August 14 | Day

It was the first week of the fall semester, and the acreage in front of the Student Union was abuzz with activity. I had just come from my lunch break. Students milled about, chatting and laughing, while tables and booths were set up by various clubs and organizations trying to attract new members. I sought a route to avoid the noise and bedlam until I spotted the Forager's Club huddled under a tent.

A coed I recognized beckoned for me. "Dr. Rodriguez! Come introduce yourself!"

They were offering free samples of wild-crafted foods, and I smelled freshly picked berries and mushrooms as I ambled to the table. "Dr. Dex Rodriguez, at your service. Hi, guys! I teach mycology classes here. The Forager's Club is a fantastic way to meet new people and learn about the local ecosystem. If you enjoy exploring the great outdoors, this is definitely the club for you."

"You don't look old enough to be teaching here," a student remarked.

"Well, I am, but I get that a lot!" I laughed.

Incoming freshmen bombarded me with questions about my course, and I patiently answered until a football player jostled into our table. "Check it out, it's the nature weirdos," he jeered. My eyes narrowed with contempt. I had a thing about name-calling, particularly when it came from immature jerks.

"Actually," I told him, "you have environmentally conscious people like us to thank for your beautiful football field. I suggest you show some respect."

"Man, get outta here. Respect is reserved for the warriors." He nudged his athletic companions.

I felt my temper rising. "You wouldn't know a warrior if one knocked you on your butt." I pointed toward the area of the field where the sports teams were set up. "I'll meet you on your own turf and show you what a forager can do."

"Alright! Bet." He grinned.

Hearing the challenge, my students urged me to let loose, no doubt eager to see me shed my professional demeanor and have fun with them. They followed us across the field, and I took my place at the beginning of an obstacle course that had been erected to raise money for charity. I was dressed in a business casual pantsuit and pumps for work. But I kicked off my heels and took off my blazer to catcalls and wolf-whistles that made me scoff.

I stretched my neck from side to side. Out of my periphery, I saw my opponent do the same. The burly linebacker joked with his teammates about how he would smoke my ass. I hid a smile as I crouched in position, awaiting the signal to go.

As soon as it was given, I leaped across the foam pads suspended precariously above a muddy water tank. The foam jiggled with each hop, trying to throw me off balance, but I kept my footing and launched myself from the last pad at full speed. I needed the running start to propel me up the ten-foot graffiti wall that curved ahead of me. A glance to my left showed my opponent was hitting the wall with the same agility.

On the other side was a massive inflatable slide. I pulled my arms in close to my body and crossed my legs at the ankles to increase my speed as I flew to the bottom. Then I scrambled up a fifteen-foot wall of fences and reached a cargo net that we were meant to shimmy across. As I lithely swung over the rolling bar at the top, my opponent's strength began to wane. With teeth bared in a grin, I sprinted over to the next obstacle.

The call of competition had awakened my inner wolf. The long strides of my legs and the pumping of my arms brought out the wildness in me. Blood rushing in my ears drowned out the sound of students cheering me on from the sidelines. To my work colleagues, it had to look like I had lost my ever-loving mind. No sane, sensible professor would be tackling an obstacle course to prove a point. I hadn't even broken a sweat.

I carefully balanced on a beam over a muddy pit, praying I didn't fall face-first. The football player huffed and puffed as he struggled to keep up. I knew I was performing too well for my nerdy profession, and I wondered if I should dial it back a bit. There were things about me that no one at the university knew, like the fact that I was a werewolf. On the other hand, I couldn't imagine letting myself lose to someone who had been so disrespectful to my students.

Last up was a twenty-foot pole with a flag at the top. I leaped into the air to start climbing somewhere near the middle while my opponent tried to pull his heavy weight up from the very bottom. It was all about strategy. In no time at all, I had clambered to my flag and snatched it down. I dropped to my feet with a triumphant shout as the football player fell on his rump with a loud groan.

