Page 3 of Monsters in the Museum (Defenders of the Light #1)

Chapter three

A dam jumped back from Nora as if he had been burned by the proximity. She turned to look at him, momentarily dazed from the sudden change, and found Adam’s head already whipping back and forth, looking for the source of the commotion. There was not just one voice screaming, but many. They sounded panicked, and the sounds of pounding feet accompanied them. Nora thought the noise was coming from near the museum entrance.

Nora’s mind flew to the emergency preparedness drill they’d had a few weeks prior and the talk of multiple mass shootings across the country. She started toward the door, but Adam’s hand snaked out and grabbed her by the back of the collar so suddenly that her head snapped back.

“Where in blazes do you think you’re going?”

Nora gestured toward the noises, confused as to why he was stopping her.

“There’s some sort of emergency here. It could be an active shooter or something,” Nora explained, working herself free of his grasp with surprising difficulty. He was strong for an English Professor.

Adam gawked. “So your first response is to rush toward the screaming? That’s how people get killed, Nora.” He pulled her behind him and then started toward the door himself, keeping her body behind his. “We have to get out of here. We can use the back door by the loading bay.”

Nora opened her mouth, but before she could ask Adam how he knew where the back door was, flashing lights lit the small office, and a deafening blaring noise pierced the air as the fire alarms went off. The office door swung shut of its own accord, magnetic closures activating as the emergency systems fired. Right before the door slammed closed, she caught the briefest whiff of the hot and acrid smell of smoke.

Nora yelled over the wild chiming, “The fire must be close. I could smell the smoke.”

Adam continued to pull her toward the door as if she hadn’t spoken. She yanked on his arm to stop him, not about to let him charge toward a fire after he had just scolded her for running toward what she thought was an active shooter.

“If the fire is in the hallway, we can’t go out that way,” she shouted to be heard over the pandemonium.

Adam shook his head, and when he looked at Nora, his eyes had gone as round as dinner plates.

“We have to get out of here,” he insisted.

“That’s a fire door.” Nora jerked her chin toward the now-closed entrance to the hallway. “It would take hours to burn through it. We’ll be safe in here until they put it out.” She cast around, knowing there had to be a fire extinguisher in the office as well.

Adam didn’t seem comforted at all. In fact, the color had drained from his face, giving a ghostly cast to his golden bronze skin. A slight sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead, making his unruly curls stick to his skin.

“Hey, it’s going to be all right,” she reassured him, unnerved by his fearful reaction. “I’m going to go find the fire extinguisher just in case, okay?”

She made to turn away from him to begin her search, but with surprising strength, he grasped her wrist and pulled her back, making her bang into the workbench.

“Stay away from the door.” Adam’s voice was harsh.

Nora had already opened her mouth to demand that he calm down when she saw it. At the bottom of the door, a thin line of black smoke oozed its way through the gap despite the fire-resistant sealant. It twisted and writhed in a way that struck Nora as strange. Smoke didn’t usually behave like that. The cloud grew larger and denser until it was as tall as she was, then began to gather into a shape. Nora blinked as she realized the smoke was taking on the form of a human—but it wasn’t really all that human. It had two arms and two legs, but that was where the similarities ended. All the angles and proportions were wrong, and the thick smoke comprising the form continued to writhe and swirl in a way that made Nora’s stomach churn. As she was frozen on the spot, more smoke crept under the door and formed into dozens of the horrific creatures.

As Nora wondered what on earth had been in the coffee at that café, Adam stepped in front of her and put an arm across her as if to shield her. The first creature then began to roll forward on its warped legs, stretching out too-long arms toward the pair as if to envelope them in a hug. Nora opened her mouth to scream, but at that moment, Adam’s arm tightened. She realized that he had not put it across her to shield her but was instead reaching for something—the sword.

