Page 62 of Seer

I sat up as well, my heart in my throat. “Was it the fog monster?”

He shook his head. “I was playing video games with Steve and Felix. Nothing important. Sorry I woke you.”

I slumped, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. I reached blindly for my phone on the side table. 4:38am.

Cal said, “I can’t go back to sleep after a vision. I’m gonna go get some work done on the book room.”

He threw back the covers and slid out. I wished there was enough light to see more than a hint of his thick thighs below the hem of his boxers. But then the scent of him, warm and musky, wafted over. I bunched the blanket over my lap. Dammit, I’d jacked off twice yesterday.

But Cal hadn’t suddenly become a neat and tidy person just because I knew why his backpack had been so tattered.

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

He paused, his hand on the zipper of his duffel bag. “You don’t have to. You should sleep.”

“Nah.” I flicked on the lamp on the nightstand between the beds. Damn. I tried not to stare at his sturdy legs dusted with dark hair. “I’d just lie here feeling guilty about you working while I wasn’t.” Trying to keep my back to Cal as much as possible, I walked over to my own bag to pull out some clothes. “Besides, I could really go for some coffee. Someone will make breakfast around 7am, but in the meantime there are probably leftover cookies.”

“Yeah? Those were awesome.” He walked toward the bathroom, his ass cheeks bouncing in his boxers.

I told my dick to behave. Nothing was going to happen, and I didn’t have any privacy to take care of things myself.

We got dressed and snuck downstairs. There weren’t many people in the building, especially at this hour, but I didn’t want anyone to come check on us.

I started the coffee pot and found the stash of yesterday’s cookies. I put our coffee in lidded travel mugs and took the entire container of cookies to the room we’d been working in.

Cal put his hands on his hips and stared at the books we’d gone through yesterday. “Let’s look for the Elf weapon,” he said. “I think we’ve made enough progress that we can get to the shelves on the left side of the room.”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

We put on gloves and masks before going into the book room and pulling out everything we could reach that wasn’t a bookor a bookshelf. Then we lined the items up on one of the tables in the workroom.

“I guess if the weapon exists, it’s buried in the rest of the books,” I said.

Cal stripped off his mask and gloves and picked up his coffee. “Dammit,” he sighed.

We’d found two more small vases, a couple of bookends with gryphons on them, a piece of wood that might have once been a table leg, a three-foot tall stone sculpture of a cat, a set of maracas, a crowbar, and a doorstop.

Cal examined our prizes while he ate a cookie. “We’re assuming if this item is in fact an Elven weapon, it will work against the fog monsters. But if the Elves need a weapon against them, that implies the fog monsters are somehow stronger than Elven magic. Or resistant to it.”

I didn’t like the thought of these fog monsters being immune to magic powerful enough to open a portal between worlds.

After finishing his cookie, Cal put his gloves back on, picked up a cloth, and began wiping the dust off one of the vases.

“I’ll get a new stack of books to look at,” I said.

I went next door and started loading up my arm with books. I was just about to head back when Cal shouted, “Shit!” and something clattered to the floor.

I dropped the books and rushed into the workroom. Cal was standing, cloth in hand, staring down at an old-fashioned typewriter sitting on the floor.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Where didthatcome from?”

Still staring at the typewriter, Cal raised his arm and pointed at the table where the items we’d brought from the book room were laid out.

“The cat,” he said. “It was the cat.”

I walked over to stand beside Cal. The cat sculpture was gone. I didn’t see it in the room anywhere.

“The cat changed into a typewriter?”