THE LAST MUSE Book I

 

Chapter 1: The Lecture Hall

Professor Theron Vasco had been speaking for forty-three minutes when he felt his fingers begin to tingle. He continued focusing on the lecture, pausing when the sensation began a slow crawl up his arms.

“The iron atom at the center of the heme group,” he said, his deep, rough-edged voice drying to a whisper, “is what allows a single red blood cell to carry roughly one billion oxygen molecules. One billion. In a cell so small you could fit ten thousand of them on the head of a pin.”

Most of the students’ heads were down, their fingers scribbling notes. A few in the back of the room had their eyes on the clock.

He cleared his throat and turned to the board to give himself a moment of privacy. His eyes closed as he waited for the feeling inside his fingers and arms to return. The floor suddenly tilted, a bright pulse behind his eyes flashed. If the attack could just pass long enough for him to gather himself, he could finish the hour. But a scent drifted along with the draft from the old window beside the lectern. Honeysuckle and something ancient he couldn't recall mingled with the metallic tang of blood. He'd asked twice since the semester began that the window be sealed or realigned.

It hadn't been. Whatever lingered on the air didn't belong to this time. And it was making everything worse.

He finished writing on the board. Read Chapter 15.

His hands were shaking when he turned back to face the class. He set them on the back of the chair behind the lectern and leaned forward, his tall frame folding slightly over it. Theron imagined he looked normal, at ease. Some students would even take it for charisma, but it was the only thing keeping him upright and his dignity in check. The outline for next week's assignment was done, but time was moving slower than usual. Or at least, that’s how it felt.

He could feel her watching him. Her eyes. They were like the soft tips of a finger touching his face.

The haunting fragrance was coming from the pre-med student in the second row. She dressed plain. Deliberately so, he’d thought after the second week of school. Oversized sweaters, leggings and boots that hit just below the knee. Her thick, wavy dark hair was always pulled back in a plait, but a few strands always escaped to frame her heart shaped face. She didn’t appear to realize just how noticeable she was. But her nonchalance only drew the eye, and the small magic inside her was like a perfume that made your lungs crave the air. Shoulders rolled and lips parted with sighs when she entered a room. He'd noticed those things, though she didn’t seem to.

She was writing down what he’d said. Her wrist was fine. Her fingers, long and thin, and she held her pen in a way that made her delicate mannerisms stand out even more. He’d been trying for eleven weeks not to notice. Instead, he catalogued every detail of her. Most of all, what he noticed was how she focused on nothing but the lecture. Not the two girls in front of her that always sat next to each other, or the young man who snuck glances her way as he pretended to stretch. She wanted to be a doctor. End of story.

His jaw flexed as he willed the scent to disperse, and her, by some quiet exertion of his ancient will, to stop watching him.

She defied him. Unconsciously. Ever curious, independent and always the perfect student.

The walls looked like they’d just slanted inward. He pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose and waited for his brain to return to normal. When he looked up, he gave the students a small, tight smile and let them go a minute early.

He never did that. If anything, he went a minute over or stayed until the buzzer signaled the end of the hour. Two of the brighter students exchanged a glance as they gathered their things. It didn’t matter. He needed them out of the room and the door closed. He needed the window open wide enough that the cold November air might move what little blood was in him through veins that had thinned over the months. Then he needed to be in his office, where there was a small refrigerator, and inside it a single glass bottle.

He’d calculated that morning, that he had eleven days. Not counting the days was not only impossible, it made him feel he was losing control. The rare steaks were helping. The lamb barely warmed and the iron in the heavy Bordeaux was helping. None of them were enough, and eleven days wasn’t long enough to finish the work.

Two months ago, the work had been weeks from completion. Now it sat in pieces across his desk, impossible to hold together by a mind starved for blood.

The students filed out and he began packing his notes, his mind already in his office, on the bottle waiting in the dark.

“Professor Vasco?”

He didn’t look up at first. He knew the voice. Elia Loredan, second row by the window, no doubt because she was always too warm.

A polite refusal was already in the works. I have another class to prepare for. Email is best. I’m afraid I’m in a rush.

