Page 59 of Soul Sucker

“Ella, you’re not supposed to take things out of there!” Liz whispered. “Go and put it backimmediatelyor we might not get our information.”

“Fine.” She picked up the sheet of paper and walked back to the filing cabinets. “I was just wondering what it was for.” She glanced back at Vadim, who had remained in his chair. “Hey, Morosov, are your family connected with Mother Goose or something?”

“Hardly.”

She opened the drawer that had contained his file and flicked through them. “Your file’s disappeared. Did you take it?”

Liz shot to her feet and rushed over to Ella. “Of course he didn’t! You’ve probably just misplaced it.” After going through the entire drawer she looked as puzzled as Ella. “What did you do?”

“I just looked through the file and found this bit of paper. There wasn’t anything else to see.”

“Oh God,” muttered Liz. “Where are we going to put this now?”

Ella opened the next nearest file. “We could shove it in here?”

Liz grabbed her wrist. “Don’t do that! We’ll just have to put it in on the countertop and hope that nobody sees it until after we’ve left. What were you doing looking in Vadim’s file, anyway?”

She rolled her eyes. “Because he won’t tell me exactly what he is, and I can’t penetrate his shields. Why else would I be looking?”

“I can hear you, Ms. Walsh. I’m sitting right here.” He turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised.

“I know, so what?” Ella put the piece of paper on the countertop and returned to sit next to him at the table. “It’s all your fault.”

“For not blabbing my entire life history to you?”

“I’m not asking for it all, just the juicy parts.” He didn’t answer and she sighed. “So what’s up with the bird picture, then?”

“I have no idea.”

He shifted slightly in his seat and Ella got a sudden image of flying before his shields slammed shut again. Otherworld was certainly doing a number on him. He looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“You don’t like it here, do you?”

He finally deigned to look at her. “I like it about as much as you like elevators.”

“That bad, huh? What happened?”

“What happened when?”

“Don’t prevaricate. Why don’t you like being in Otherworld?”

His smile was bitter. “If I told you that, we’d be here all night.”

“We have time.” She sat forward and held his gaze. “Okay, shoot.”

The door at the back of the office opened and Vadim looked away from her. “Here comes the messenger of doom. He’s early.”

“Luckily for you.” Ella put her phone away.

Liz waited until the man deposited something in the box before she stood up, tucked her hair behind her ear and approached the counter. She froze, her hand poised over the message as the man spied the single sheet of paper Ella had put on the counter and picked it up.

“Sorry about that,” Liz said “It just fell out of something.”

She received no reply and waited smiling bravely until the door shut again. She exhaled with a whoosh and scooped up the sheets of paper.

“Let’s get going. Even if this isn’t the stuff we need, I don’t think we’ll be getting any more help today. We’ll go and speak to the administrators at the college next. It’s just up the street, so we can walk there.”

Ella looked up at the brick frontage of heralma materand grimaced. It hadn’t changed a bit. She’d spent two and a half years of her life being trained to suck out memories from both humans and Otherworld. Because of the shortness of their potential working lives, the trainee empaths received almost no vacation time to be with their families. It had just been constant work to get them out into the field to do their dangerous job.

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