“Yes, we are!” Her hands pushed against him as her anger radiated from her center. It slapped at him with more force than he’d expected, unintentionally letting him feel that she wasn’t merely angry at the situation. She was furious with him.
Startled by the impact, he stopped for a moment, catching the rays of righteous anger coming off her in great peals. The woman was irate, and in the middle of the waves, bright and dark, she was beautiful. Magnetized by what he saw in her–by her newfound bulldozer mentality, by the fact that she had decided she was right and anyone who disagreed should get out of her way–he was pulled again to her.
He’d told himself, even when she’d started this tirade, that he was going to let her see it through. She needed it. It was part of her growth in the direction he had to see. It would lead her to the end, to either him or Zachary, but it would be the next step. That was so important when she had been standing still for so long. Though her fury pushed at him, he pushed back, attracted to her on a level he’d never thought to protect himself against–not from the formerly biddable Katharine. Now she was a valkyrie, a siren, and he was helpless.
Her hand flew by in an impatient gesture necessary to her berating his lack of morals. It was both gorgeous and ridiculous; Katharine had no right to berate anyone else’s morals. Also, hers had only come now, suddenly and with great conviction. Allistair snatched her hand from the air as it passed again and used her gesture to propel her in his direction. “What, Katharine? Do you know what’s right? Is this right?”
He dragged her flush against him, both waiting for and hindering her reply. But her breathing was ragged, her face awash with her new ideals, and her mouth didn’t speak, merely beckoned him.
Within moments he had torn aside her clothing and was inside her, engulfed in the way she moved with him, against him. Katharine was a wash of texture both along his skin and in a place low and resonant. She was the drug he should refuse, but never could. She would be the death of him. But at this moment, he didn’t care.
Her fingers dug into his shoulders, hopefully feeling only sinew and bone. His breath came from somewhere deep and distant, but Katharine was too far gone to realize it. She leaned into him, into the last push that would bind them together. For the moment her anger at his lack of morals had been set aside. She let out a last gasp and slumped against him.
It was the same old story–Allistair and the feelings he couldn’t let go of. The sex they were both helpless against–even though he knew the way he had done it was wrong. Even though it violated all Katharine’s basic beliefs, the few that she held. Only here, now, there was something more. The start of Katharine. The start of what she could be. She had finally found something and latched onto it. She had held firm–well, at least until he had caved and started the sex. But he forgave her for that lapse.
He craved her all the more when she spoke, still half naked, still cradled in his arms and joined with him. “It’s wrong. What I did was so wrong. I didn’t look any further than the money. I should have looked.”
Her tired anger called to him. He fed on it. Let it drain from her and into him, where it soothed him. He was making progress. She needed to be in her anger for a while.
For a moment, he held them there, as suspended in time as he could keep things. But he was only so strong, especially when he had been drained by yet another altering experience with Katharine. In the end he failed at this, too.
Her cell phone rang, and for some reason it worried her. She couldn’t seem to ignore it, though his soft words urged her to. She pushed against him, as if she was only just realizing what she’d done. There was something off-putting about the gesture–as though she hadn’t done this before, as though it was an affront to who she was.
Cold fear gripped him deep inside. Had he pushed too hard, wanted too much from her? Had he led her to turn back to Zachary?
She completely extracted herself from his grip and managed to both straighten her clothes and grasp at the phone before it quit ringing. Her voice was soft in the sudden stillness that had pervaded the room. “Hello?”
Allistair waited.
“Really?” Her features lost their animation, and only because he could see the colors did he know it was due to fear. Katharine thanked the caller and hung up.
“What’s wrong?” He leaned over, searching for her gaze, for contact. But she wasn’t giving it.
“Nothing.”
Her blank face told him that, whatever it was, for him it truly would be nothing.
• • •
“It doesn’t say you’re hunting devils.” Margot had been waiting at the back table before Katharine arrived at the coffee shop.
On the way down she’d had several fleeting thoughts. The first was to wonder if she had gotten herself put back together correctly. She knew that at least Lisa suspected what was going on. So it was reasonable to think that others might be putting two and two together as well. And, truth be told, they should get four.
But her skirt wasn’t hitched up into her underwear, and for now that was as far as she could get her concern to extend.
