The reflection of the glowing red face of the clock on the bedside table suddenly drew her attention, blinking as the hour rolled over.
4:00 A.M.
She stared at it in the mirror, aghast, realizing that in three hours and twenty minutes, classes would begin for the day. On Thursdays, she taught four one-hundred-level anthropology courses.
Or she’d used to. She certainly wouldn’t be teaching any today.
She considered calling in sick, but decided it was wiser not to. When this was over, she’d figure out what kind of story to tell. She might be able to get away with claiming to have been forcibly abducted and fully exonerate herself. Which meant if she called in sick now, it would make her look like a liar later. I know it’s odd for a kidnapper to let his kidnappee call in sick, but he was an odd kidnapper. Right. That would go over like a ton of bricks.
Exhaling gustily, she returned her attention to her laptop and plugged it into the hotel line. She’d decided to check her E-mail while he was showering, partly in a no-doubt-pointless bid for the comfort of routine, but also to keep her mind off sex, which, with him around, was like trying not to think about chocolate while sitting in a person-sized fondue pot of the dark, creamy stuff, surrounded by flowering cacao trees.
Her inbox was filled with the usual: newsletters to which she subscribed to stay apprised of significant developments in her field; E-mails from students in the undergad classes she T.A.’d, filled with impressively creative excuses as to why they should be the exception to the rule, forgiven their: a) absenteeism; b) failure to appear for an exam; c) late paper. The entertaining and inventive pleas for leniency were followed by spam spam and more spam, and finally, the one she liked best—the Naked Man of the Week pictures from her cyberfriends at RBL Romantica.
She made short work of her correspondence, shooting the newsletters to a suspend folder for later perusal, denying any and all excuses/pleas for extensions that didn’t involve a death in the family, reporting the spam, and perusing the Naked Man pictures appreciatively before setting one of them as her desktop background.
She was about to log off when a new E-mail popped in. She scanned the sender’s ID.
She didn’t know a [email protected] and had a phobia about viruses. If something happened to her laptop, a new one wasn’t in the budget. There was no topic in the subject line, which meant, according to her stringent guidelines, there was no place for it but the Trash folder.
As she slid the pointer over it, she got an instant bone-deep chill. She whisked her fingers over the mouse pad, jerking the pointer away.
Slid it back again. An immediate, painful, bitter chill licked up her hand.
She shivered, jerked the pointer off.
Oh, that was just too weird.
She frowned, thinking about the way it had arrived. Had an E-mail ever just popped into her inbox when she’d been sitting idle on the inbox page?
Not that she could remember. Sometimes when she was refreshing a page, or reentering the inbox, new ones showed up, but one had never popped in like that when she was just sitting static on the page.
Gingerly, she slid the pointer back over the topic line: NO SUBJECT. Grimacing at the immediate sensation that her hand had been plunged, dripping wet, into a Subzero freezer, she clicked on it hard and fast and yanked her fingers from the mouse pad.
She pressed her palm shakily to her cheek. It was as cold as ice.
Wide-eyed, she stared at the screen. The E-mail contained three short lines.
Return the mirror immediately.
Contact [email protected] for instructions.
You have twenty-four hours.
That was all it said. There was nothing else on the screen but for a line of nonsensical symbols and shapes at the very bottom.
As she scanned them, a sudden shadow seemed to fall over the hotel room. The bedside clock dimmed, the overhead light in the little entrance foyer hummed, and the ivory walls took on a sickly yellowish hue.
And as clearly as if a man were standing in the room with her, she heard a man’s deep, cultured baritone say:
“Or you will die, Jessica St. James.”
Whipping around, she scanned the room.
There was no one there.
Beyond the bathroom door, the shower still ran, and Cian MacKeltar still splashed.
She sat perfectly still, brittle as glass, waiting to see if her disembodied guest had anything further to add.
The moments ticked by.
Her shoulders drooped and she stared morosely at her reflection.
He’d called her Jessica St. James. Freaking everybody knew her name.