"Like I said," I tossed over my shoulder as I headed back to the Forager's Club table, "you wouldn't know a warrior if one knocked you on your butt."

"Wow! That was outrageous, Dr. Rodriguez!" a freshman exclaimed. High-fiving them, I glanced at the time and realized I had over-stayed my break. I said quick goodbyes and hurried across the campus to my office.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry. I know I'm late," I called out as I entered the mycology suite. I hurried past the charming mushroom posters lining the wall in the outer reception area, grateful that no students were waiting for me. My office hours weren't for another thirty minutes, but sometimes students came early. I slipped on a sleeve of my lab coat as I dumped my purse and keys on my lab assistant's desk. She gestured toward my open door.

"Someone stopped by for you."

"Who?" I mouthed.

The overworked grad school student rolled her shoulder in a careless shrug, and I swallowed a complaint. How was I supposed to get anything done if Dean Brumfield kept sending his underlings to interrupt my work? I plastered on a smile and entered my office. A tallish man with thinning gray-blond hair stared out the window behind my desk. He wasn't one of the dean's lackeys.

"Hendrick Van der Woodsen?" I reacted with shock.

The Director of Overlay Affairs Surveillance & Intelligence Services turned to face me and smiled. "Hello, Dr. Rodriguez." The dapper gentleman's gray pinstripe suit made him look even more distinguished as he stood with his hands clasped behind his back. It also hid the weapons I knew he shouldn't have gotten into my building with but that the Supernatural spy most definitely had on him.

I carefully shut and locked my office door, grabbed my remote control from a top drawer of my desk, and powered on the mounted television in the corner of the room. The news blared loud enough to muffle our conversation, though not so loud as to interrupt my colleagues.

"What are you doing here in Baton Rouge?" I asked lightly. Regardless of who he was or how important, I had vital research to do—research that meant the difference between receiving adequate funding and not.

"Can't a friend show up to check on you? You've done well for yourself in the past year." He nodded toward my shelf. I had recently published a book on the historic uses and impacts of fungi in psychiatric management.

"I'm slowly but surely working on a follow-up, although lately my primary focus has been on unlocking the healing properties of reishi. In fact," I replied, "you're interrupting my work. The dean will have a fit if I don't get these results to him in time. My project is on the funding chopping block this semester. So, what can I do for you?"

"I have something to show you." The director set down his phone. With a raised eyebrow, I moved around my desk to his side. He took a seat in my burgundy leather office chair and pressed play on a video clip.

Onscreen, a tortured young woman was in front of an upscale hotel being wrestled down by medics as she shouted gibberish: "I am the Oracle of the Court of Immortals! I am the Oracle of the Court of Immortals!" To the humans present in the video, her words sounded like the ravings of a madwoman, but the director and I realized we were receiving an incoming from a higher realm.

I moved aside the glass bell cloche covering a pot of pale green Pixie Cup lichen that decorated my desk and perched on the edge beside Van der Woodsen. "Who is she?" I asked. She was African American, and she had the aching beauty of untarnished youth, despite her dissaray in her struggles against those holding her.

"Her name is Haley Edison." The director crossed his legs. "She's a seventeen-year-old social media personality, the daughter of a well-known movie director. The video was taken on the ninth in front of Century Luxe Hotel in New Orleans. We don't know why she was chosen as a channel, but this clip has caused a great deal of excitement and speculation within the upper levels of OASIS. A team has authenticated the message. It's definitely from the Oracle."

He increased the volume so I could hear better. I leaned in. "The Book of Tides is compromised!" screamed the young channeler. "Awaken the Lady of the Waters. Retrieve the Chariot and unlock the Gates of Mortality. Cross the Rainbow Bridge between life and death. You must deliver the book to the City for safekeeping!"

I looked at my companion. What did any of it mean? Director Van der Woodsen slid the tracker back and replayed the audio. "Deliver the book to the City for safekeeping," the girl said again. I straightened and glanced at the clock above my door. My office hours started in less than fifteen minutes. The director's arrival couldn't have come at a more inopportune time; however, he clearly wasn't paying a social visit.

