Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (133 page)

I pushed my chair back from the desk, then immediately felt silly. What did I think they were going to do? Reach through the monitor and grab me?

How could they have gotten into my house to monkey with my computer, anyway? And who would do something like that? I didn’t think anyone I knew would go to the trouble of such an elaborate prank. I didn’t have the kind of friends who would enjoy making me freak out and then laughing about it with me later, and I didn’t have enemies committed enough to go to so much trouble.

There was Justine.

I remembered that look she’d given me at church.

I’d never thought of her as an enemy, per se. She’d been more in the category of “family you can’t stand, but they’re still family.” Maybe I’d been wrong, though. Ben and I co-owned the house, so he kept a key. Justine could’ve used it to get in. She didn’t work during the day, so there’d have been plenty of opportunity.

But could she have set up some elaborate computer prank? It didn’t seem likely.

Someone could’ve helped her
.

I studied the print again. The grass the foot was stepping in was of a piece with all the rest of the grass in the picture: dead, wet, and a bit too long to look well kept. The foot was wet and had little bits of sodden grass stuck to it. It looked real.

Maybe I was hallucinating. The naked guy had also apparently walked right in front of me, and I hadn’t seen him. That image looked real, too, but maybe it wasn’t.

Serious mental illness often emerged in your early twenties, right? And I already had one — panic disorder. Maybe that put me at risk for others.

But if I really was hallucinating, wouldn’t I believe I wasn’t?

I slid the photo under the keyboard and sat there, rubbing my hands on my jeans. I couldn’t get rid of the clamminess. I tried to come up with another plausible explanation for the monster foot, but the more I thought about it, the more my chest tightened up.

Finally, I pushed the whole issue away, and my mind settled into a fragile state of blankness. Carefully
not
thinking about the photo, I went upstairs, got in bed, wrapped my arms around my tattered childhood bear, Sniggles, and willed myself asleep.

I
woke up with a plan
. It was so simple I should’ve thought of it the night before. I would show the weird pictures to someone else and see if they saw what I saw. If they did, then I wasn’t going crazy, and it was just a matter of finding out who was messing with me, and why. And how.

“
W
hat
is
that
?” Janie said, scrunching up her nose adorably. She was holding half of her BLT in one hand and the cemetery picture in the other.

Since it was just the three of us in the office, Dr. Nielsen always closed up for an hour at lunchtime. Janie and I usually ate at our desks to save money, but every other Monday, we went to Pete’s. I’d put my possibly hallucinatory photos in a folder and brought them along.

Clearly, she could see the monster foot. Some clenched-up thing inside me loosened. I quietly slid the other photo — the one of J.T.’s with the mystery man — back into the folder. If the foot wasn’t a hallucination, surely Mr. Streaker wasn’t either.

“I’m not sure. Someone must be pulling my chain, but I can’t figure out how. Any ideas?”

“Dunno.” She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you sure you didn’t Photoshop it?”

“Of course I’m sure. I don’t even own the program.”

“Huh. Someone must’ve been at the cemetery, and you didn’t notice them.”

“But they would’ve been so close to me. How could I not have seen them?”

“Huh.” Janie turned the print this way and that. “What do you think, Jackie?”

I hadn’t realized our waitress was standing behind me. Jackie, a tall, spare redhead, came around to look at the picture. She rolled her eyes.

“Gimme a break. It’s some guy wearing a costume.” Jackie looked me up and down, not very flatteringly. “You must’ve been zoning out, and he snuck up on you.”

I blushed at the implication that I was spacey. Then I got embarrassed at blushing so easily, which made me blush more. Jesus, I was such a dork sometimes.

“I only knelt there for a few seconds to get the shot. I don’t see how someone could’ve snuck up on me that fast without making noise.”

“Well, if you’re not paying attention, you don’t hear stuff going on around you, do you?” Jackie said, arching an eyebrow as if I were denying the obvious.

Maybe I was. But my memory of the moment seemed so clear. I hadn’t zoned out when I was taking those pictures. I’d felt pretty focused. Photography usually made me feel that way: sharp and observant and detail-oriented. It was one reason I liked it so much.

“Sure, that can happen, but if he snuck up on me while I was lining up the shot, where was he when I stood back up a second after I took it?”

“Behind a tree, maybe?”

“What’re you gals arguing about?” Doyle Schumaker asked.

Doyle was having lunch with Billy Wozowski at the next table. Billy and Doyle were police officers. Doyle’s K-9 partner, a German shepherd named Abby, was snoozing under their table.

“Someone’s trying to put one over on Beth,” Janie said. “She took this picture at St. Mary’s yesterday afternoon, and it has a weird foot in it.”

Janie gave him a flirty smile and tossed her hair a little as she handed him the photo.

