Spell of the Highlander by Karen Marie Moning Page A

him questions about the relic she’d come to wish she’d never laid eyes on—like where the heck it had come from?
    Maybe it wasn’t a relic at all, she thought, briefly buoyed by the possibility, but a gag-relic of some kind, a special-effects prop from a
Stargate
episode or some other SciFi channel program. And maybe it had state-of-the-art, highly technical, cleverly hidden audio/visual feeds hooked into it somehow. And it all powered some really tiny, extraordinarily sophisticated projection screen system.
    Which . . . er, didn’t exactly explain the interaction between attacker and man in the mirror, but hey, she was just working up possibilities, devising and discarding.
    Possibility: Maybe it was . . . uh, well, uh . . . cursed.
    That
thought made her feel inordinately foolish. Didn’t sit well with her inner analyst.
    Still, better foolish than mad-as-a-mirrormaker.
    She’d phoned the professor last night, using the direct line to his room that he’d left her in one of his gazillion messages, but he’d not answered. She’d tried again first thing this morning, but no luck. Still sleeping, she supposed.
    Bottom line, she was a pragmatist. She’d not gotten this far in her life by being illogical or prone to whimsy. She was a what-I’ve-got-in-my-hand kind of girl. And after intense reflection, she decided that she didn’t feel crazy. She felt perfectly normal about everything except for this idiotic ongoing mirror-incident.
    Maybe she
should
smash it, she thought peevishly. End of problems. Right?
    Except, not necessarily. If she
was
crazy, her illusory sex-god would probably just take up residence in some other inanimate object (that certainly brought to mind a few intriguing ideas, especially something in her bedside table drawer). If she
wasn’t
crazy, she could conceivably be destroying one of the most pivotal, dogma-shattering relics in recent human history.
    “Looks like I’m stuck fact-finding.” She puffed out an irritated little sigh.
    Rummaging in her pack for her cell phone, she withdrew it, flipped it open, and glanced down at the screen. No messages. She’d been hoping the professor would call her back before she got tied up in classes all day.
    Too late now. She turned off the phone, tucked it back in her bag, grabbed her coffee from the counter, paid the cashier, and hurried off.
    She had classes back-to-back until 4:45 P.M ., but the second she was done she was heading straight to the hospital.
     
    5:52 P.M.
    The Dan Ryan Expressway at rush hour was a level in Dante’s Hell.
    Jessi was hopelessly gridlocked in stop-and-go traffic that was
way
more stop than go—so much stop, in fact, that she’d been working on homework for the past half hour—when her cell phone rang.
    She tossed aside the notes she’d been taking, crept forward a celebration-worthy eighteen inches, whipped out her phone and answered, hoping it was the professor, but it was Mark Troudeau.
    The statement was just forming on her tongue that there was no way she was taking on even
one more paper to grade
when he ripped all the words right out of her mouth by telling her he was calling to let her know the campus police had just informed him that Professor Keene was dead.
    She started shaking, clenched the steering wheel, and exhaled a sob.
    “And get this, Jess, he was
murdered,
” Mark relayed in an excited rush, clearly fascinated and clearly oblivious to the fact that she was crying, despite the wet snuffling sounds she was making. Men could be so dense sometimes.
    Dimly, she realized traffic was creeping forward again. Eased her foot off the clutch. Dragged the sleeve of her jacket across her face.
    “The cops are talking like he got mixed up in something bad, Jess. Said he recently pulled a lot of money out of his retirement and mortgaged his house big-time. I guess he owned some land somewhere in Georgia that he just sold too. Cops have no idea what he suddenly needed so much money for.”
    Belatedly