Free The Demon Lover by Juliet Dark Page B

country, she suddenly looked much older. Where could she be from? I wondered. Bosnia? Chechnya? Serbia? But if she didn’t want to say which war-torn corner of Eastern Europe she came from, who was I to pry?
    “What can I do to help?” I asked instead.
    She gave me a snaggle-toothed smile and relaxed her shoulders. “I would like to take your class Vampires and the Gothic Imagination,” she said very carefully, as if she had rehearsed this bit. “But it is full.” She frowned, then smiled again (she was beginning to seem a little manic). “You are a very popular teacher! Everybody wants to take your class!”
    “It’s my first semester here,” I reminded her. “So, it’s not because of me. The class is popular because vampires and the supernatural are popular right now. Is that why you want to take the class—because you liked the Twilight books?”
    “I don’t know what this Twilight is,” she said. “I read the description of your class. It says that the heroine of the Gothic novel confronts evil—within and without—and survives it. That is what I would like to know, how one survives a confrontation with evil.”
    The girl was leaning forward, her hands clasped in her lap, her pale tea-colored eyes wide and glassy. Her pupils were dilated, the black swimming over the light irises as if something dark were rising up inside her. For a moment, looking into them, I thought I caught a glimpse of the horrors they had seen. A wave of cold, like a current in the ocean, passed over me and I shivered.
    “Of course you can take the class,” I said, wishing there was something more I could do for this girl. “Do you have something for me to sign?”
    After I signed Mara Marinca’s add slip I decided I had to go home to take a nap. All the energy I’d woken up with had drained away. Moving boxes up all those steps had really worn me out. I felt as if I’d had that beer Frank Delmarco had offered—several, in fact.
    On my way out of the building, I ran into a woman struggling on the stairs with two boxes. The boxes were uncovered and filled with newspapers and magazines that kept slipping out so that she had to stop every few steps and restack them. The boxes themselves looked as if they were coming apart at the seams.
    “Here,” I said, taking pity on her predicament, “let me help you with those.”
    “Omigod, you’re a lifesaver sent from heaven!” she declaimed dramatically, casting her big blue eyes upward. She was dressed for dramatic gestures—in a sweeping bell-sleeved kimono and a long flowing skirt—not for moving. Her wispy blond hair was pinned up in a clip that fell out twice before we made it up to her office with the collapsing boxes.
    “Thank you so so much!” she said, spilling the contents of her box onto a pile of more newspapers and magazines spread out on her office floor. “I’ve been collecting all the journals and magazines that have reviewed my book this year and haven’t had a second to organize them all.”
    “Wow,” I said, looking appreciatively at the pile. The New Yorker , People , and Vanity Fair were mixed in with literary journals like The Hudson Review and Blueline and writing magazines like Poets & Writers and The Writer’s Chronicle . I looked up from the pile to a stack of books on her desk: multiple copies of Phoenix — Coming Up from the Ashes .
    “You’re Phoenix,” I said, feeling a little odd using the single name, but like Cher or Sting, that’s all she went by. “I’ve read about your memoir.” So had most of literate America. A harrowing tale of growing up with child abuse and incest in a dirt-poor Appalachian hollow, Phoenix had been featured on dozens of talk shows and gotten a rave review from a New York Times critic who was better known for excoriating her subjects.
    “Oh, have you?” she asked, batting her eyelashes. I heard the Southern accent now and remembered she was from North Carolina. “Everybody’s been so sweet. It’s very