God's Eye (22 page)

She started to stand to excuse herself, but Margot stood first. “Thank you for the tea. I don’t want to take up your whole day, but I didn’t think it was really a conversation for the library either.” She smiled and held out a small, glossy business card. “I put my cell number on the back so you can get to me if you need another translation.”

Then she left so fast that it was almost as though she’d disappeared.

Katharine leaned back in her seat. Her world was getting weirder and weirder. She sipped at the tea while she thought. There was no point in going back to work. Who knew what she might suggest the company do with its money today? Maybe she could recommend blowing up a small planet, or making a few more species extinct.

Slowly, with concerted, simple movements to cover the magnitude of her thoughts, she acted like she was savoring the last of the tea. Instead, she was taking stock.

She was screwing her trainee. And he didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with that. She was in a relationship that seemed to grow more serious as the days went by. Zachary checked on her, asked about her, and behaved like the devoted boyfriend. But she was screwing her office mate. That put a bit of a damper on the seriousness of the relationship.

The animals had stayed away for a while. But the last visit, the black wolf, had been almost more than she could handle. If it happened again, her heart might explode from the stress if the animal didn’t kill her first.

The latest message meant the visitations hadn’t ended. And the meanings were disturbing in and of themselves. They also hadn’t been in her mailbox as she had said. Nor were they tacked to her door. Someone–no
something
–had invaded her space and left them there.

Her heart was picking up speed, so Katharine forced herself to quit thinking about anything. She tossed the cup into a trash can and headed out the door. Allistair could wonder where she was. Her work could wait. Everything was less important than not thinking right now.

Fetching her car from the garage without entering the building, Katharine headed home. She ducked into the condo, not wanting to see Zachary, even though she doubted he’d be home.

She removed her suit jacket and skirt but nothing else. Drawing the blinds to shut out the afternoon light, Katharine tumbled into bed.

•  •  •

Zachary watched her through the veil. Katharine was deep asleep–like she hadn’t been in ages. She needed the rest. She needed the deep dreams, too. It was one way that he and Allistair could get to her–to help nudge her along, to help her grow.

But Allistair was at his sham of a job, and would be there until the day closed. Zachary could look at him through the distance, could see his rival shifting at his desk as he sensed he was being watched. But he wouldn’t know it was Zachary watching. He lacked so many of his senses while in human form that he didn’t even seem to know that Katharine had left him.

Zachary wanted to laugh. He’d been upset that Allistair had gotten so close to Katharine through her work. Taking the job and getting inside her office had been brilliant. But there was a flaw. He was expected to show up and be human during working hours. Neither of them was strong enough yet to appear in two places at once. But soon Zachary would gain that strength. Because he was going to take advantage of the fact that Allistair had tied himself into this bind.

Katharine was safe from Allistair for now.

With a sigh of contentment that sent the air shifting on the human side of the veil, Zachary turned away from her. He had work to do.

He had been following Mary Wayne for a while now. He was trying to help her. She needed it. As a human on her own, she’d been on the wrong track. She needed him.

He found her quickly, and with a shift in his thoughts, Zachary reached across the barrier and into Mary Wayne.

Katharine shrugged against the feel of skin touching hers. Her body burned. The man was dark. Thick black hair filled her hands as she reached to hold his head to her.

With a moan, she tried again to get even closer. He needed her as badly as she needed him. She could feel it deep in her bones. His touch enflamed her. Her head tipped back and she felt his mouth, hot and heavy at her throat. Teeth nipped sharply at her tender flesh and she begged for more.

His guttural groan answered her. Her breath escaped her as she had the sudden realization that she didn’t know his name. In the same instant, the thought was ripped away from her, silently removed from her brain so that she wouldn’t care. She needed him–whoever he was.

Her hands followed his slick skin down his back, tracing impossibly huge muscles as they went. Some kind of oil covered him, leaving her wet with it as he moved against her. He was larger than she had even thought him to be. But that didn’t matter, as she was a writhing ball of need.

He teased her, bringing her to the edge of want, and Katharine thought she should give some of that back to him–even though she was certain that he was hard to tease.

She didn’t know his name, didn’t know him, and had no idea how she had the pieces of knowledge that she did. But she did. Still, these thoughts didn’t stop her, and she ran her hands down his sides, up his back, across his sharp shoulder blades.

Her brain registered the oddity of that through the haze of desire. Still moving against him, still straining for more, Katharine slid her hands across his back.

She cried out at the pain that pierced her palm. The bony protrusion on his back had sliced her skin. While the hurt didn’t destroy her want, it allowed her a tiny window through it.

Ignoring the pain, Katharine felt his shoulders as the sharp edges grew. Forcing their way out of his form, they spread and opened. Still his mouth ate at her, still she moved against him. Still she cried out with need that only he could fulfill. She wanted him. She just couldn’t identify
what
he was.

The moan that hung on the air was her own. Deep inside, desperation tugged at her, begging for completion. But her brain had broken free of the storm-tossed moorings and she traced her hands–now slick with both his oil and her own blood–down his overly muscled arms. They were the size of tree trunks. He could crush her in an instant.

Somehow she wasn’t afraid–though she knew she should be–and was just merely curious.

Her eyes followed the edge of his inky skin. Was it just the dark or was he really so deep a black? Beautiful and shiny like a widow spider, his skin didn’t even show the blood she was surely trailing down it.

His arm ended in a hand as muscular as the rest of him. Long, strong fingers grasped her upper arm. She could see where his vice-like grip dented her flesh. The long blades that were the ends of his fingers brushed her delicate skin, leaving faint cuts as they passed.