Her scent moved through the air, and a will he'd honed for centuries was suddenly on the brink of betraying him.

His hand was on the edge of the desk, faster than the eye could see, holding him up. He'd almost fallen on his face.

What was that? Her blood? Whatever had just happened wasn't simply about her blood or the notes it carried. It was the quality of it. The power.

She was a muse.

And she clearly didn't know it. She wore no muse insignia. She stood with her notebook against her chest, unaware of the small wake she left wherever she entered a room or walked down a hall.

Focus on the notes, said a voice inside his head. 

“Yes, Ms. Loredan.”

“I’m sorry to bother you. I know how hard you’ve been working on the paper. I overheard dean Carjen mentioning it. I didn’t mean to overhear, but…”

She stopped as if she could sense his irritation. Of course she did. She felt him without knowing she was doing so. But he wanted—no needed her gone. He needed to be in his office. He needed to have been there fifteen minutes ago.

“I just wanted to ask if you were all right. If there was anything I could do.”

“I’m fine.”

It’s only, you seem so exhausted.” Her voice trembled.

It was difficult not to meet her gaze. Her vulnerability was so raw it cleaved straight through to his heart.

“I thought if you needed a research assistant, or, I don’t know. I’d be glad to help.”

Now he was forced to look at her.

That offer required an immediate refusal.

But she had this urgent, slightly nervous expression. She was offering him something more than her time. Only the deepest part of her knew she was offering him continued existence.

“It’s not necessary,” he said, his voice dry from suppressing pain. It sounded angry He drank what was necessary to get him steady and functioning..

“I appreciate the thought.” He tried to soften it. Now it sounded cold, a degree less than angry. A soft sigh escaped his lips. “My work isn’t the kind that benefits from extra hands, and I am not, contrary to appearances, in any difficulty.”

She blinked. Her face flushed from embarrassment—or was it hurt feelings?

He wished he’d softened how cold he’d been. His throat felt dry.

Then his attention moved to the slow, steady pulse along the side of her throat. His mouth watered.

“Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for. Have a good evening.” His eyes fixed on his hands gripping his briefcase.

He walked toward the door at what he hoped was a normal pace. Four feet. That's all. A few easy strides beneath the fluorescent lights of the Perelman School of Medicine. Then the floor lurched sideways and his shoulder slammed into the doorframe.

Delicate fingers closed around his forearm. Small fingers that couldn’t have reached all the way around even if she had tried.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, “I thought you might fall…”

Her fingertips pulsed. Through the wool of his jacket and the cotton of his shirt, he felt it: the warm, steady, two-beat rhythm of her. The faint hush of her carotid two feet from his ear, the slight slowness of her resting heartbeat that no doctor would ever quite understand, let alone explain to her.

His gums throbbed. He didn’t move.

“Ms. Loredan,” he said, very quietly. “Please. Get on with your business.”

She let go.

He didn’t look back, his eyes on the long corridor, the white marble blaring, the sunlight distorting the lines and edges of everything. He kept his breath frozen inside his chest until he had turned the corner.

 

Chapter 3

The Lab

 

Elia was hiking. She needed to be calm before she reached the university. Her gaze lifted. The fog above the stream was rising onto the trail and curling around trees and rocks like fingers. They were heading straight for her, breaking her calm. Thoughts of her first lab with the Professor returned.

A chilled breath spread through the warmth inside her chest and a daydream found its way into her thoughts.

She would sit beside the professor at the bench while he could easily hand her the early drafts of his manuscript. She already knew his published works, and she’d modestly let him know.  A glint of approval would reach his eyes. Then she’d do it. She’d tell him that she’d read his papers before she ever even came to American. He’d hide that he was flattered behind a reserved really? But it would be his smile that said it all.

That last part, his smiling, made her body feel warm even in the November chill. He might not smile but thanking her wasn’t going too far.

She let go of the daydream and admired the bare trees; their branches intertwined like latticework. Puffs of cold air escaped her lips as she quickened her pace. It was difficult to get her heartbeat up, but she wanted to be breathless. Breathless enough to cool the fire growing inside her.

