Running Back (New York Leopards 2)

You’re Athena, I reminded myself. You’re a strong and intelligent and brave. You’re the Gray Eyed Goddess.

I took a deep breath, and then walked into the conference hall.

Two hundred faces turned my way.

I almost stopped. Instead, I pulled up my chin and walked to the podium.

The first rows were filled with the usual suspects; men and women whom I knew as professors and peers. My friends from Columbia, who gave me discrete thumbs up. One held up a tiny “I Heart You!” sign briefly. And then others I recognized. I’d gone to Dr. Martin’s lectures, I’d co-author a paper with Shannon Andrews, I’d read Professor Levy’s books.

But in the back, a wall of press filled the space.

Usually, at lectures this large, there was some introduction, a little patter of noise to give added importance and tout awards and accomplishments. But I’d been planning on a little lecture, where I walked on, waved and launched into a speech after clearing my throat once.

Now I closed my eyes, startling by the way my stomach turned and keeled. I pictured Kilkarten, the green fields, fresh dirt. Smelled the salt and sea and wind.

Saw Mike.

For a moment, my chest ached, clenching around the broken pieces of my heart, and then it relaxed as his grin crooked up, his eyes bright, his warmth steady.

No matter what had happened, he had always believed in me. We were both lost and confused and broken, but we believed in our passions. He believed in me. I believed in Kilkarten.

I opened my eyes.

The microphone picked up my voice, and the audience quieted. “Hi, I’m Natalie Sullivan. Welcome to Discovering Kilkarten: A Sixth Century Settlement.”

* * *

I stopped seeing the audience after five minutes. They blurred out, ceased to exist, and it was just me and my slideshow. Once or twice, they came through with laughter and I remembered they were there, but most of the time I just expanded on the site. I explained the process I’d gone through to locate the section, the geophysical testing, the units. And then I went further in-depth on what we had discovered, before finishing with our future plans.

And then I was done.

When I was nineteen years old, I went gorge jumping. I jumped off a sixty-foot cliff and plummeted into the pools carved out by glaciers thousands of years ago. I thought my heart would stop. I thought my bones would break. When I resurfaced from the shocking, freezing water, from the silence and the dark, I expected the entire world to be different. For the students on either side of the gorge to be clapping thunderously at my epic leap. No one was. Life continued as normal. “Why didn’t anyone clap?” I’d asked Cam, and she’d shoved me lightly. “They did, stupid. But you were underwater, so you didn’t hear it.”

This was like that. I fell back from the podium, and the lights turned up, and everyone started clapping. I just stood there, the noise washing over me, breathing rapidly as I tried to reemerge from that strange, paralyzing state.

Then I broke through the water and saw the faces, focusing first on the familiar ones, then the strangers. No one looked blown away, but no one looked comatose, either. I smiled and leaned back into the microphone, glancing at the clock. “I think we have about twenty minutes left for questions. So—”

“Is it true your mother is Tamara Bocharov?”

I tried to make out the person that had shouted from the back, slightly disappointed. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“Are you really dating Michael O’Connor?”

“Also, not relevant.” I took a deep breath, scanning for someone who didn’t look like they’d harass me about my personal life. A stodgy academic. Someone in tweed. Someone like—

Like the man standing now.

The press ignored him, still waving for my attention, but my eyes, like those of every academic in the room, had been captured by Professor Henry Ceile. He smiled but didn’t wait for me to invite him to speak. “I thought you were excavating this site looking for Ivernis with Jeremy Anderson. What happened to that? Why isn’t he here with you?”

Murmurs passed through the room.

I leaned forward until the podium cut into my stomach. “Dr. Ceile. I would have thought you’d have better things to do then attend a nightclub singer’s song-and-dance.”

He granted me a slight nod and smile. Point to me. “It turned out I didn’t. But where’s the professor?”

I sucked in a deep breath. “Dr. Anderson is still in Ireland working on research.”

“But not about this site, is that right? Because there was nothing related to Ivernis here.”