The stranger looked as if he very much regretted initiating this conversation. Theo was, unfortunately, familiar with the expression being directed his way.
The stranger shook his head slightly, as though Theo’s chatter were water in his ears. Something else Theo was extremely familiar with.
He loomed closer, casting a wide shadow across Theo’s cluttered desk when his bulk blocked out the light beside the door. “Dr. Campbell. Where is he?”
Theo traced the impressive line of the stranger’s shoulders underneath his unusual many-layered black leather coat before offering his free hand to shake. “I am Dr. Campbell, pleased to meet you! My brother is also Dr. Campbell, and my father is Dr. Campbell as well, though they would be less pleased to meet you. Nothing against you, personally, they just aren’t terribly fond of interacting with strangers. Or people in general, to be honest. Sometimes I think they can barely tolerate me!”
The stranger winced as if he could relate to the sentiment before quietly responding, “Dr. Campbell has been described as a thin male with green eyes, red hair, and pale skin.”
His deep voice sank into Theo’s bones like the pleasant rumble of a hovercoach over cobblestones.
Dark, hooded eyes skipped over Theo as his visitor described each feature as though checking off a list in his head, all the while ignoring Theo’s offered hand.
Theo dropped it to the desk with a shrug; the slight couldn’t hamper his enjoyment of this diversion from his research. “I’m afraid that doesn’t narrow it down even the slightest bit. My brother and I are identical twins, and we definitely favor our father, to the eternal dismay of our poor mother. My dismay as well, to be honest. It would have been ever so nice to have her chestnut hair rather than this glaring beacon I’ve got atop my head. I tend to stick out like a redheaded thumb.”
The stranger sucked in a breath through clenched teeth, square jaw held tight as his broad shoulders rose and fell in a long, measured sigh.
Theo felt like sighing himself at the sight. The man really was uncommonly beautiful.
He could happily watch those shoulders move for hours. He even had some suggestions regarding the nature of the movement.
His attention was brought to the desk when the stranger slapped a battered manuscript on top of his notebook—an older heatbound copy, of all things. The stranger’s fingers were marked with ink, tattooed on the metacarpals between each knuckle with Hangul letters in beautiful calligraphy. Theo had never seen the like.
The stranger put pressure on the hand he held splayed across the document, pinching the finger Theo had left inside his notebook. He yanked it out hastily as the stranger growled at him. “This Dr. Campbell.”
Absently shaking his pinched finger, Theo scanned the manuscript. The simulated parchment was stained and rumpled. It appeared to have been dog-eared at the corners over and over again, and the pages bristled with assorted tabs. All signs of a book well loved.
He tried to read the cover page, lifting the stranger’s long fingers distractedly with his thumb and forefinger until he was hit by a jolt of recognition, filled to the brim with unexpected delight. “Wherever did you get this? I wrote this years ago during my graduate studies! I’m honestly surprised that anyone outside my thesis committee has even read it. It’s such an obscure topic, after all. I had the most terrible time just—”
The stranger’s palm slammed back down on top of the document, missing Theo’s hand by a hair. “You are this Dr. Campbell?”
It appeared as though he already knew the answer and was dreading it as he squinted dubiously in Theo’s direction. There was a slight tremble in the man’s fingers as they pressed hard against the sheaf of papers.
The stranger’s eyes remained shadowed by his strong brow, but his gaze washed over Theo—a wave of heat, laser-focused and far more intense than the conversation warranted.
A frisson of caution tried to nip at Theo’s mind, sounding an awful lot like his brother hissing in his ear about good sense. He shook it off the way he usually did and leaned his chin on his hand to peer up at the stranger through his lashes. “Why, yes, I am. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
The stranger lifted the manuscript, his fingers unmistakably trembling now as he flipped through pages with a dry rustle of sim-parchment. He held the document open to a passage of translation Theo had featured in his study of long-dead languages and shook it rather rudely in his face. “This. You can read this?”
Theo launched into a recitation of the passage, finishing with a flourishing roll of the tongue. It was rare to find a fellow enthusiast on the topic, particularly one so pleasing to the eye. The stranger seemed unusually passionate about the subject, his breath quickening audibly as Theo rattled off the words of a people long gone.
Theo cocked his head to the side and reached for his pen as he opened his notebook. “If you have an interest in the topic, I keep one of my sources here in my office. Just there, on that shelf.” He gestured off to the side where his cluttered bookcase leaned heavily against the wall for much-needed support. “It’s titled ‘An Annotated Glossary of Dead Languages’ by Dr. Fernsby.”
The stranger folded his sheaf of papers into his coat and walked to the bookcase in two decisive strides. Theo took the opportunity to study him further, pen hovering above his open notebook.
Quickly flipping past a few dozen sketches of Professor Gladwell standing at his lectern, he found an empty page.
As the stranger turned to face the bookcase, Theo caught a glimpse of black ink trailing up his neck to frame his sharp jawline in an odd geometric pattern of thin parallel lines intersected with tiny circles. He attempted to sketch the tattoos onto his paper.
Even more ink snaked out of the cuffs of his coat, wrapping around his wrists and stamping all the way down to his fingers with that lovely calligraphy scribed across his knuckles. Theo wrote down the characters and translated them to Core Standard in the margins.
Honor on one hand and Valor on the other. Fascinating.
Closer examination revealed a design of clustered hexagonal shapes running up the wrist of his left hand. Theo had just begun to sketch them when the stranger turned back toward him, book clutched in his fist.
Theo had never seen anyone remotely resembling the man; nothing about him said “Core,” from his sprawling ink to the look in his eye. He gave the impression of someone midway over a rickety rope bridge, unsure of every step but determined to get across.
Theo couldn’t help but find his appearance a little bit dangerous as he took in his severely handsome face framed by unevenly-shaved black hair, all of it underscored by the dramatic sweep of his coat.
The impression was cemented when the man tucked the book away inside his coat and pulled his hand back out with a ray gun pointed in Theo’s direction.
Theo’s pen dropped a blot of ink onto his notebook as the man stepped closer.
The stranger’s eyes were so dark his pupils disappeared into the black of his iris. His unrelenting stare sent shivers down Theo’s spine that could not be attributed entirely to fear. “Come with me. Now.”
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