The backpack thumped against her hip. She had fifteen minutes before the train. Her parents hadn’t written back to any of her emails. She’d sent three in the past week. Somehow that compounded the regret of not getting to say goodbye to Mrs. Calloway before she left this morning. Her landlady hit her horn, a quick two beats. Her way of saying goodbye when they missed each other. Elia had planned on them sharing a cup of coffee before bidding each other goodbye. Today was what Eia had been working toward since she was accepted to Penn for the MD-PhD program. It felt important like, a milestone deserving of at the very least, a shared latte and blueberry muffin.  

A cold wind blew out of nowhere, and her nose felt instantly red.

Sniffing and wiping the wetness from her nose, her parents came to mind again. She grinned. When they found out Professor Vasco had taken her on as his research assistant, they’d be over the moon, talking over each other and asking her too many questions to answer all at once. Her mother would have a lot of advice, while her father would tell her how proud he was and that he’d seen this kind of thing in her future all along.

They were going to call. And when they did, it would melt away the feelings of not being important enough for them to spare five minutes.

They had each other and one day Elia would find someone to love her the way her father loved her mother. She was certain of that.

She let out a gasp. Something between a sigh and an embarrassed chuckle. The memory of this morning’s shower came out of nowhere. Thinking about the professor while she was naked had been awkward even though no one would ever find out about it. Still, she tried to force herself to stop thinking about him as the steam made her skin radiant and silky. She imagined him smiling. A smile she’d never seen, his dark eyes squeezing and crinkles forming at the edges. She felt ridiculous, like she was fifteen again.

She walked even faster, making it impossible for her to think about the humiliating shower. When she left the trails, she felt someone eyeing her from behind. The only thing there was the coffee shop and the wide single step that led to the glass doors. This was the second time that had happened. And whoever it was, their gaze felt like beetles with sharp, tiny claws. She didn't need to turn around to check if it was her imagination. She always knew when she was being watched, but whoever this person was, they had a dark soul.

Once she reached the platform, the temptation to see who’d been following her grew uncomfortable. She resisted the impulse and stared out at the sky and tops of roofs and treetops beneath it. A minute later, the sound of the train’s metal wheels grating against the rails could be heard.

Everyone slowly moved toward the edge of the platform. Whoever had been staring was closer. The sensation of beetles grew heavier. Her shoulders quivered at the feel of it.

The ride to University City wasn't long. Whoever was watching her was staring now. When her stop arrived, half the coach stood up, waiting for the doors to slide apart. The person watched her all the way to the crowded street. She wouldn't know who'd been watching her now if she turned around and part of her wished she had.

Elia cut through a crowd of girls talking, forcing them to close the gap and give her a moment to lose the person following. Seconds later she was racing up the stairs, passing professors and other students, scarves catching in the icy wind and hands pulling lapels close to ward off the cold.

Her thoughts narrowed once she greeted the guard at the entrance of the building. Papers, lab and research flitted through her head. Her class came and went. She took notes, listened to the professor and jotted down several questions she’d ask when most of her classmates were gone.

Elia stopped by the library before her second and last class of the day. Lunch passed unnoticed as she finished leftovers from last night’s dinner along with a steaming hot cup of raspberry tea.

She'd meant to arrive at Professor Vasco's lab two minutes ahead of time, but Professor Elliot cornered her in the hall, a sheaf of papers in his hand.

"Elia. I was hoping to catch you."

She slowed and forced herself not to glance down at her watch.

"I'm submitting to JCI on Friday and the methods are a mess. I know you're starting in Vasco's lab today, I won't keep you. But if you have an hour this weekend, even half an hour, I would owe you. You caught three things in Patel's draft last semester that two of my postdocs missed."

She said yes. She would have said yes even if she hadn’t been in a hurry. Elliot was the kind of professor who remembered favors, and because she had read every paper he'd published in the last five years, she knew she could help him. He thanked her so much that by the time she pulled away she was three minutes late instead of two minutes early. She rushed down the empty hall, her long, heavy braid brushing the backs of her arms like a pendulum.