I spent a little bit of each work day envying Janie. It’s not that she’d dated some guy I wanted, or anything like that. I just wished in general I could be more like her, at least in some ways. She was pretty, yeah, but more than that, she just seemed comfortable in her own skin. She was never anxious, never restless. She seemed grounded, like she knew what was important to her and was sure she was going to get it eventually. For lack of a better word, she seemed satisfied. I’d never felt that way.

Maybe it came from growing up in a big farming family. I used to love hanging out at her place when we were kids. There was always a lot of noise and bustle, and plenty of arguments, but it was clearly a happy, loving group of people. Not that my mother hadn’t loved me plenty, but for much of my life, it had just been the two of us. Janie’s family was different. With a family like that, you’d never be lonely.

Doyle took the print from Janie and looked at it. His expression turned serious. He looked up at me searchingly.

“What time did you take this, exactly?” he asked, casting a meaningful glance across the table at Billy, then handing him the picture.

“Um … about 2:00 in the afternoon, I think. Is something wrong?”

“I might have to take this in as evidence, Betty.”

I felt a little breathless. “Really? Why?”

“About that time yesterday, there was an APB out for a seven-foot-tall bagel monster,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at me.

Jackie, Janie, and Billy laughed, and I blushed all over again. Even worse, people at the tables around us started asking what was so funny. Soon the picture was being passed around Pete’s Eats to a mixture of guffaws and speculations about Photoshopping.

If Justine had somehow engineered this to make me look stupid in front of the whole town, she’d sure as hell succeeded.

I went back to my meal, watching out of the corner of my eye as Jackie circulated among the tables, laughing with folks — no doubt at my expense. Someone’s gaze caught mine. It was Callie McCallister, Dorf’s most committed moral crusader. She was holding the photo and looking right at me, fear and revulsion plain on her face. Great. My picture was in the hands of the one person in town most likely to think I’d actually photographed a monster.

Sure enough, on her way out of Pete’s ten minutes later, Callie stopped to drop the picture on our table. Her tiny hands were shaking. When she spoke, so was her voice.

“Elizabeth, you have to stop spreading this image. Glorifying hellspawn this way — it’s unlawful.”

“Callie, come on,” I said. “It’s just someone’s idea of a prank. I’d like to know who, so I can smack ’em.”

Callie’s expression didn’t change one bit. She was a little wisp of a thing, but when she’d made up her mind, she didn’t back down. The whole town knew it from experience.

Janie rolled her eyes.

A man reached down to our table and picked up the folder containing the other photo, the one of the mystery man in front of J.T.’s. I looked up at him in surprise. He was standing right beside Callie, but I hadn’t noticed him. Maybe this was the new live-in boyfriend Suzanne had told me about.

He was looking at my picture without permission, so I didn’t hesitate to give him the once-over. He was a white guy of average height with brown hair and eyes and bland, even features. He was wearing jeans and a blue sweatshirt. Thoroughly uninteresting. And really rude.

“Excuse me, you didn’t ask to see that,” I said, reaching for the folder.

He ignored me except to turn slightly, so the folder would be out of my reach.

Just as I took a breath to object, Janie cut in. “So,” she said, drawing out the word in a way that made me cringe, “you’re the one who’s living with Our Lady of Christian Virtue, here? Living together outside the bonds of matrimony? Are you sure that’s
proper
?”

Oh god
. This was the part of Janie I didn’t admire so much: she had the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

The man ignored Janie, but Callie sucked in a scandalized breath and turned tomato-red. That heavy, quiet feeling instantly surrounded us, the one that means every person within earshot is holding very still and listening. Two short-order cooks and a busboy stuck their heads out of the kitchen to watch. Jackie paused with her water pitcher cocked over someone’s glass. Pete himself stood up from behind the counter, hands full of the straws and napkins he’d been stocking.

“He’s not … I mean, we’re not … he’s just a houseguest!”

“Oh, right, he’s a
houseguest
,” Janie echoed in a knowing tone, added a wink and air-quotes for good measure. “Got it, got it.”

“He is! I’d never … you know.”

“No, no,
of course
you wouldn’t,” Janie said in a soothing tone, which she immediately undercut by snorting loudly.

“Oh,” she said, “excuse me.” And snorted again.

The man slid the photo back into the folder and reached over to set it on the table. A thick, lumpy red scar ran across the back of his wrist. Yikes. No wonder he wore long sleeves.

Callie stood there another few seconds, stammering out protests. Then the man put his arm around her thin shoulders and guided her out of the restaurant. I could hear her talking as they walked down the sidewalk. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I could tell from her voice that she was crying.

After another few seconds, conversation and the sounds of eating picked back up. Janie leaned over to me with a grin.

“Whatcha say we tee-pee her house tonight?”

Doyle said “I heard that, missy!” in mock outrage.

“Did you get a load of that guy with her?” Janie said. “Blandy McBlandsville, if you ask me.”

“Yeah, I’ve forgotten him already,” Doyle said.

