Was it love? Was that the heady feeling in his kisses? Did she give herself so willingly because he was her soul mate? Or was it something far more sinister?
• • •
Katharine fought her way through the next day. Margot called early asking for further descriptions of anyone Katharine thought pertinent in the ongoing investigation into her sanity. Margot also relayed that most of what she was finding in her research was the usual: God made the angels; some of the angels fell and became demons. It was the standard heaven and hell mythology, and Margot was apparently quite horrified that she worked at a library that was so skewed toward the Judeo-Christian point of view.
Katharine was almost as horrified that Margot’s diatribe made her late for work yet again. As she walked through the back doors from the garage she realized her consistent tardiness of late should have had someone hauling her ass in and firing her. At the very least she should have gotten a warning. Maybe it was because she was the boss’s daughter that no one was willing to shove her in front of the board. Or maybe they just assumed it was okay for her to break the rules.
But it wasn’t. Her father had made that clear from the day she was born. Rules were meant to be followed–to the letter. His rules at least. And that went doubly at work. His primary rule was that all employees sold their souls at the front door when they came in for an interview–Katharine included.
The metaphor made her shudder. But still she wondered why he hadn’t called her to the mat on the issue.
She was so hung up on why she hadn’t been confronted that she didn’t recognize Allistair from the back of his head as she followed him down the hallway. It was only as he took his place in the elevator and turned to smile at her that she realized she hadn’t felt him.
For the first time it dawned on her that she was used to feeling him, that there was something about him that moved the air in a way she always seemed to recognize. So why hadn’t she recognized him now?
She offered a brief smile and made only the most rudimentary of small talk on the elevator. The way she had looked at him at first, assessing him, wondering why she hadn’t smelled or felt him and how she had somehow gotten so close without knowing it was him … the others in the elevator must have seen it. They must be wondering about the two of them.
So she bordered on being rude to him before she thought better of it. She was entirely out of sorts. Her night with Zachary, the call from Margot, the fact that she was far later than she normally was, and now sharing an elevator with Allistair and all these other people …
Why were they here?
There should have been next to no one in the elevator at this time of morning. But it was packed. She glanced at her watch. “Do we have an early appointment?”
His voice startled her. And though she bristled at the way he assumed the appointment would belong to both of them, she just shook her head, suddenly even more confused.
She was right on time.
How was that possible? She’d gotten up on time, but the phone call had pushed her back. She had lingered, listening to Margot tell all the history of the earth even as the librarian denounced it. But here she was, just a few minutes early.
Allistair didn’t push the issue. Whether he sensed the porcupine quills she was projecting or merely didn’t care beyond the fact that he wasn’t late for anything, she didn’t know.
The packed silver cube stopped at almost every floor, letting loose some of its cargo each time the doors opened. As people pushed their way to the front, the remaining riders would reshuffle themselves. Allistair stuck close to her. A few times she could have almost sworn he had sniffed at her like a dog, but surely the other riders would have said something or looked at them strangely. Katharine knew most of the other people in the elevator with them.
There was Ted from accounting. Betty from payroll. Janine in research. For some reason Jeff Grason from security was in with them too–maybe he was reporting back after his long absence. He wasn’t her favorite person these days, what with his convenient loss of memory of her seeing Mary Wayne go right past her on the tapes. When she’d called him at home, he’d said there were so many things he saw that he just didn’t remember that particular incident. It was hard to hate him for it–it wasn’t like he was the only one. Even Allistair had forgotten what she so desperately needed someone to remember.
In that moment, she realized she didn’t really know any of these people on the elevator. She knew names and faces, but nothing about them. Did Jeff Grason have a wedding ring? She couldn’t see his hand. He might have seven kids. Betty? A family? A hobby? Even Allistair she didn’t really know. She had let him peel her clothes away and take her on her own desk, and she still didn’t know anything about him. Nothing of any importance, anyway.
The melancholy stayed with her all the way into her office and eventually overrode her while she was sitting at her desk.
Her fingers worked; her computer registered that she was doing something. But even when she answered the phone she wasn’t fully engaged. And her brain kept coming back to the fact that on the surface she had a cushy job and knew a lot of people–a lot of the “right” people, in fact–but she didn’t know much of anything about any of them.
Only Margot, with her lying ex-boyfriend and need for a big handbag to carry all her things, came through in full relief. Somehow Katharine wasn’t surprised when Margot called a little later in the morning to see if she wanted to meet for lunch.
“Did you find something else, a different”–she couldn’t say “mythology,” so she made a quick substitution–“angle?”
“No.”
It wasn’t the answer Katharine had expected, and neither was the line that followed.
“I just wanted to see if you wanted to grab lunch together. Just as friends. I thought it’d be nice to see you and not talk about all that.”
Even though Margot’s tone was warm and inviting, Katharine responded with her rote “That sounds fine” and was silent, until she realized what an ass she was being.
