God's Eye (9 page)

As she stared at the gray, nubby carpet and tried to gather her thoughts, a pair of feet in cheap heels planted themselves next to her, and a voice more refined than the footwear floated down. “Can I help you?”

Katharine wanted to laugh, but simply shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Still the woman insisted on squatting almost ungracefully, closer to Katharine’s level. “I’m a librarian here. I’m Margot.” She didn’t hold out her hand. Her face was a shade too long, the patrician nose out of place on a woman and the mouth too full under such a nose. Katharine thought Margot’s face suited her job, but her voice didn’t. In practiced, cultured tones Margot spoke again. “I probably could help. I’m a professional researcher.”

Well, everyone needs something to be proud of,
Katharine thought ungraciously, deciding Miss Margot of the long fingers with no rings and her librarian pride couldn’t fare any worse than she herself had. “All right. I got this message in the mail. It said
cave.
That’s it, one word. I can’t figure out what it means. It can’t be a reference to an actual cave, I don’t know anything about caves.”

Immediately, Margot dove to the secondary definition Katharine had needed a book to come up with. “Does it mean ‘surrender’?”

Tucking her feet up under her, Katharine set aside the dictionary cradled in her lap and shook her head again. “I already found that in the dictionary. I can’t think of anything I even could give in to. No one is pressuring me. I’m not involved in any legal problems. No personal or corporate battles. At least none that I know of.” She sighed and raked her hand through her hair, “I mean, wouldn’t I have to know something to surrender it?”

“Sounds like you’re right. That doesn’t make any sense.” Margot stood to her full height and tapped her foot in a way that said she was thinking. “It was just a note? With just the one word?”

She looked down long enough for Katharine to nod. It was only a semi-lie.

“Is it part of a series? Perhaps it will mean something after you have all the pieces?”

Katharine shrugged. “It’s the first of its kind. And I have no idea what sort of message would start with cave.” “Then maybe it isn’t in English.”

What?
She was opening her mouth to say all that. To say that she’d thought of another language, and already dismissed it.

But Katharine didn’t get to say it. Margot was already at work, and besides, she was a professional researcher. She was probably going to make a fool out of herself. But first she told Katharine what she was thinking. Margot immediately dismissed the Chinese, Japanese, and Russian dictionaries out of hand. Katharine asked why.

“Nothing in them even could resemble the word
cave.
You would never have mistaken it for English.” She turned her long face back to the shelves in front of her, her mouth pursed as her brain worked. She pulled down the German dictionary, then dismissed it too, only passing it over her shoulder to Katharine when she asked for it. But there was no mistake; the
C
section was barely a few pages, and the only thing even close was
café.
That wasn’t it. Margot hadn’t had to open it to know that.

The French dictionary actually had
cave
listed, but it meant “cellar.” That was even less likely than the English meaning. Margot persisted. Italian had only
cavo,
meaning “hollow” or “rope.”

Katharine’s gut twisted when Margot tried the medical dictionary. If the word had meaning there, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Luckily there was only
cavum,
meaning a recess. Which was a hell of a lot better than if the word
pox
had shown up on her mirror. Although at least she would have known what that meant. Then she had another thought.

Maybe she was dealing with a stupid beastie. There was no law stating that being paranormal meant being intelligent, right? Somehow her mouth got ahead of her brain and she blurted, “Could it be Aramaic?”

Margot frowned as Katharine scrambled for a plausible excuse for what she’d said–something that didn’t involve visitation from black cats and creatures with razor claws. But Margot asked no such thing, just launched into another display of nerdy intelligence. “Aramaic isn’t right. Again, the alphabet is so different, you would have recognized right away that it wasn’t English. But it might be Latin.”

Her long fingers snaked for a thick purple book, reminding Katharine of the talons she’d seen the other night. Deftly, the librarian thumbed through the pages, then stopped. “Did it have a bar over the
E?”

Katharine scrambled to her feet for the first time since Margot had approached. “Yes, kind of.”

Her heart scrambled in her chest, trying to get away from what she didn’t know. She had been telling herself the mark was a glitch, an old fingerprint on the mirror, a smudge and nothing more. A bar over the letter
E
complicated things immensely.

Margot turned the dictionary toward her, one long, almost ghoulish finger pointing to the word just as it had been on her mirror that morning:
cav$$.
Her voice was almost condescending, but Katharine’s pulse was too fast for her to bother being offended. “It’s not pronounced
cave,
it’s
cah-way.”

Katharine didn’t care about that, only what she read as her eyes traced the across the print.

In Latin the word meant “beware.”

•  •  •

Zachary sniffed at the food on his counter. He’d ordered it from a nearby restaurant and wanted to claim that he’d made it himself. That would impress Katharine. However, when she caught him–and she would–the lie would not impress her. So he left the meal in the boxes.

He could have conjured it, could have simply conjured anything he needed. But the effort that act required would have taxed him. It was a great irony that in his true form he could obtain anything he needed and as many things as he needed, except the one thing he needed most: Katharine’s belief. He had to appear as she expected, as something she accepted.

She was very average in that respect. Humans in general had preformed ideas. It helped their brains deal with the world around them. But, though they had the ability to think beyond their immediate input whenever they wished, people rarely did. If you gave them what they expected, they didn’t look further, didn’t question. So it was far more important that he put his energy into being the Zachary she knew than making it look like he had cooked the meal for her.

