Dark Studies (Arcaneology) by C. P. Foster Page B

his lips. “Didn’t you like it?”
    Her face flushed. “You know I did.”
    “Then…?”
    “Is that what you want? All the time?”
    He was quiet for a while. She waited as he considered the question.
    “No,” he mused, “I just needed it tonight.”
    “Maybe…,” she began. He raised his head to give her a questioning look, and she hesitated, suddenly embarrassed. “Maybe we could do it again. Not always. But…sometimes.”
    She heard the smile in his voice when he answered, “Yes.”
    After that, they talked about other things. Idle, intimate conversation. The night went by before they knew it, and at last he said what she least wanted to hear.
    “It’s almost dawn.”
    Grace turned her face and pressed it against his shoulder to stifle a protest. It would do no good. The dawn could not be stopped, and with it he would leave her. His life would fall away to wherever it went when darkness fled the sky. Steffen eased her out of his arms and got up long enough to put on a pair of jeans, then returned to the bed.
    “I’ll stay with you a while,” she told him. He had rented the room for two nights so he wouldn’t have to hurry to his own stronghold at the rising of the sun. “But I won’t be here when you wake. My flight leaves at noon.”
    “You and your gallivanting,” he murmured.
    “If you’re going to write books on travel, you sort of have to do it.” They had decided Grace would be a travel writer, to give them a reason for meeting so infrequently.
    “I know.” He touched a kiss to the top of her head.
    As the life drained out of his body, Grace stretched up to whisper into his ear, “Dream of me.”
     
     
    Two days later, Angie received an e-mail. Just one word: Perfect .
     

Chapter Six
     
     
    Some people just won’t take no for an answer. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it’s psychotic.
    —Dick O’Rourke, radio talk show host
     
     
     
    Professor Benotti’s office was barely more than a broom closet, so cluttered with books and souvenirs of his travels that navigating to and from his desk nearly always resulted in a minor avalanche. Perched on the one chair she was able to excavate, Angie waited for her adviser to finish looking over her latest dissertation proposal.
    Benotti leaned forward and tipped his head to look at his computer screen through the bottom half of his bifocals, then drew back and ducked his chin to look through the top half. Every so often he would switch again. Finally, he took the glasses off and sighed.
    “It’s still too broad. You want to compare four different species—human, vampire, elves, and the Fallen—but in order to effectively make a comparison, you have to have mastered each subject. You’ve got enough material on humans and vampires, but there simply isn’t much information out there on elves and the Fallen. You’re going to have to do some field research.”
    Angie frowned. “Ethnographic research is out of the question, for the Fallen, at least. For one thing, they would make me forget all about the dissertation. For another, I would only be able to study one at a time. From the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen, they don’t interact with each other much.”
    “Elves are a possibility. Not in their world, of course. If you spent a couple of weeks there, a couple of hundred years would pass here. I doubt the university would extend your time limit that long.” He chuckled. The university only allowed doctoral students ten years to finish before booting them out of the program. “But that wouldn’t be a problem at one of the elfhaemes they’ve established in our world.”
    “It would be vastly different from how they live in their own world.”
    “True. However, it would be more than we know about them now. And you can at least interview them about their own world.”
    “I thought of doing that,” Angie admitted. “But how would I get access? They don’t have much contact with humans, and it’s almost always through the