Kristi would be pissed, but so what?

He ground his teeth together. He should have blown off his meeting with Hollister and gone with Kristi to the damned play. But it was too late now.

Glancing at his phone, he willed it to ring. “Come on, Kris. Call,” he said. But the phone remained silent, and as he drove toward the college his restlessness and worry only increased.

In the women’s room at the student union, Kristi slid the gold necklace around her neck and wondered if she was making the worst mistake of her life. Beneath the harsh fluorescent bulbs the little vial gleamed, its dark contents looking nearly black.

It felt strange.

Outré.

Almost evil.

With a sound of annoyance she stuffed the necklace beneath her sweater so that the tiny glass pressed against her skin. It felt cold, surprisingly so, for its small size.

Adding a bit of gloss to her lips, she walked purposely toward the far side of campus, where she joined a crowd of students and faculty members heading to the brick building housing the English Department and a small auditorium not far from Wagner House. Lights glowed around the south entrance and a white sign painted with black letters proclaimed “Play tonight: Everyman.”

The quintessential morality play, Kristi thought as she spied the girl named Ophelia who called herself “O” and also wore a vial of her own blood.

Perfect.

O was trying to buy a ticket from a girl seated behind a long table. Some kind of medieval-sounding pipe music filled the antechamber, and the ticket taker, dressed all in black, seemed to have trouble making both change and eye contact. Her black hair, scraped back and showing light brown roots, was in stark contrast to the thick white makeup covering her face.

“The play’s already sold out?” O demanded, glaring down at the girl in charge of the till.

“Yes…I mean, I don’t know…. Just a second.”

“This is required for my class!” O wasn’t about to be put off. “I have to get inside.”

“I know! Everyone’s saying the same thing.” The flustered girl caught sight of Father Mathias, who was hovering near the curtained entry to the theater. Clad in a black cassock that was probably all the rage for clerics in the 1400s, he pulled at one sleeve, the one covering a bit of barely visible bandage.

“Father Mathias? Could you help me a second, please?”

“What is it, Angel?” he asked, and Kristi wondered if Angel was really the girl’s name. Or did it have something to do with the play? Or, worse yet, was it Father Mathias’s own pet name for the flustered girl?

“Do you know how many seats we have left?”