Justice Calling

Chapter 7

Juniper College is a private liberal arts university known for turning out a lot of serious students who go on to get PhDs and then work in low level service jobs for the rest of their lives trying to pay off massive student loans. Okay, so maybe not always that last part, but it was one of those elite small schools full of people who seemed more in love with learning than with practical life skills. I’d teased Ezee about it a lot, but in good fun.

I mean, I’d been raised by a bunch of professors and gone to a similar school. Once upon a time I had thought I could be happy in academia for the rest of my life. Before Samir and my wild years as a sorceress-in-training, plotting to make the world my bitch.

The campus was just outside Wylde proper and butted up against the border of the River of No Return Wilderness. Ezee’s in the middle of a grove of old growth Douglas Fir trees.

The sun was low in the sky when we arrived and the campus quiet in the spring chill. Here and there students walked in packs, talking to each other or with heads buried in their phones, and no one gave us much of a glance.

Ezee’s office was on the fourth floor. Levi had a key and let us in when knocking clearly showed his brother wasn’t in residence.

Books filled one wall on shelves bending a little under their weight. Two overstuffed leather chairs with brass upholstery tacks decorating them in knotwork patters on the edges were positioned by the desk in a way that invited one in for a cozy chat over a cup of tea about the mysteries of the universe, or, given Ezee’s area of expertise, a lively talk about American history and treatment of native peoples.

His desk was orderly, his laptop sitting in sleep mode and plugged into the spike bar on one side. A pile of papers sat waiting to be graded or handed back. There was a pink pen, uncapped, lying on the open area of the desk, as though Ezee had just set it down and was about to return to whatever he’d been writing. Even his desk chair was rotated toward the door, as though he’d only stepped out for a moment, and the Armani aftershave he used still hung in the air.

“Maybe he’s in the bathroom? Or we could check the library,” I said.

“It feels like he’s here. Somehow.” Levi shook his head and sniffed the air. “I think he’s close. I can’t tell. It’s like something is blocking my connection to him.”

The twins might be fraternal, but shifter twins were an almost unheard of phenomenon. It wasn’t a surprise that they were bonded in a magical way. We often joked that if you pinched one, the other would flinch. Or at least glare at you, if it was Levi. Flinching wasn’t manly enough for him.

“Do you know his computer password?” Harper asked.

“Is the Pope Catholic?”

“Okay, yeah, stupid question.”

Levi sat at the desk and unlocked the laptop. “Nothing immediate that I can see. Let me check his calendar. He writes down everything.”

“Can I help you?” A man’s voice from right behind me made me jump. Nausea twisted in my gut and I took a step back into the office as I turned and looked the guy over.

He was about my height, maybe five eight, pudgy, close to forty, with thinning brown hair and glasses that exaggerated the bulge of his blue eyes. He wore a brown sweater and a pair of faded khakis was the nausea. Maybe it was the events of the last day.