His head turned. The high-end maid had left flowers in several places around the condo; he would grab one of the bouquets and take it next door to Katharine.

His mouth twitched, as though he were a real human. He wanted Katharine to come here, to his place, but that would require planning. Because she couldn’t stay–he wouldn’t be able to hold form long enough. If he was promoted after this task he would likely be granted the strength to do so, But again, his work was here now, and he wasn’t of a high enough order to pull it off. Yet. He had to make do with what he had. So she couldn’t stay. She couldn’t be in his bed when he lost control of his form. Even if she slept through all of it, what if she woke in the night and he wasn’t there?

No, he needed to be with her at her place–needed to be able to make his excuses, such as they were, and leave.

Wandering the unit, he looked for something to wrap the flowers in, before coming to the conclusion that he had nothing of the sort and would have to take the entire vase. He’d make sure she saw the bouquet as a sweet gesture rather than as a lack of planning. Tucking it under one arm, he grabbed the handles of the plastic sack with the stacks of savory-smelling Styrofoam boxes and turned his front door handle.

Zachary didn’t bother locking it unless someone was there to watch. No one would enter his unit without his permission, and even if someone did manage to get in, once there they wouldn’t steal from him. They wouldn’t be able to; some deep, buried, innate sense would save them from the urge.

It was twenty feet from his doorway to Katharine’s, and he prepared himself as he made the short walk. There were things he needed to do while he was there, information he had to get from her, if he was to save her from Allistair’s plans.

She opened the door almost as soon as his finger lifted from the chime. Her smile was radiant, but the smell hit him like a slap across his face: she reeked of Allistair. But he couldn’t say anything, couldn’t react. Zachary forced a grin to his lips and greeted her warmly, even though she bore the scent of the other.

It had been clear for some time that she had been in contact with his opponent. When Zachary touched her he could pick up the tracers that Allistair left behind–he could smell the strong contact between the two, and initially he had wondered how his rival was interacting with her. But it had never been as strong as it was when he picked her up for lunch. The impression of Allistair, touching her skin, of his merely being near her, had threatened Zachary’s composure throughout the entire meal.

Katharine hadn’t given up any details. No matter what he’d asked, she had said nothing about Allistair. Zachary hadn’t gotten a good look at his opponent through the veil the other day, but he’d been around long enough that he would recognize Allistair’s eyes from the times they had crossed paths in the past. But when the sensations of Allistair’s touches had been so prominent on Katharine at lunch, Zachary had been forced to follow her up afterward.

He had been so certain that he’d staked out prime territory, getting a unit next to her condo. She was easy to track and to follow. So he’d thought it would be as easy to protect her from Allistair, but that shifty bastard had actually gotten into the one place where she spent more time than her home. And Zachary was furious with Allistair for besting him, even in this slight way, and with himself for letting it happen.

During dinner, he kept a calm appearance for Katharine, and his mouth kept up with chatter and pretty compliments throughout the meal. He fed her, and part of him paid attention to the conversation and how her eyes darted to the flowers time and again. But there were more important things here than her childhood and her plans at Light & Geryon, and he needed to dig them up–needed to know what she knew.

After the meal, while they were clearing the dishes, he pushed his way in, reading her thoughts. He needed to be sure that she really didn’t mind if he left her in the kitchen to clean up alone. It was ideal–he could check out her place while she was occupied. But humans were truly different from other creatures in one respect only–they were practiced liars, every one. Katharine would say she didn’t mind if he left her with the dishes, but if she didn’t truly mean it anything he gained in knowledge would be lost on other ground.

So he reached into her thoughts again, nudging her toward contentedness, pleased that she was so easily swayed. When he was absolutely certain she wouldn’t hold it against him, he left to wander through the unit. It was a different design from his own but familiar enough that he could check the place discreetly while Katharine made noise in the kitchen.

He picked up Allistair’s scent again in the living room and bedroom. But unlike the smudges on Katharine herself, it wasn’t overlaid with the ripeness of humanity. His rival had walked this place often. Zachary trailed his fingers across the surface of the desk, as he had on previous visits, picking up visions and knowledge in a way that normal human flesh did not allow. He saw the creatures and faint outlines of soot, but most importantly he did not sense the human Katharine knew as Allistair.

Satisfied with his search, his feet took him into the bathroom, where he pushed the silver lever on the sleek new toilet, flushing it for effect. He washed his hands to get them wet and smelling of soap, to take up the required time. He couldn’t afford any discrepancies nagging at the back of Katharine’s brain. For all that she ignored the world and the cues around her, she was fairly intelligent. With the way things were going lately, she would start paying attention any day now–which was Zachary’s first goal. Once she woke up, she could decide. And he had to make certain that when she did, she sided with him.

In the kitchen, Katharine was loading the last of the dishes into the washer when he planted himself behind her and wrapped his arms around her. She leaned back, enjoying the embrace she thought she knew so well. But Zachary had no guilt about her perception of him as a human lover. In the end, she would have so much because of this time with him. He would open the world to her, and give her so much more than she even knew existed. So he let himself be pulled into the want radiating off her, caught glimpses of her need enveloping him, and leaned her into the counter as she wished.

Katharine made love to him with a force he had not expected. And he took great satisfaction in the fact that their lovemaking left the tracers and the scent he needed. He would have to leave later, to recharge his energy, to change from this human form. Tomorrow when she went to work, when she went to where Allistair was, she would take this mark with her.

Only Allistair would see it. But only Allistair needed to.