This sounded less like an excuse than a secret. Whywouldhe be at a college in what he inaccurately considered the middle of nowhere?
“Are you in hiding?” she asked.
“You’ve used up your question for the day.”
“You are, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, cranking up the sarcasm to heretofore-unreached levels. “I’m hiding from a wicked sorcerer. Do you think this is a fairy tale? That I’m trapped here until a talking frog offers me a kiss?”
Oh, the mental picture this created. “That’s notexactlyhow the story goes.”
“Thank you, Professor, I know how the story goes. I’m German—I had the effing Brothers Grimm read to me as a child until my ears bled.”
“You don’t sound German.” (English, she would have guessed. Or New Englandish. His accent was faint.)
“I say things the way I want people to hear them,” he muttered.
An interesting way of putting it. She considered him for a moment—fingers flying over the keys, long legs stretched out beyond the edge of his black duster—and tried to picture him fleeing Germany to avoid a dangerous convincer.
Her imagination proved weirdly incapable of working him into a scene that didn’t involve at least one computer.
Oh, well. Silly idea, anyway.
“What are you thinking?” he said, a suspicious edge to the words. “You have the loudest silence of anyone I’ve ever met.”
She swallowed a laugh. “Just, um … Good thing you weren’t born during the witch hunts. Germanic lands were the worst offenders, you know.”
“I frequently congratulate myself on my narrow escape. Aha, here’s your file.” He opened it. He blinked at it. “That can’t be right. There’s just one sentence.”
She tried, not entirely successfully, to feign innocence. “That’s all of it, thanks. See you tomorrow?”
For a moment, he did nothing, right hand still clutching the mouse. Then he stomped out, coat whipping up behind him like black tail feathers.
There. That evened the score.
. . . . .
He arrived at the appointed hour the next evening, wrapped in the usual coat and the cowboy hat she now associated with flight.
“Next question,” he said, skipping “hello.”
“How many peopleareusing magic” might have seemed the obvious one, but she decided she’d rather know about the use than the people. Was it happening all around her? Did magic play an important role in the modern world? So she asked that instead.
Hartgrave’s lips thinned.
“Yes,” he said, barely opening his mouth enough to let the word go.
The answer she’d hoped for, but not expected. Not at all.“Yes?”she repeated. When he didn’t deny it, she added, “Holy moly!”
He made a dismissive noise. “You lot couldn’t curse your way out of a paper bag.”
“What? Which lot?”
“Midwesterners.”
“I categorically refuse to believe no one’s cussed you out since you’ve gotten here—”
She stopped, feeling a bit like she’d gone to sleep in one room and woken up in an entirely different one. How did he get her so entirely off the subject? But as she tried to slip in a follow-up question, his cell phone began beeping like mad. (She preferred the chime. This new alert was the auditory equivalent of a pounding headache.)