The second thought was that she’d hardly worked at all this last week. And that recently the only thing she’d actually accomplished was to get Light & Geryon to invest in the firing pins and the gem mine. The world would be a better place had she not done that work. She knew she should feel guilty about how she was handling things–skipping work, not caring–but she couldn’t conjure the emotion. In a way, her father’s disappointing, if expected, reaction had been a bye, allowing her an emotional opt-out from her responsibilities. If he didn’t have any morals about killing people, then why should she have any about something as insignificant as doing her job?
As she entered the coffee shop, she was considering what skills she had that would be marketable if she left the family fold of Light & Geryon. A small terror skittered through her at the thought of so radically altering her life plan, but then she spotted Margot tucked away in the back and used the more immediate concern on the table in front of her to push away the ones she’d just dug up.
Katharine nursed the tea she had bought just to be polite. Never able to quite shake the hostessing rules her mother had drilled into her, she had done a velvet badgering job on Margot until the librarian had told Katharine what to get her.
Now, after all the niceties had been taken care of, Margot was finally able to make her point. And her point was the same as many others today: Katharine was wrong.
She wasn’t hunting devils.
“The translation is different … Latin isn’t like English. The placement of a word in the sentence doesn’t determine the meaning.”
Not being a total geek, Katharine was at a loss. Unfortunately, the look on her face must have conveyed this to Margot, who took it as a cue to launch into an explanation.
“In English, ‘The boy loves the dog’ is different from ‘The dog loves the boy.’”
No shit, Sherlock. Katharine felt the uncharitable thought slide through her head as though it belonged. But Margot was speaking again before she had the chance to really berate herself.
“The sentences are different because of the word placement. In Latin, the words have different endings that you have to translate; you can’t just feed the word meanings into English grammar. So, your ‘You hunt devils’ translation is incomplete.”
Katharine merely waited.
“Once you put the correct endings into place, you get ‘The devil hunts you.’”
Well, maybe the fact that Margot was a geek wasn’t so terrible. That wasn’t such a bad explanation, after all. Then the meaning sank in. “Oh shit. Well, that is different.”
Margot nodded. “It’s disturbing. You got this in the mail?”
Katharine nodded in return, a lie in movement if not in words.
“You’ve gotten two of them.” Margot sipped her tea like she was thinking, but Katharine could see that a point was coming and she took the high road to wait the libra
rian out.
Margot didn’t play around. “That’s why I called your cell and asked you to meet me here. I looked up the laws, and these are threats. You should report them.”
Katharine shook her head. The feeling of again flat-out disagreeing with someone was at once still uncomfortable and yet growing on her. “I’m not reporting it. No one has threatened my person.” At least not in writing, but she didn’t add that.
Margot leaned over the small table. “They don’t have to say, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ not outright. There’s a threat in those notes. It’s implied, but as soon as you get an officer to agree that there is a threat, it’s an offense.”
Katharine opened her mouth to protest, but Miss Margot had another layer of frosting for that cake. “And it’s actually a felony because they are using the U.S. Postal Service to do it.”
Yeah, about that … Katharine thought. As the librarian leaned back, her poorly cut suit shifting so the lapels no longer stayed quite flat, Katharine tried to find a polite way out of this mess she had made. Her mother had told her that lies would come back to haunt her, and here was the smallest–that the notes had been mailed–smacking her in the face.
She could not get the police involved. They would lock her in the loony bin. Her father would quietly fund a padded room for the rest of her life. She would lose her future of little blonde babies named after Zachary. And her mother would die a second death, this time of embarrassment. “I’m not reporting it. It’s not really a threat.”
“Just because it isn’t in English doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
Katharine opened her mouth to protest again, but Margot beat her to it. It seemed the librarian had a bit of pit bull in her. “Even if you don’t log it as a threat, you really should tell the cops. That way, if you get another one, or if something happens, there’s already a record. That’s the kind of thing that they ask later–why you didn’t report it.”
“I’ll think about it.” It was all Katharine could say, even though it was as bald-faced a lie as any she had told in recent days–and she had been laying out some whoppers lately.
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.
CHAPTER 11
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 i
nside, 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.
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