Here she’d been handed exactly what she needed today–the knowledge that she had a friend–and she was answering a genuine overture with standard, and probably cold-sounding, politeness. Not really sure how to be warm and friendly, she quickly gushed to fill in the space. “That’s great. It’ll be good to just have lunch with a friend.”
There was a moment of silence on the line as it probably hit Margot that Katharine had no clue how to be a friend. Just as Katharine started to respond a third time, Margot’s voice came through. “I know a place just down on the beach–we can walk. It’s beautiful out.”
They made plans as Katharine looked out her window, only now seeing the day in slim stripes beyond the blinds neither she nor Allistair had ever bothered to turn.
After hanging up, she stood and made a point of opening them all the way, for once enjoying the view that helped make the property value so high.
Half an hour later, Margot called her cell from the sidewalk downstairs, and in minutes Katharine was there beside her.
“How long do you have for lunch?” Katharine asked, as she came out the front doors.
Margot smiled. “However long I want. I’m not at the desk today, so as long as I put in my hours, it doesn’t really matter when.”
Having lost all concern that morning after her musings about not being fired, Katharine simply shrugged it off. “Me, too. So come this way with me first.”
She tugged Margot over to the store by the coffee shop, the one with the perfect shoes and the demon reflection in the window. Her pace slowed as she approached, but she wanted Margot to see the shoes, and she wanted to face the window again without screaming. Even more, she wanted to look at it without seeing what had made her scream.
She hadn’t been able to face it by herself, but Margot was the perfect buffer. She alone would understand if Katharine saw something. And if Margot saw it, too, then Katharine might just sleep a little better at night, even though M
argot surely wouldn’t. But instead of giving in to the shivers that wanted to overtake her, she said, “I saw this pair of shoes you’d love.”
Margot frowned at the red patent leather pair that had replaced the pumps Katharine had seen. But her words weren’t about shoes. “Is this where you saw the reflection?”
Katharine nodded. “But we’re back for the shoes.”
“I’m not really the ‘fuck me’ red type.”
Katharine’s mouth dropped open at the term, then she laughed out loud. “No, stupid. There was another pair in the window then.”
She tugged the door open and led Margot inside.
After some serious shoe shopping, they strolled down the slim sidewalks leading to the beachfront walk that extended for miles. If they followed it, they would end up at Venice Beach, fighting off swarms of midday rollerbladers. And didn’t Allistair live down that way?
Katharine pushed the thought aside and enjoyed the weather and the idea of being simply a part of the large crowd. They ate cheap sandwiches to make up for the money they had spent on the shoes, which were tucked in folds of tissue in the bags that hung on the backs of their chairs.
They talked between mouthfuls of bread and meat about old boyfriends and living on their own. About how the weather had finally turned and how neither of them had ever been rollerblading. They made a date to come down on a weekday when it wouldn’t be so crowded and embarrass themselves trying.
On the way back, a phone call sent Margot off to head straight back to the library; there was some sort of emergency among the stacks.
Katharine was so lost in her own thoughts, so abhorrent of going back into her soulless cube of an office, that she lingered in the walkways through the houses. Footpaths replaced the front street and houses were stacked five deep. On the other side of the road, the land again pitched into the water, this time in a controlled, man-made way, the maze of boat slips packed to the gills. The spots that were empty belonged to those who had managed to call in sick or just brush off the land for the day.
She almost literally ran into him, surprised again that she hadn’t sensed him. For some reason, she felt that was a right that had been snatched from her. He spoke her name, seemed surprised at meeting up with her, but she was looking Allistair over rather than really paying attention. Dark hair, dark skin, deep brown eyes. Was this a human incarnation of the creature with the oily black skin that came to her at night?
Working to cover her thoughts, she automatically turned away. Before he could ask why she was acting strangely, she reached down and plucked a dandelion from the untended yard that rolled up to the sidewalk. She held it up to him with a forced smile that said she had in no way been contemplating his lack of humanity.
His smile was quick and sure. And this time she felt him, felt whatever it was that made her let him do the things he did to her. The smile she returned was just as genuine as his, and for a moment her thoughts turned to Zachary. Here, in the light of day, with Allistair at her side, it seemed far more likely that this man was the human and Zachary the plague that had been visited upon her. “Making a wish?” She nodded.
And wished it would all go away.
She wished she didn’t know either of them. She wished she didn’t know about the people at the receiving end of MaraxCo’s firing pins or about the children in the gem mines. She wished she didn’t have soot in her apartment and a fear of her mirror. So she looked at him and wished it were two months earlier, that she could wake up in the past and go on with her life the way it was, before she knew.
Holding the puff of dandelion in front of her, she blew the seeds right at him. With a natural sense of humor she hadn’t quite expected, he smiled at her as the white fluff danced around him like falling feathers.
He was heading out to a late lunch and she was going back in, so they said a quick good-bye and went in different directions. But as she walked away, she found it harder and harder to shake an odd, nagging feeling that he’d taken something from her.
