Trio of Sorcery Read Online Free PDF Page B

Then came one of the Historical Study track courses, another Core Requirement; those assumed that you had a general foundation in history and elaborated on what they figured you knew. They were supposed to give you insight into how major issues had developed. She’d picked the course on Japan. She didn’t know very much about Japan, and now would be a good time to work on that before she had to deal with Japanese folklore in class or nasty Japanese critters on the street.
    I need to take a martial arts course.
    Judo? Probably. Nasty critters were sometimes very physical in nature. It would be nice if she could ever find someone who actually believed they existed to teach her, but that was like hoping for a money tree to sprout.
    The third course that rounded out her morning was a science class, also in the Core Curriculum. She’d picked a basic Archeology course, which had looked pretty interesting from the source description. Now that she’d gotten into it, it looked as if it was going to be more physical than mental, which was good, because she needed something that wasn’t going to make her brain explode just before lunch. And who knew? She might be able to use some of what she had learned at some point. Guardians kicked around a lot of strange things.
    After lunch was her first Folklore course, followed by nothing. Which would give her most of the afternoon for homework, and most of the evening for writing. Assuming that—
    There was a knock on the door, which made her jump and spill her tea a little. She sighed at the interruption, swiped at the tea with her napkin, and got up. Well, maybe it would be one of the boys upstairs. Maybe one of them would be nice. Even handsome. Maybe he’d ask her out.
    Maybe pigs will grow wings.
    She opened the door, eyeballed the man standing there, half illuminated by the staircase window at the end of the hall, and immediately knew it was not one of the boys from upstairs.
    It was a cop. She knew cops; how they stood, dressed, moved. She could spot a cop at five hundred yards. Even though this one was in his civvies, she knew cops, and this was one.
    â€œMiss Tregarde?” the cop asked. “Diana Tregarde?” He had a nice voice, a calm tenor. He did not flash a badge. So whatever he was here for, either he was trying to find out something without being official or he really was off-duty. In either case, he knew her name, and obviously where she lived—and why did he know these things? She didn’t have a car to be illegally parked, she was just another Harvard student. Her suspicion meter went up a couple of notches.
    She nodded, but did not step aside nor invite him in.Until she knew why he was here, she wouldn’t either. Not just because she was paranoid—you couldn’t live in Nixon’s USA and not be paranoid—but also because she wanted no part of some fishing expedition. She didn’t know anyone here in Cambridge except one other Guardian and she hadn’t had any real friends to speak of back home, but that didn’t mean that a cop wouldn’t try to make something out of nothing.
    And he knew her name.
    For all she knew, that flashback last night had been a warning, telling her that something out of the past was going to come calling and make trouble for her.
    The hallway was very, very quiet. So she wasn’t the only one around here who had spotted him for what he was. Lovely.
    The cop smiled, looking embarrassed. “I know you don’t know me, but Lavinia Thurgood sent me. I asked her for a little help with something, and she told me you were in town and that you were better suited to what I need than she is. She says you’re pretty good at exposing phony tea-leaf readers and Gypsies.”
    Well that was a bolt out of the blue. She blinked at him. “How do you know Lavinia?” she asked cautiously.
    â€œShe’s a cousin,” he said, and coughed. “I, ah, ask her for help