Summer Sons(92)
At the door to the library he slid past an anonymous, scarf-wrapped woman on her way out. Murmuring paper-scented quiet enveloped him. Since his immersion in Professor Troth’s terrible, looming mansion and exposure to her corpselike husband, his control continued to creak—his hold on the curse weak and weaker. Eerie potential, for a haunt or worse, pressed at the edges of his head. The revenant was silent for the time being, but constantly biding, never forgotten. The time between hauntings got shorter every time it sank its teeth in. He jogged up the steps to the research floor two at a time, working his legs for the sake of grounding himself in his body.
Fluorescents buzzed overhead. He fit the brass key into the scratched lock of Eddie’s carrel and jiggled it to get the tumblers to fall. When he entered the enclosed space, the pinboard of news clippings lurked at his elbow. The curse had picked its last Fulton victim and lured him to his first death, friend in tow as a side dish. Andrew collapsed into the chair to stare at the clippings Eddie had assembled to chart the public narrative of their shared trauma. Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness.
They’d survived, but not unscathed. The unruly, ghoulish power that streaked through his veins marked him as an heir to the Fulton lineage, more than he ever wanted to be. The haunt seemed determined to drag him over the threshold and make him embrace the curse.
Footsteps approached and paused in front of the carrel; a fumbling metal-on-metal clink sounded as the lock turned over, rattled, and turned once more.
“Riley—” Andrew started.
West froze as the handle slipped from his grip, door yawning open on its loose hinges. A single key with a tiny metal loop-tag dangled from his fingers, carrel number written on it.
Shock and rage exploded across Andrew’s body in a blistering wash, propelling him forward to ball his fist in West’s cream-pale polo. With a wrenching spin and a shove he forced the other man into the carrel.
“Hey, watch it,” West blurted as he staggered against the far desktop, catching the edge on the backs of his legs with a dull thud. Andrew hooked the door shut with his foot. The slam was loud on the quiet floor. “What are you doing here?”
Andrew shoved a finger in his face and snarled, “No, what the fuck are you doing here?”
With a pursed mouth, he smacked Andrew’s hand aside and edged farther onto the desk, bracing his shoulders on the wall with his knees apart—as far from Andrew as he could get in the enclosed space. His messenger bag hung crooked at his hip, rucking up his shirt.
“Oh, come on. I heard about the get-together at Troth’s,” West said with a glower of his own. “How’d you like that, her undivided attention?”
“Not much,” he said. “But you’ve got Eddie’s fucking key and thirty fucking seconds to explain yourself.”
On the heels of a frustrated sigh, West said, “I came to give you something, but you need to hear me out before losing your temper.”
“I’m all ears,” Andrew said, turning his hand in the air in a get-on-with-it gesture.
“I wasn’t expecting to find you here, since you’ve stopped attending class so far as I can see,” West said. He tossed his hair in an agitated shake, though the short fall of locs immediately resettled over his forehead, and shifted in place on the desktop. “I was going to leave a note. Look, I can’t put up with your bullshit and hers at the same time without failing this dissertation on timeline alone, and she’s just lapping it up from you, this wounded animal routine.”
“Fuck you,” Andrew said, driven closer by furious instinct.
Sparking temper flared to life at the corners of West’s flat-lined frown. He dropped both hands on Andrew’s shoulders for a shove, then planted his Chelsea-boot heel above Andrew’s knee when he staggered away—holding him at a safe distance despite West’s disadvantage. Their mutual vitriol tainted the stagnant air of the cube. West forced him an additional step toward the door. Andrew winced at the sharp spike of pain the heel-edge drove through his leg and retreated out of reach of the shoe entirely while West yanked the clasp of his bag open.
“I took this.” He stood at his full height and smacked a notebook against Andrew’s midsection. Andrew grabbed his wrist, thumb over the rabbiting beat of West’s pulse. Cardboard edges dug into his navel. “But I grabbed it after he died. Insurance against Troth and her games, a way to catch her if she stole his work too. Except it clearly doesn’t matter one way or another, does it? She’ll screw me over regardless.”
Andrew released his arm and caught the notebook, letting it fall open in his palm. Eddie’s handwriting filled the pages, spangled with bullet notes and pointy asterisks, the top corners labeled with names and dates. The field journal. He tossed it onto the desktop, where it skidded cockeyed to a stop. West glanced at his own hands while he popped his wrist, his jaw muscles clenched. His contrapposto stance at the far corner of the carrel, designed to fit one grown man with comfort and not two in conflict, showed discomfort but no guilt.
“How much did you want him gone?” Andrew asked.
“None of this was about him,” West responded. “And it certainly isn’t about you.”
“Bullshit it wasn’t,” Andrew said. “Eddie came along and stole your mentor’s attention, guaranteeing you another year stuck at Vanderbilt. Now he’s dead, and you’re standing there with his notebook.”