God's Eye (27 page)

•  •  •

Katharine had ditched work yet again and was headed toward the coffee shop to soothe her once-again rattled nerves when her phone started singing at her. It was the ring she’d assigned Margot.

Unsure if she wanted to know what Margot was calling about, Katharine looked at the screen for a moment. She kept walking down the street. Though the day was beautiful, it was still just a touch on the chilly side, and no one was on the street. As she passed a storefront, she caught a glimpse of her reflection and saw herself as the coward she was. Being a coward would only harm her from here on out. So at the last moment before the ring died and sent Margot to voicemail, Katharine pushed the button and answered. “Hi.”

“Thank goodness, for a moment, I thought you’d decided not to answer.”

“No, I just couldn’t find my phone in my purse.” There was a brief pause. “You didn’t have trouble finding your phone. You just debated whether or not to answer it.”

“Is it okay if I hate you?” Katharine said in as pleasant a tone as she could muster. And then before it settled and Margot got mad at her she added. “That’s really annoying, you know? My father always falls for that one.”

There was a small pause. “Then maybe he hasn’t paid the slightest bit of attention when he’s around you. I’ve never seen anyone with a more organized house, purse, life, whatever than you.”

Like a hit to the belly, Katharine realized that, as usual, Margot was right. Her father paid no attention to her whatsoever. For the first time, Katharine could see his always placid expression for what it really was–glossed over. His eyes failed to notice everything he might see in her if he just looked. Shouldn’t he have seen that she’d been tired, drained, scared these past several weeks? He’d patted her hand and told her they’d known it was coming when her mother died, but had only hugged her once. Somehow she’d grieved for her mother all alone and had never gotten upset at him for leaving his only daughter to herself. She’d just accepted it as the way it was, even though she now knew better.

“Are you still there?” As Margot’s voice came over the phone, Katharine realized it was still pressed to her ear and she was a little farther down the street.

“Yes.” Although she was even more certain now that there was nothing Margot could tell her that might be even remotely good.

“Look, I want to ask a few more questions.” Without waiting for Katharine to concede to being questioned, Margot launched into what was apparently quite a list. “Have you seen anything hovering or flying around your room? Or pecking at you?”

“Oh God, no!” That quickly brought her out of her thoughts. So it could be worse? They might peck at her? “Why?”

“There’s a lot of demonology that says that’s what they do. That’s really been linked recently to hallucinations caused by rye mold–lots of scientists think they broke the whole Salem witch trials wide open when they discovered that the conditions were perfect for this particular kind of rye mold the years the persecutions went on. But there’s still a lot of lore prior to that, and it says demons do this kind of thing, so I was curious.”

“Nope, no pecking. No Goody Proctor haunting me.” Katharine turned the corner to where the street ended and the shopping area began. The foot traffic began to pick up a little and she shared the sidewalk with another person here or there.

“That’s a good start.” After a brief pause, and while Katharine wondered what could be coming next, Margot started up again. “Do you hear voices? Telling you what to do?”

A laugh erupted from her. “Lord, Margot. If I heard voices I’d probably be glad to do what they told me at this point.”

“All right then, no voices.”

There was another pause and Katharine heard rustling noises in the background as she waited her friend out. She imagined Margot sitting at the library desk, turning huge pages from some gilt-edged tome she’d pulled from some far, dusty corner of the library.

As she passed a large plate-glass window, something caught her eye. Gasping slightly, she turned to see what it was.

“Katharine! Are you okay?”

She laughed again at Margot, thinking she hadn’t laughed much at all in her life, because who would she laugh with? “I just saw the most fantastic blue suede pumps. They’re perfect for you.”

She leaned in, her breath fogging a small circle on the glass. The shoes were the color and texture of fog over the ocean, almost gray. Straps crossed over the top, giving the simple shoe elegant lines. As she stepped away from the window, about to ask Margot what size she wore, the reflection in the window changed. Katharine took a step back and frowned. It seemed the lines from the shoe were growing–extending wide. It took only a moment to realize the line was moving, and it wasn’t the shoe. Without thinking about it, she stopped looking through the glass at the shoe and started looking at the window itself, her eyes tracing the dark forms reflected there.

She frowned as the lines converged at the tip of a long, oily wing. Subtle movement gave life to the thin membrane. Frozen, but still not comprehending, Katharine followed the reflection of the wing to where it joined a body. As deep and inky as the wing had been, the body looked even darker. Muscle flexed, crawling under liquid skin, as the creature rotated. Clawed fingers clenched and released as Katharine looked it over.

She followed the long and steely lines up past a neck far too solid to snap, past disturbingly long teeth that breath eased in and out past. Into hypnotic wells that passed for eyes.

In those eyes, something screamed soundlessly, and something deep and sinister drowned it out. In those eyes, she could see into the depths of something she never wanted to see. But she couldn’t look away.

Even though she realized the creature was standing right behind her.

“Katharine? Katharine!”

She started. It didn’t sound like the first time Margot had said her name. Somehow she forced out a “Huh?”

But still she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the beast reflected in the window. Margot’s voice tied her to reality–or at least what she hoped was reality.

Finally, getting a cold dose of some sanity, Katharine dropped the phone and screamed as her chest clenched and the utter fear poured out of her.

•  •  •

Katharine heard two strong knocks before she saw Margot push her way through the condo door. She nodded absently to her new friend, thinking that Margot’s knock was what her mother would have termed “manly.” But Margot, even with all her assertiveness and backbone, was definitely feminine.

