handle an eternal vampire bond that turns your brain inside out. Especially when you’re certain your vampire is doing something stupidly dangerous and won’t even tell you about it.