In an instant, his long fingers closed around the hilt, and he swung the blade out in front of him in a long arc, slicing the being in a diagonal slash across its torso. The dark creature let out an unearthly shriek before fracturing into hundreds of fragments of shadow that wriggled away like Stygian maggots before dissolving into thin air.

Nora didn’t even have a second to process the inconceivable spectacle before the rest of the creatures advanced, and Adam lunged forward into the midst of a swirling vortex of shadows. The monsters descended on him, shrieking in horrible voices that made Nora want to claw at her eardrums. Adam stood at the center of the mass and brandished the sword, slicing through several more shadows that dispersed in much the same way as the first. Nora opened her mouth to warn him of more creatures creeping up behind him, but Adam had already whirled around and dispatched them before she could draw a breath. She watched, transfixed, as he whirled and bobbed in the mass of creatures, swinging the sword faster than her eyes could follow. Shadow after shadow fell before the blade, but still more seeped under the door.

A layer of sweat formed on Nora’s skin and dampened her hair—it had become sweltering in the room as she stood frozen in shock. Her back pressed against the workbench, her hands on the edge with a white-knuckled grip. Her brain refused to process what was happening in front of her. At any moment, she expected to jerk awake from a very strange nightmare. Or perhaps there was a fire, and she was suffering from hallucinatory smoke poisoning.

Another small voice in the back of her head that still clung to sanity tried to scream at her that Adam shouldn’t be touching an artifact with his bare hands, let alone using it like this—she decided that in this moment, sanity was vastly overrated.

For a heartbeat, she lost sight of Adam as the shadows around him became denser. It gave her the impetus she needed to regain the power to move. She scrabbled on the workbench behind her and grabbed the first thing her hand touched: a long pair of pointed tweezers from her open supply kit.

When she turned back, Adam was grappling with a shadow creature that had managed to grab his tie and was attempting to use it to drag him down into the swirling pit of darkness around his feet. Nora gripped the tweezers in her left hand, and for a fleeting moment, she desperately tried to remember everything Drew had taught her about playing darts. Then she lobbed the tweezers at the shadow creature as hard as she could.

A shriek cut through the already deafening alarms as the tweezers sunk into where an eye would be if the creature had any sort of conventional features. It immediately released Adam’s tie as its arms flew to its face, and Adam took the opportunity to stab the sword through its chest, looking much less like a lanky college professor and much more like a heroic warrior. As the creature dissolved, Adam glanced over to where Nora was standing, a look of something Nora didn’t recognize crossing his otherwise focused face. The moment was gone as quickly as it came as Adam was forced to make a quick turn to dodge under a whip-like arm of blackness. The motion caused his glasses to slip off his face and they were crushed under his heel, but he continued slashing and parrying as if he hadn’t noticed.

Nora’s use of tweezers as projectiles seemed to have drawn the attention of the other shadow creatures, and she spotted one slithering across the floor toward where she stood. It moved like a large snake, sickeningly misshapen by having swallowed another creature whole, the sight threatening to make Nora gag. She swallowed around the bile in her throat as she reached behind her for something else she could throw, hoping for a scalpel of some sort this time, but the creature was too fast for her. Pain seared her ankle and then she was falling. She heard the back of her head hit the edge of her workbench with a sickening crack before she felt it, and the world swam before her eyes in a dizzying swirl of shadows and light.

When her eyes refocused, the shadow had a whip-like arm wrapped around her ankle, its grip burning into her flesh. A shriek ripped from her at the sensation of sizzling flesh, and she kicked out wildly. The creature only grabbed tighter and began pulling on her leg, reeling her toward its darkness like a fish on the end of its line. Nora reached behind her to grab the leg of the workbench, trying to keep herself from being dragged across the floor. As she stopped her own forward progress, the creature hissed in frustration and began clawing its way up her leg to her body, where she lay on the floor. A scream bubbled up in her throat, but she was unable to get it out around the intense heat clawing its way down into her lungs. Red coals burned where the creature’s eyes should be, and the shadows parted in a sick parody of a smile.