CHAPTER 15
Katharine ran. She screamed. And though she knew it was just a dream, she found she still couldn’t fight her way out. Even asleep, she had begun to wonder whether her dreams were more than mere wisps of her subconscious. Perhaps the other reality of deep sleep, whether confined to her mind or not, had heft and value.
So she ran from what chased her. She couldn’t let it catch her, especially if this wasn’t “just a dream.” Her legs worked furiously, though she knew she stood no chance of getting away from what chased her. It was far more powerful than she. And in the dream, she understood for the first time that it was far older, too. Being malevolent didn’t prevent it from being wise. And she felt it pull back, as though it would just let her run herself into the ground, like a small rat, mindlessly working toward its own capture.
Not knowing what to do, she fought for a burst of speed and instantly smacked into something in the dark. Solid and feral, it brought her to a dead stop. It didn’t need to engulf her or grab her–she was in enough trouble already, having run herself right into it. It pulled back and waited.
As she breathed in and tried to see through the darkness that came and went like fog, she realized she could smell him. And that it was Allistair. With a sigh of relief, she dove for his arms, hoping she could find the needed shelter there. But in the same instant that she started the movement toward him, she suddenly jerked back.
Here. Right before her all along, was another charismatic man who had invaded her life. Another new player in her story. Another who had drawn an unsuspecting Katharine in as easily as if he held puppet strings.
With that, she jerked wide awake in her room.
In a second or two her eyes adjusted to the little light that came in past the blinds and the faint glow from the nightlight in the bathroom. She had never left the overhead light on; part of her had always been aware that light changed nothing in her scenario. Nothing of her dream lingered in the physical space. There was no one here. And it was just her room. But she wasn’t just Katharine.
No, she was shifting. Becoming.
• • •
Zachary jerked back, startled at Katharine’s movement. She had stopped in the hallway that led to the garage. There, all alone, she had turned her head and looked right at him. Then she’d turned back and gone on her way.
She hadn’t been tense. He would have seen that she radiated nerves, and these days she often did. It was his job to help smooth out those feelings, to help her stay as peaceful as possible. She hadn’t been afraid either. That, too, he would have seen and done his best to prevent.
But, no. He’d stayed here, just on the other side of the veil and watched. He was apprehensive about calmness this morning. He had waited for the ripe smell of Allistair to hit him as it washed off her in waves. But it didn’t. It seemed both of them had left her alone last night.
So he’d been shocked when she’d turned and narrowed her gaze to exactly where he stood.
She couldn’t have seen him. If she had, she would have screamed, run, done something. Even if nothing physical had occurred, he would have seen the changes brought on in her thoughts had she managed to actually focus on him. Seeing through the veil was terrifying for humans, no matter what they looked at. They had no point of reference, no system of categorization, and no way to process any of it. Some were closer to what they might call “enlightenment,” but Katharine wasn’t.
Her car pulled out from its parking spot and she drove off to work.
Mary Wayne was still giving her trouble, he knew. Katharine was the only one who remembered seeing the woman there at the office after she had died. All other evidence had been erased. But Katharine had been unaware. She had told the police things in her drug-confused state–things that she couldn’t have known–making her a “person of interest” in the investigation. And the state of affairs over Mary Wayne had gotten very ugly. The only point in Katharine’s favor was that the police had almost stopped asking themselves
who killed Mary Wayne; at this point, most of them had switched to the question of what had killed her?
But Zachary had been listening to see what they found, and the few holdouts for a human perpetrator–those who didn’t think there was a crazy feral dog on the loose, or perhaps an escaped pet tiger–had put Katharine on their list to watch.
That was a dangerous place for her to be. If they saw her as insane, that would only serve to build the case, especially given the manner in which Ms. Wayne had been dispatched.
Zachary sighed. He could save Katharine from the police. And he needed to do it. She needed saving and he had to be the one who came to her rescue. It was the only way she would be safe from the cops and safe from Allistair. She needed to side with him.
Unfortunately, his human form didn’t yet have access to the information that would stop the police investigation into Katharine’s life. He would need to “discover” it in a purely human way before he could use it to free her from scrutiny.
He looked further, past the condo building and into the depths of Light & Geryon. Allistair looked up from where he sat hunched over at his desk, looking and acting all too human. Allistair was supposed to become more human the longer he stayed. While he didn’t seem to notice all the other comings and goings beyond the veil, he pissed Zachary off by being able to find him the second his opponent turned his focus to Katharine.
Zachary decided to let it go. She was with Allistair now, and for the next several hours there would be nothing he could do. It wouldn’t be prudent to try to get to her with Allistair right there.
So Zachary relinquished his attention. When he felt Allistair relax far away, Zachary turned his thoughts to the police. He regretted mixing himself up in police affairs. After all, this was supposed to be about Katharine. But he needed this, and so did she. With a nudge, he moved the thoughts of several of the officers–not enough to make anyone frown or wonder where it had come from, just enough to change the trajectory of the idea.
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