"If there is a reason to call, we'll call." He walked away and did not look back.
She stood in the hall holding back tears - which confused the hell out of her - then placed her palm to the closed door. The fellow from across the hall emerged from his rooms. She jerked her hand away from the door like she'd been caught doing something wrong.
"My boss lives here. He didn't come to work today. Did he by any chance mention to you that he was taking some time?"
The man across the hall, whom she thought was the Manager of Antiquities Acquisition said, "No, young lady. I rarely see him. Works a lot, doesn't he?"
"Thank you." She started away.
"Probably gone to London for a nice piece of art glass."
Heaven looked back at the neighbor and nodded while thinking the man must be on the upper end of the loon scale even by Order standards.
Back at her desk - the last place she felt like being - her mind kept drifting to what she had read about Baka in the Chronicles. A couple of years had passed since then. She was left with a long-term memory impression, but not details. She hadn't known him personally of course.
At the time he was a vampire. And there was that.
Her eyes weren't focusing on the computer screen in front of her and she was generating sufficiently potent nervous tremors in her right leg to cause the chair to inch along under her. Every hour with no sign of Istvan Baka represented another phone message she left. And, with every hour that passed, her feelings of uneasiness intensified and became more agitated. There was a part of her that was beginning to regret having been so constant in her hostility toward him.
Why do you hate me so much?
She repeated that question several times over in her mind. Why did she have such a strong reaction to him? She asked herself if it was really because he had teased her about her name and decided that definitely wasn't it. A lot of people teased her about her name. Always had.
Was it because she had been pulled away from a project she loved so that she could help with the Great Vampire Inversion? That couldn't be it either because she understood fully that there was nothing more important. The Order had been founded for the express purpose of eradicating the scourge of vampire. The other branches of services and research activities had been added over the centuries, but vampire slaying remained top priority. Every employee of The Order knew the story of the count and the journeyman who had lost their wives and their happiness to vampire. There simply wasn't any work more important than doing away with that threat once and for all.
Invalidating the two reasons she had been using to rationalize her rude and hostile behavior toward Istvan Baka, what did that leave?
Oh, bloody the hell no.
Her honest self-assessment had led her to a revelation that was the last thing she had expected to discover. She pulled up GilesQuery and typed a question.
The first response was: William Shakespeare said, "Love me or hate me, both are in my favor... If you love me, I'll always be in your heart. If you hate me, I'll always be in your mind."
That wasn't it. Searching for the quote she couldn't quite place, Heaven came across a science journal article. Love and hate rival each other as extremes of passion, but, as it turns out, they share the same brain circuitry. It seems there really is a very thin line between the two emotions previously thought to be opposites.
She turned toward the window and stared out while she mulled that over. Was it possible that the extreme discomfort she felt around her boss was related to attraction? As she sat looking out at the gray day, she replayed in her mind every interaction between the two of them and, as she did, a fog lifted from his visage so that she could see him truly. What she saw was shocking.
His blue eyes weren't just gorgeous, sexy, and intelligent. They were also kind. How was it that she had looked at him without seeing that? She remembered being irritated by the appeal of the way his mouth curved when something was amusing. She remembered how, shortly after they began working together alone, his voice and manner had softened toward her. It had started to wrap her in comfort like a warm, soft throw on a winter day.
If he went to the coffee bar, he always asked if she wanted something. She always replied with a too-crisp, "Thank you. No.", and made a point of refusing him the courtesy of looking at him.
If he assigned her something new to work on, he would always add, "Is it too much?" She would respond by stretching her neck with exaggerated haughtiness then look down her nose, and say, "Certainly not."
She recalled that they had spent their days working in silence, the only sound being his occasional sighs. She knew he watched her surreptitiously and, in a fit of vindictiveness that should be beneath her, she hoped he wanted her so that she could be all the more cruel. What was wrong with her?
During the fraction of a second that she had glanced at him when he asked why she hated him so much, there was no doubt that he had looked hurt. Had she missed that or was she just so angry about some perceived injustice or transgression that she simply didn't care? That wasn't like her. At least she hoped it wasn't. She thought of herself as being a good person, but when it came to Istvan Baka, she had been comporting herself like a shrew.
Something inside drove her to behave badly around him. She had thought she was in perfect control, but all along it had been just the opposite. She was reacting to a compulsion that didn't make any sense. Her will was not her own.
With vision cleared, acting on impulse, she turned off the monitor and headed for the Chronicles section of Headquarters library thinking there could be some clue to be found in the records. He wasn't just away on personal time. She knew it right down to the bottom of her ESP.
CHAPTER_6
Istvan Baka was born in the eastern Carpathian Mountains of Romania in 1453 and lived there throughout his life as a human. The year that he was fifteen, the same year he began working for the monks of Cozio, an organization known as The Order of the Black Swan was forming in southern Germany one thousand miles due west. Immediately they had begun secretly recruiting young men to the highest and noblest calling; that of guarding humanity in silence and anonymity from creatures such as Baka was fated to become.
At the time he was infected with the vampire virus he was working for the monks of Cozio, painting murals of the history of the monastery and various other religious themes.
An image flashed in Heaven's imagination of what one of those paintings might have looked like. She saw the composition, the richness of the colors, and the feeling the artist conveyed. It was a strange reaction for someone who was hardly a student, or even a fan, of art.