21

For the next couple of days, Kendra didn’t see Matt or any of the others who seemed to be after her.  She made enough progress on her dissertation that she e-mailed a big section of it to her faculty advisor, who had threatened to delay Kendra’s graduation if she didn’t finish a rough draft immediately.  That done, she was pleased to find that she had an hour free before supper.

She resumed her reading of vampire lore.  The stories tended to contradict one another, and it all sounded so fantastic:  vampires as witch revenants, as evil spirits risen from the dead, or as the progeny of two eastern European creatures the names of which she couldn’t even pronounce.  Vampires lived on blood, or the essence of life, or human emotion.  Belatedly, Kendra questioned the validity of the population curve.  Numbers could prove anything.  Garbage in, garbage out…yet a vampire had rescued her, and she’d seen the local coven, or family…whatever.

It did seem likely that the dip in the population between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries had been due to the witch-hunts.  The execution of a bunch of eccentric people had to have killed off a fair number of vampires too, but if that were the cause, then how had Elle and Matt arrived at exactly the same population curve?  Estimates of the number of witches executed varied almost a hundredfold, from eighty thousand to more than six million.  She was missing something, and that bothered her.  How was it possible that her younger self knew something that she did not remember?  She didn’t mind forgetting fashion trends or social conventions, but Kendra had not forgotten a number since she’d buckled down at age fourteen.

A herd of undergraduates passed her carrel on their way out.  She followed them to the Stamford student center.  Why not?  She had never eaten in the school cafeteria, might as well try it.

The decor and ambience left a lot to be desired, but the food was good.  As Kendra left the student center, she estimated that she saved three or four dollars compared with even the diner’s reasonable prices.  She sauntered back to her apartment.  Two days away from her research had definitely relaxed her, despite he recent misadventures.  She felt so good that she almost walked into the home decor shop that she passed--and that was all it took for worry to explode back on the scene.  She had never cared about decor.  Did the fact that a colorful tapestry caught her eye mean that she was slipping?  If Matt and Xenopoulos had left her alone, were they after somebody else—had a better physicist figured out how to jump in time?

Kendra reversed direction sharply, and headed for her lab.  Paranoid that all of her work had become irrelevant, she shrugged off niggling concerns about personal safety.  She’d just stay in her lab, with the door locked, until the sun rose.  Maybe she’d even ask security to drive by the physics building a few extra times.  Right, that will sound sane.  Gee officer, would you keep an eye on the building to be sure a couple of goons don’t drag my body out of it?  Kendra snorted as she pulled open the heavy main door of the physics building.

A new way to plug historical data into her equation occurred to her as she climbed the stairs.  Maybe messing around with vampire population curves and witch-hunts had done her some good after all.  She hurried to her lab, locked the door and got busy.  First things first, she ran a decoy program to distract Xenopoulos in case the spy software was still running.  Next she swept for bugs, but found none--more cause for alarm.  Kendra hunched in front of her computer. 

At about two in the morning she slid off her lab stool and straightened.  Her spine felt terrible, but that didn’t keep her from punching her fist in the air jubilantly.

“Yee haw!” she shouted.  She ate a protein bar.  She would not risk being hungry for this trip.  After another hour of fine tuning her equation, and fiddling with equipment, Kendra was ready.  Her heart pounded.  She stood on the small black circle, whispered “One small step for woman, one huge step for womankind,” and pressed the button on her new key fob.

It was dark and cold.  The stars shone more brightly than she’d ever seen them.  Kendra took a step.  Her foot squelched in cold mud.  The stench of stale beer, sour onions, and sewage hit her nostrils.  Her eyes adjusted and she made out the dark shape of a building in front of her.  It had a thatched  roof, and its proportions seemed off.  It was taller than a single story, but less than two.  Next to it was a long low building, a stable, Kendra realized when she heard a horse bluster as it exhaled in the dark interior.

Both freaked out and encouraged that she seemed to have jumped a good way into the past, Kendra picked her way through the cold, noisome mud toward the stable, expecting it to be both warmer and better smelling.  After only a few steps, she lost a shoe and swore softly.  Flats may be sensible in her own time, but they were stupid whenever and wherever she’d landed.  It hit her then that she’d have to blend in, or risk being killed.  Why hadn’t she at least tried to match the fashion of the day?  Caught up in the elation of her research findings, it hadn’t even crossed her mind.  Elle would have remembered.  Wrinkling her nose, Kendra yanked her shoe out of the muck, took the other one off, and hurried barefoot into the stable.

Horses were huge.  How did they even fit into the low shed that held them?  Kendra slid between two and paused.  The warmth was delicious.  Just then the horses, probably a bit unnerved by a human who touched them but did nothing, shifted toward each other.  Kendra just managed to scoot toward their heads before the two great rib cages could squish her.

As she walked by their heads, the horses in nudged her hand looking for treats.  At first she jumped as the velvety lips bumped and explored her hand, but as she made her way back and forth across the stable looking for some sort of disguise, she came to think of the nosey horses as kind of sweet--until one of them nipped the soft skin of the inside of her wrist.

“Ouch!” she hissed, and backed into a corner, out of horsey reach.  She didn’t feel anything wet around the bite, but she did feel a ridge of swollen tissue.  Bitten and devoid of costume, Kendra thought about returning to her own time then and there, but if she were to come back, she needed to know what to wear.  She settled herself on top of some kind of saddle in a corner, and slumped against the rough wall, and hoped to avoid splinters.