The sight of more of her blood bothered her only on a cerebral level. She felt the pain, but for some reason, it didn’t actually hurt her.

She looked over his shoulder as the air moved around him. Great black wings unfurled behind him and Katharine watched in awe. Her head tipped back to see and as she did, his face came up to look at her.

Katharine screamed.

The eyes were blank holes of evil and hate. The mouth she had begged for and writhed against was full of steel teeth sharper than the blades of his hands. His nose was merely a set of holes sunk deep into his face, and the air they breathed out over her stank of death and of a distant but powerful malevolence.

As she gasped she sucked in some of his breath, looked into his eyes, and for a moment she took in the evil that he was.

Then her brain shut down and the black enfolded her.

•  •  •

She came to with a start. Katharine sat up, sucking clean air into her lungs.

The dream had been terrible. But there was light outside–bright daylight coming in through the open window. The middle of the night already seemed distant, felt as though it had happened a long time ago. That she still remembered it so vividly was a testament to how afraid she had ultimately been.

Even now, fear and a healthy dose of shame at how she had begged it to touch her lingered in the back of her consciousness. Though she had done those things in a dream, Katharine still felt a measure of responsibility for her actions.

She laid back, pulling up the tangled sheets to cover her nakedness. She was glad it had been merely a dream, and an easily explainable one at that. She was afraid of the animals and the messages. And she had Allistair and Zachary both plying her with mind-numbing sex.

No wonder she’d had such a foul dream. With all that was going on lately, it wasn’t surprising that her mind had learned how to make an image so evil and terrifying.

Part of her wanted to stay in bed, to roll over and go back to sleep, and hopefully replace this dream with a good one. She wanted to be lazy in a way that had always been forbidden to her, first through her upbringing and later through her own rigidity. But when she didn’t slide out of bed, didn’t act, her thoughts turned back to the dream.

Forcing them to something else was only helpful if there was something else to turn to. All of Katharine’s something elses were just as difficult to get past: the writing on the mirror, her recent sex addiction, her growing lack of personal morals. On the other hand, where her work was concerned, she was finding new morals she didn’t know she had. The problem was that those morals were going to cost her her relationship with both her father and Uncle Toran, the only family she had left.

So staying in bed was going to be a problem. Only when she rose was she finally able to push away the thoughts she didn’t want to deal with as she pushed back the covers. Her feet found the plush carpet, and for a moment everything was as it always had been. She was getting up alone, in the early morning hours; she’d head to work …

It was only a momentary lapse in reality, this belief that all was as it should be. But she clung to it as tightly as she could. When her brain would start to wander, she forced it back to the task at hand–and buried her other thoughts behind the simplicity of picking out her slip.

Standing in front of her closet, Katharine skimmed her hose up her legs. She refused to wear her garter belt again. Today she was keeping it together. Today Allistair wouldn’t see her slip, so she chose a slimmer one that was a little difficult to get in and out of. She chose her suit and laid it across the bed before turning to the bathroom to brush out her hair and put on some makeup.

Her brush was in her hand, pulling through a wave of her hair when she stopped dead.

Katharine would have thought the mirror could hold no more surprises for her. Simply finding more words she didn’t understand wouldn’t have unnerved her. Her eyes went wide as her own image made her wish there were words on the mirror.

As soon as she saw them, she began to feel them–the bruises on her upper arms tugged at her as she moved and turned to get a better look. She bore tiny parallel cuts on her ribs and the back of one arm. Her forehead pulled together as she frowned. It looked like she’d been in a bar brawl the night before.

Her face was clear of cuts and marks, but her neck bore a series of curved rows of punctures. As she leaned in close to look at the tiny wounds, she lost her curiosity and felt her heart squeeze in cold fear. The clusters of small cuts looked like teeth marks.

And the bruises on her arms were in the shape of a hand. A hand larger than any she had ever encountered on a human.

•  •  •

Katharine stood at her bathroom mirror and sighed–another message. She was scraping rock bottom and she knew it.

She had wandered through work for two days. She had lied through her teeth. And everyone had bought it. The whole thing.

She hadn’t seen Mary Wayne, although she had run two other front-desk stakeouts. By the third time it had happened, she’d stopped asking security to run the tapes. Katharine had headed right upstairs, where she had been stopped by Bonnie at the front desk of payroll, who barely got her “Good morning” out through her nearly perpetual smile before she started into “have you heard?” and “isn’t it sad?” and “oh, you just missed her, she just stepped out for a moment.”

Of course she had. Mary Wayne was some kind of a ghost who could walk right in front of her and not be seen. Katharine wondered why the woman even bothered leaving her desk, when Katharine could so easily look directly at her and still miss her. It was caught on tape on more than one occasion. It seemed Katharine had developed some kind of Mary-Wayne-specific hysterical blindness.

But Katharine had just smiled at Bonnie and expressed her sadness over Mary’s imminent departure, though it wasn’t really even at the top of her concern list anymore.

No. She had been late two mornings ago, when she had discovered the bruises. Mostly because her brain had checked out rather than examine what the marks might mean. The last thing she saw in the mirror was her own eyes starting to roll back, and by the time she had come to on her bathroom floor, it was already close to noon. It was the ringing of the phone that had woken her, although she had been in no shape to move fast enough to answer it. She found out later that it had been Allistair calling, for the second time. Zachary had also left her a message. But none of it had budged her from her spot on the bathroom carpet.