Her hand lifted. The lab door was right there. Her body stopped like she’d slammed on the breaks. She swallowed, took a few breaths and then reached for the silver doorknob. Her eyes closing as she twisted it.  

Of course, the professor was already there. Elia opened her mouth, ready to apologize. He glanced down at his watch and returned to his reading.

She scanned his desk. Nothing on it for her to review. Beside him, the empty space she imagined was taken up by papers and an empty bottle of water.

Her eyes searched the room. A stack of papers was waiting for her on a desk at the far end of the room. As far from his own bench as the lab allowed.

Elia glanced at him, waiting once more for an acknowledgment that never came.

Her heart sank as she walked toward the desk, her boots sounding against the tiles, every clack louder than the last. Sliding the backpack from her shoulder, she looked up at him one final time before sitting down.

The cool surface of the desk steadied her as she laid her palms against it. The foolish daydreams she'd carried all morning, sitting beside him, discussing manuscripts, earning a rare smile quietly dissolved.

He didn't even know she existed. The inhale tugged at something bruised inside her. She shook her head, subtly, with resignation and opened the folder carefully.

The lab was silent except for the wind howling down Civic Boulevard. The windows shuddered every now and then. She acclimated to the sound, the space inside the atmosphere was familiar. Loneliness and Elia were well acquainted, but there was a heaviness in the room that had nothing to do with her hurt feelings.

She took a few deep breaths and the last of her disappointment left on the exhale. There were hundreds of pages on the desk in front of her, all of them belonging to the brilliant professor Vasco. Elia began with the earliest entries noticing his writing. It was careful and slightly old-fashioned. She read through the first protocols of the past three months, taking notes of her own on a small pad. His comments in the margins were fascinating. She knew Professor Vasco was gifted, now she realized his was the kind of mind that came once in a lifetime. He was known all over the world and she’d researched him in undergrad. His family was from Morocco. His father had died when he was a child. He had no brothers or sisters.

She read on. His manuscripts grew bolder, the conclusions surprising, the experiments more ambitious. Time slipped by as Elia lost herself inside the world of the professor’s mind. She could’ve remained there all day. Forever even.

Elia was lost in tunnel vision. The lab faded away. The wind did too. Her eyes felt strained from staring at the page for so long. She rubbed them, glancing around, careful to avoid catching the professor's eye in case he took breaks too.

When she finished a page, she slipped it to the bottom of the stack. Her eyes lifted as she placed the page beneath the others. Without permission, sometimes her gaze moved to him. More than once she noticed him go motionless, as though he had known her eyes were about to find him. He never fully looked up.

But the stillness of him held something more. Something heavy, hidden. There was a secrecy about him, something he hid as though if it were known it could change more than his research career.

She was oblivious that she was staring. He raised a hand to his forehead to rub it slowly, her focus narrowing. It fell to the bench as though it had weight to it.

He was tired. That was it. No, not tired. He was exhausted.

Something stirred softly inside Elia He was working too hard. He had a paper at Cell and a deadline he couldn’t afford to miss, not after already missing the last one. It had to be hard being perfect, brilliant and so—darkly attractive. She imagined the need to outdo himself was enormous.

Elia returned to the notes, reading on. An hour passed. Then another. The light through the tall windows shifted from the white wintry afternoon sky to the twilight of a winter night. Darkness would claim the horizon in a matter of minutes, and she was nearing the end of her time in the lab. Then she found it.

She’d been studying a column of pH values in a series of binding-affinity trials from October. Her eyes skimmed the column once. Her fingers nimbly returned to the protocol on a previous page to double-check the specified value. She turned forward to the entries that followed and ran her eyes down the pH columns of the next three trials. She read each one twice.

The pencil hovered above the page, her fingers beginning to tremble, her lip hurt from biting into it. Her mind scrambled with how to tell him she'd found an error. It was the reason the manuscript hadn't been submitted in September. Worse, it never would have been submitted until someone caught it.