"You want me on a mission," I surmised. I thought about the obstacle course I had just wiped that football player's smug face clean on. There was more to me than academia, but only on my terms. My life's work as a researcher was important to me.

From the television, a news anchor who had sat dispassionately discussing an ongoing highspeed chase suddenly cut to the footage of it, and the noise of sirens and growling engines flooded my office. Some crazy kid had stolen a vintage sports car from a car show. I turned the volume down a few bars, waiting for Van der Woodsen to confirm the reason he was there.

He rose to his feet and migrated to the shelf to run his fingers along the repeating spines of my debut as he explained, "The Book of Tides is a rare Supernatural artifact with unparalleled potential for misuse. I spoke with President Distefano. He tells me that he met with Darcy Cyprian, a collector of some renown, a few days ago. Distefano is worried the vampire will soon acquire the Map of Destiny."

"Never heard of it," I said.

"The map is unimportant," he waved a hand, "other than as a means of helping Cyprian find what we've been tasked with getting out of this dimension."

"I don't know why you've come to me. In case you've forgotten, I'm no longer in the field, Director Van der Woodsen. I work for OASIS strictly as a consultant." I raised my chin as he started to chuckle quietly. "Therefore, unless you want me to whip up a potion or something, I can't help you," I said.

"Oh, you know why I've come to you, doctor. You're the only agent I've got that can find the locations the Oracle mentioned. Come now, don't be precious. I've taken the liberty of arranging with the university for your lectures to be taken over by someone else."

"You shouldn't have," I blurted out angrily. Van der Woodsen blinked at me in disapproval. "Maybe I didn't make myself clear, Director. You need to find someone else to take on this mission, rather than my professorial duties. I'm on the cusp of a breakthrough with pharmaceutical-grade reishi mushrooms, but I can't do anything without the massive investment this university is funneling into my work."

"Dex, I don't want to have to pull rank." He studied me with a hand in his pocket and a half-smile. I braced my fingers on the desk in front of me and shook my head.

"Then don't, Director Van der Woodsen. Look, I know the OASIS motto: 'Once an agent, always an agent.' But I paid my dues, and I left the field with some of the highest commendations of anyone. This research is my life's work."

"You're trying to find a way to help your mother," he murmured.

A burning lump formed in my throat that I swallowed down as I eyed the woodgrain surface of my desk. My mother was in a longterm care facility, being treated for a severe mood disorder. Yes, my work could help her. "You can't ask me to give up on this. I can't lose funding," I said. He lowered his head, and I glanced up.

"I'm not asking you to give up anything, Dex. You complete this mission for me, and I'll see to it that OASIS funds the rest of your research. You know perfectly well that we're good for it. Anyway, I wouldn't ask this of you if it wasn't a matter of life and death. To be frank, the scale of calamity that could befall us if we fail is tantamount to world destruction."

OASIS would fund the rest of my research? I barely heard anything else he said. Accepting the mission would mean leaving my comfortable lab and putting myself in danger. The thought of hidden enemies, unforeseen hazards, and potential violence should have made me hesitate. Instead, it made my heart race with unexpected excitement. I hadn't realized how much I missed those days.

"Are you in?" Van der Woodsen asked.

I nodded my head slowly. "I'm in, but there's one problem–crossing the great divide between life and death. We'd literally have to stop time to make it through to the other side alive."

We both turned to the television as the high-speed chase continued to be broadcast loudly. Director Van der Woodsen smiled and pointed to the silver-gray car that was airborne on the Channel 2 news.

"What do you think of that?" he asked.

"Some careless Supernatural is breaking all kinds of laws on both the human side and our side."

"I agree, but that's not what I'm talking about."

I looked at him, intrigued. "What do you mean?"

"You said we'd have to stop time. Stop time?" he asked. "Or outrace it?"