If Katharine was up against what she thought she was, she was going to have to grow her own backbone, and really damned fast.

“So.” Margot gracefully dropped herself into a dining room chair and crossed her long legs. “It sounds like you’re having more of the problems on my list.”

That, finally, got Katharine to lift her head and look at her friend. “You have a list of my problems?”

Margot laughed. “No, I have a list of problems that might be due to demons.” It seemed the subject matter subdued her, and her expression turned more serious. “I tried to keep away from problems that were due to possession, but there may be some overlap.”

With this, she frowned and started scrounging in her bag for something, presumably the list.

Katharine, her soup forgotten and her hands long past the shaking-like-a-seizure stage, pushed herself to her feet and headed down the hall to her closet. That black bag Margot carried bothered her no end. It was battered and scarred, and it had been cheap and styleless even when new.

“Katharine?” Margot’s voice called from the living area. For a librarian she sure could make her voice go a long way.

“Just a minute.” She continued to dig in the closet until she came up with a large black bag that revealed hints of purple when the fabric folded. Grabbing it, she marched back into the living room. “If you want it, this is for you.”

Margot looked up from a sheaf of papers she was rifling through and blinked. “It’s beautiful.” She looked almost stunned as Katharine put the bag into her hands. “And I’m sure I can’t afford it. Don’t you want it?”

Katharine shook her head. “I love it, but it’s too big for me. My mother gave it to me a handful of years back and I never used it. So it’s just been sitting in my closet all this time waiting for someone who needed it. It’s perfect for you.”

Turning it over several times, Margot felt the material and checked inside, looking in all the little pockets. “As long as you’re sure …”

When Katharine nodded, Margot smiled and simply said, “Thank you.”

For just a moment, Katharine stopped where she was and felt something form inside her. There were a thousand other things she had kept just because her mother had given them to her, so there was nothing particularly special about this bag. And she was never going to use it, but Margot would enjoy it until it was nothing but threads. She shook her head. “Thank my mother.”

Katharine ate the dregs of her now-lukewarm soup while Margot busily transferred things from her old purse to the new one. It was nice to enjoy a moment with her friend that didn’t involve discussing various things that could kill her. Painfully.

But after a short minute, and a chance to see everything Margot carried with her on a regular basis, Katharine was directed back to the list Margot had made.

“You said you saw something while you were talking to me.”

Katharine grinned. It was all she could do. “Yeah, I saw the perfect shoe for you.”

Margot just looked at her, waiting her out.

So she gave up and continued. “Then I saw a reflection, and as I looked it over I realized it was a creature. Somehow that didn’t bother me until I saw its eyes.” She couldn’t suppress a shudder at the memory. It was almost as though just the remembering created a new link between herself and the creature. So she pushed it away. “The eyes were …”

Margot tipped her head, trying to catch Katharine’s eyes. “This sounds like one of the questions I was going to ask you.” She looked down at her list and added a check mark.

Katharine fought a shudder before she came back to reality. “What was the question?”

“Whether you were seeing things out of the corner of your eye or in reflections.”

Dejectedly, Katharine nodded. “Well, I wasn’t until then, but now, yes. What were some of the other questions?”

For a moment it seemed Margot wouldn’t respond. When she did, it was to say that she wasn’t sure she should ask them.

Katharine tried to be stern. “Tell me.”

Only after a big sigh did Margot start speaking again, this time in a cold, rote voice. “Have you seen things crawling or moving along or under the walls or ceiling? Have you awoken above your bed or been held somewhere by an unseen force? Have you found cuts on your body that you don’t remember getting? Is there anyone new in your life? Anyone special? Anyone particularly charismatic?”

Allistair watched the door like a hawk, but Katharine didn’t come through. Being her assistant had been a fantastic idea when she was a die-hard workaholic, but this whole mess had upset her rigid schedule and turned it into mush. He had no idea whether she would show today or not.

He needed her to show today. He needed to give her the news and he needed to give it to her in an offhand manner. If he called her in, told her she had to come, he would lose the apparent casualness he needed. He would lose the thrust of making certain that she saw the connections for herself. He would lose so much. And she wasn’t here.

He rolled his spine, enjoying the way the bones slid against each other. He flexed his fingers and toes and moved his legs beneath the desk. He had already collected enough material–files, reports, random notes–to appear that he had been working all morning.

He walked back and forth across the office. The door was closed and no one would see him. If Katharine came in, he’d just say he’d been pacing, maybe waiting for her. Worried because she was late, again.

The motion in his legs felt good, even if it didn’t necessarily help him hold form. Still, he’d incorporated on a day when he wasn’t certain he’d see Katharine, so he used it, he moved. And while he moved, he plotted.

What if someone else told her? It wouldn’t be delivered the same way, but then he wouldn’t have to be the bearer of what would turn out to be truly catastrophic bad news. Since she’d been gone all morning, she might have heard. But she might not have. How would he figure out whether she knew without giving it away? And if she had already heard, wouldn’t she have called him? He should be at the top of her list to contact in a case like this. But she probably didn’t have a list at the ready for a case like this.

The phone at his desk rang, a deep buzz that wanted to slide under his senses and go undetected. But he picked it up anyway. “Yes?”

There was a cold pause at the other end–Lisa’s general warning that she didn’t really like him, and didn’t like that he had gotten the job she felt was rightfully hers. “Katharine let me know she won’t be coming in today.”

Only a hair after the end of the sentence came the click of Lisa putting the phone back in its cradle. It was good that he didn’t have anything to say back to her. All he had to do now was get out the door and stay gone for the day without raising suspicion.