How could he have missed it? It wasn’t complicated at all. But that’s what made telling him uncomfortable.  She didn’t want to embarrass him. Not on her first day. The same day she'd managed to arrive late.

"Professor."

He didn’t lift his eyes.

"Professor, I think this pH was recorded incorrectly. The protocol specifies eight point three, but the working notes here show seven point three."

His fingers rubbed his eyes.

"If the protocol value is the correct one, the binding affinity would shift, and the results from the next three trials would track differently."

He went still, his dark eyes landing on hers, the shadows in the room slanting across the upper part of his body. His hair and his eyes looked unnaturally black.

He stood, a finger rising to his temple, before he sat back down slowly. She sensed, not saw him shudder.

He couldn’t stand.

"Bring it over, will you?"

His voice was clipped. His brow furrowed slightly, as though he were irritated.

Compassion hit her so suddenly, it hurt. She sipped her canister of water, screwing the top back like she was relaxed instead of alarmed.

With the page and several others, she set them carefully on the corner of his bench, then she took a step back. His face turned to her — almost.

He read it. He turned to the page with the protocol. He read that too. He studied the column of pH values for the trials that followed and ran his finger down them, slowly.

He was silent for a long moment.

"My God…” He mumbled softly. "That should be eight point three." His voice revealed quiet shock. Relief too. He didn't look up immediately, his eyes were still on the page, a vein along his temple pounding too fast.

Elia stared. She knew blood. She knew hearts. No heart moved that fast. Ever.

He took a breath and the pulse stopped. Completely. Impossible.

Elia wrapped her arms around herself. The silence, the coldness of his expression. Her body had begun to tremble. Her arms held it still.

She heard him inhale.

"I could've turned this in…"

His response caused the air tangle inside her throat.

"Thank you, Ms. Loredan."

Her lips parted. The words landed softly inside her chest like a petal reaching the ground, finally.

"Professor."

He handed the pages back to her without looking up, and she returned to her desk.

His eyes followed her the whole way. She felt it, and it was nothing like the crawling sensation of the watcher. The professor's gaze felt careful. Curious.

Something of him settled inside her chest. Each step should have carried her farther away from it. Instead, the sensation remained, warm and impossible, just beneath her ribs.

This wasn't normal. Not by a long shot.

 

She sat down gingerly, pretending the papers on the desk needed arranging. Her attention moved to him for only a second. Just in time to catch his hand resting above his heart before he moved it.

Was he feeling it too?

No, the professor wouldn't feel something like that. He was the epitome of science and reason. Nothing mattered to him but his work. Of all the articles she had ever read about him, none had mentioned a woman. There had been two photographs taken of him leaving conferences, in both of which a dark-haired woman had been visible in the back seat of a car a driver was holding open for him. But photographs were old, and the woman had not been named in either caption. Still. The images spanned a decade. Something she hadn't thought about in undergrad now occurred to her. Neither he nor the woman had aged. Except for the strands of gray in his hair, he hadn’t changed, loose wavy locks that curled at the tips. He was tall, wide-shouldered, but perhaps a bit less athletic than before. No, he looked just the same, only more mature and internationally known.

Elia read the last few pages of the stack without absorbing very much of them. At six o'clock she gathered her things. The dark sky winked with a blanket of stars still foreign to the sky outside the window of her childhood bedroom. She stood and began packing up. The notepad, a pencil and two pens placed into their specific compartment of her backpack like it mattered.

"Goodnight, Professor."

He met her gaze, his face unreadable, his eyes seeming to see through her.
"Goodnight, Ms. Loredan."

A brisk wind swept up the steps of the university just as she stepped into night. But what she felt most of all was the faint sensation inside her chest. His gaze left something behind. It didn't make any sense, but neither did the dragonflies and phoenixes that seemed to follow her wherever she traveled with her parents.

Elia swiped her train pass through the kiosk and stepped onto the platform.

Only a handful of people were waiting, kitchen staff uniforms peeking beneath warm coats. Elia leaned past the platform, no light from the train, only tracks that stretched into the darkness.

And then it returned.

The stare. Her stomach twisted hard. Did they know her schedule?