A few people around us laughed.

It was bad. I mean, of course I couldn’t let Callie go around claiming I was consorting with demons, or something. Dorf was a fairly religious town, and if people heard that kind of accusation enough, some of them might start believing it. But Janie’s way of defending me had been over the top. I had profited from it — before Callie came to our table, I’d been the laughing stock, and now the laughing stock was her. I felt like a shit.

Janie got busy chatting up Doyle and didn’t notice how quiet I’d gotten.

We finished up and headed back to the office. Once there, I set about returning the calls on the answering machine, but I didn’t give the task much attention. My mind alternated between feeling guilty over Callie and thinking about the photo.

It was good to know I hadn’t hallucinated the foot — for Christ’s sake, practically half the town had seen the thing.

But there still wasn’t a good explanation for how someone’d managed to create the effect. That was a problem: having been humiliated, Callie would probably be out for blood. She’d be spreading all kinds of crazy ideas about me.

I needed a logical explanation for the photo, and I needed it soon.

W
hat with all the commotion
, Janie and I had taken more than an hour’s lunch, which annoyed Dr. Nielsen. I stayed late to make up for it, then headed over to Ben’s house. It was something I hadn’t done in years — just drop by unannounced. Justine had made it clear she didn’t appreciate it.

But this time I actually wanted to see her, not Ben. Maybe if I surprised her with the photo, she’d admit to engineering the prank. Or at least I’d see a hint of guilt or embarrassment on her face.

It was nearing sunset by the time I pulled up in front of my brother’s modest 1930s bungalow. The sun was casting deep shadows across the front yard. It made Justine’s decorative lawn tableau of deer and garden gnomes around a wishing well look sort of sinister.

I climbed the steps and rang the doorbell. In my hand I held the folder containing the photos, now stained by a greasy fry I’d dropped on it during lunch.

Lia, the five-year-old, opened the door.

“Aunt Beth!”

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Mommy! Aunt Beth is here! Are you here for dinner? Daddy said Susie could eat with us, so I guess you can too.”

“No, honey, I just need to talk to your Mommy for a minute. Who’s Susie?”

“She’s my dolly,
duh
!”

Good lord
. How nice to see my nieces were learning good manners.

Justine appeared behind Lia and shooed the girl away. “What do you want?”

She didn’t open the screened door. I bent the folder open to the cemetery picture and held it up against the screen.

“What do you know about this?” I asked.

She glanced at it and shrugged. “It’s a picture. Looks bad, so I guess it’s one of yours.”

“Look at it.”

She sighed elaborately. “That what I have to do to get rid of you? Fine.”

She opened the door, took the folder, and looked at the pictures with an obvious lack of interest. Then she stiffened. I could see her knuckles turn white, hear her stop breathing. Slowly she looked up at me. Long seconds passed. She just stared.

It wasn’t guilt I saw on her face. It was confusion and fear. No, not fear — terror.

Finally she snapped back to life, as though someone had hit her play button. Without saying a word, she threw the folder at me and slammed the door in my face.

For a few seconds, I stood there amazed. It hadn’t been the reaction I was expecting. At all.

I gathered up the pictures and rang the bell again. No one answered. I knocked on the door.

“Justine? Justine?”

I couldn’t hear anything at all from inside the house. No voices, no footsteps, no TV. It was as though the whole place had gone to sleep. Strange. I knew at least two people were in there. I went from knocking to something closer to pounding.

“Justine! Lia? Ben? Ben!”

This was weird. Why had Justine freaked out like that? Was she afraid I’d get her in trouble for the prank? Surely not — playing a joke on someone wasn’t illegal. I walked around the side of the house. The lights were on, but the shades were drawn. I stopped to listen.

It wasn’t just quiet. It was still. Utterly still.

The hair prickled on my arms and my pulse sky-rocketed. My mouth went dry and a wave of dizziness sent me staggering against the house. Terror engulfed me. Without even thinking about it, I turned and lurched back to my car, piled in, and locked the doors. I sat there, gasping for breath, chest aching. Snapping my rubber band didn’t help. I couldn’t get enough air. I grabbed the little wastebasket I kept on the passenger-side floor and threw up. Then I clawed at my shirt collar, trying to loosen it.

I must’ve passed out. I came to sprawled awkwardly to the side, clumps of hair sticking to my sweaty face. I sat up, dazed and sick, and did what I always did after an attack — looked around to see who’d witnessed it. In this case, no one. A small favor.

I thought briefly of just going back and knocking on the door like a normal person, but even considering it set my heart racing. I profoundly did not want to get out of the car. I couldn’t shake the sense that if I got out, something terrible would happen.

I started the car up and headed home. It was either that or have back-to-back attacks. My hands trembled on the steering wheel the whole way. Just thinking about Justine and Ben’s place sent my pulse up. I tried to put it out of my mind and focus on my driving.