Adam screamed her name as she clawed at the table behind her, trying to find something— anything —to defend herself with as the creature reached her upper thigh. In that moment, her hand closed around something heavy and metal. Before she could process what was happening, she swung the spear down in a long arc and jabbed it forward, sending the blade straight through the place where the creature’s face should have been. With one last shriek, it exploded into its shadow fragments, and the weight on her leg was gone, although the pain persisted.

The spear rested heavily across her lap, a grounding weight as she panted in fear and relief. When she raised her eyes, Adam still fought the shadows, but only a few remained and the smoke had stopped coming in from under the door. As he dealt with the remaining creatures, Nora’s eyes slid closed, and she leaned her head back against her table, the throbbing from where her skull had collided with the edge, forcing itself back to the forefront of her consciousness.

After what felt like a few moments later, but might have been several minutes, there was a clatter and a warm presence at her side. Nora peeled her eyes open to see that Adam had dropped the sword and kneeled on the floor beside her. His hands flew to her face and smoothed over her forehead and hair, trying to meet her unfocused eyes with his. The warmth of his hands felt nice in her hair, despite how sweaty she was.

“Nora? Nora,” he repeated, his tone bordering on pleading.

Her eyes slid over him, distantly noting that he had a few small holes charred in his tweed blazer, and the long end of his tie had been singed right off where the creature had grabbed it. He looked otherwise unscathed.

“Nora, are you alright?” His face was frantic, not at all like the grim determination he had worn when he was grappling with the shadow creatures.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said as she reached up and grabbed his hand, which still smoothed over her sweat-soaked hair. She put her other hand on the ground to push herself up to stand but didn’t make it six inches off the ground before she slid back down, finding herself quite dizzy and weak. “I think I hit my head a little too hard.”

“That’s not all.” Adam’s face turned ashen as he looked down at the ground. Nora followed his gaze to find that his knees were soaked in a spreading puddle of blood. With growing nausea, she traced it to its source—flowing from a gash in her upper thigh, right where the creature had grabbed her before she killed it.

I killed it, she thought, her mind unable or unwilling to focus on the blood streaming out of her. She had never killed anything before.

“By St. Boogar and all the saints at the backside door of purgatory!”

Adam swore so colorfully that Nora was drawn back to reality enough to gape at him even in her current delirious state.

“One advantage of being an English professor—you’re exposed to a lot of wonderfully creative expletives,” Adam commented in a voice so falsely calm that his intent to distract Nora from her injuries was immediately transparent. As he spoke, Adam pulled off the remnants of his tie. As soon as he had jerked the strip of plaid fabric from around his neck, he began fastening it around her upper thigh above the gash. After knotting it securely, he reached up into a drawer of her table and rifled around for a moment before retrieving a pen. He forced the pen into the loop he had made around her leg and twisted it until the binding pulled tight around her leg, causing Nora to grunt and jerk away in pain. He paid her distress no heed and used the free end of the fabric to fasten the pen in place, leaving the loop taut around her thigh. Her breath came in short pants from the pain and the sharp pinch of the tie, but the sensations grew fuzzy and distant in her mind.

A tourniquet, she mused as she grappled with her receding consciousness. Her eyes began drifting closed, but she forced them open again as Adam murmured, “We have to get you to a hospital.”

She forced herself to form words even though her tongue felt as if it had turned into a large rubber ball in her mouth.

“Dr. Drew Coleman. The emergency room at Northwestern Memorial.” Her voice sounded far away, as if she was shouting from underwater. “Ask for Drew.”

The world spun dizzily around her, and for a moment, she thought she had finally passed out until she jerked once again and realized that Adam had scooped her off the ground and began to run. She tried to move her head, but whether it was to protest or to bury her face in Adam’s chest, she couldn’t say. The last thought she had as she lost her grasp on reality was one of disbelief as she registered that he was reciting a Russian nursery rhyme as he ran with her cradled in his arms.