Bedeviled (2 page)

What the hell was happening? Was that really a
tail
? She’d heard of man-eating women, but she hadn’t really thought they actually
ate
the man!

The creature still hadn’t even glanced at her, and Maggie knew she should be turning around and running for her life. After all, once the beast finished off Joe, what was to stop her from having Maggie for dessert? But how could she leave Joe to be gulped down like a Hostess Ding Dong? Sure, she’d broken up with him, but only because he was boring. That didn’t mean she thought he qualified as Creature Chow.

She supposed she should have been more scared than she was, but freaked-out and furious won the day. Racing toward the desk and what little was left of Joe, Maggie swung her purse in a wide arc, smacking it into the creature’s head hard enough to interrupt her “meal.”

Instantly the naked diner turned on her with a snarl that displayed rows and rows of what looked like very sharp teeth. Her dark red eyes burned, and the pendant hanging between her high, perky breasts seemed to glow even brighter.

The creature swung one arm out at Maggie, knocking her ass-over-teakettle, toppling the single chair drawn up in front of Joe’s desk to fall on the floor. She landed on her butt, though, which, sadly, had plenty of padding. Still clutching the purse that contained her life, Maggie jolted to her feet in time to see the naked whatever push away from Joe and head toward her.

It took only a very quick look to let Maggie know that there was no saving Joe. By this time he was barely more than a stain on his faux-leather desk chair. The nondescript office seemed to shrink around her as the creature smiled—which was somehow even more terrifying—and leaped at her.

“Yow!” Maggie scrambled out of the way, still swinging her purse, but this time the naked snacker avoided getting smacked, and the momentum of the swinging bag pulled Maggie off balance until she stumbled right into the whatever-she-was.

“Isn’t this nice?” the thing crooned with its mouth full. “Someone ordered food delivered.”

Up close and personal, the female looked even scarier. Those red eyes were like uncovered manholes into hell, and when she grabbed hold of Maggie and threw her to the desk, Maggie knew she was in trouble. Not only did the thing have some serious chomping power, but she was strong, too.

“Back off,” Maggie shouted, knowing it was no use. No way was this thing going to quit.

“You have to die; you’ve seen too much.” She smiled, displaying those shiny, sharp teeth to excellent advantage.

“Don’t remember a thing,” Maggie assured her, struggling for all she was worth. “Honest. Can’t see without my glasses, anyway.” She blinked furiously, pretending to need glasses, trying to convince the hideous female that she was one step up from Mr. Magoo.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, laughing as blood ran down her chin to her neck.

Oh, God.
Maggie swallowed hard and struggled to find something on the creature to grab. But she’d never been much of a hair puller, and since the damn thing was naked, there weren’t a lot of other choices she was willing to make. Boobs or tail?
No, thank you.
“You don’t have to kill me,” she argued frantically. “Honestly, I won’t say a thing. Who would believe me if I did?”

“Idiot human.”

“No reason to be insulting,” Maggie said, her mind racing in tandem with the rapid beat of her heart. How was she going to get out of this? That shining pendant the creature wore swung down close to her, and Maggie curled her fingers around it and yanked. It took a couple of tries, while the female on top of her was screaming and howling and trying to pry herself loose, but Maggie hung on and finally wrenched the gold chain the pendant hung from strongly enough to snap one of the links.

“Nooo!” The howl coming from that “woman” lifted every hair on Maggie’s body straight up and brought goose bumps to every square inch of her skin.

Taking advantage of the creature’s momentary distraction, Maggie reared up and back, planted one foot in the female’s belly and kicked out, giving herself just enough room to spring up off Joe’s desk and charge. She had zero idea what she was going to do now, but she was just so darn mad, she wasn’t really thinking. Besides, her opponent was looking a little worried, which evened out the playing field a bit.

Swinging that pendant as if she were aiming for a home run in Dodger Stadium, Maggie cracked the heavy gold-and-crystal bauble into the creature’s head again and again. Fury was riding along with terror, but clearly her rage was still in the driver’s seat. The wildest part, though, was that instead of fighting back, the creature was cowering in a corner, her tail wrapped around her body. Like she was afraid of the very necklace she’d been wearing only a minute or two ago.

“What the hell is wrong with you? You can’t just go around eating people!” Maggie shouted. She knew she wasn’t making much sense, but then, she was willing to bet that not a lot of people would have been at their best in this situation.

“No, stop!” The naked female raised both hands, trying to ward off the pendant, but by this time Maggie was just too pissed to care. “Don’t. You ignorant human, you’ll kill us all.”

“Oh, please, like I’m going to believe something that wanted to eat me!”

Still swinging that pendant, Maggie reminded herself that this thing had turned Joe into an all-you-can-eat buffet and had planned to do the same thing to
her.
So no guilt here. Just righteous indignation and a hell of an ache in the arm that was still swinging that heavy pendant.

The creature was whimpering now, moaning, and Maggie’s fury was starting to fizzle out—though she kept swinging that heavy pendant—when the
next
weird thing happened.

The crystal front on the pendant shattered, and a whirling tornado of golden light spilled from it. The minitwister seemed to grow and expand, almost like it was alive and breathing. There was a swishing sort of sound as what looked like spinning gold dust lifted up and down in the still air, and Maggie backed up. She looked at the broken piece of jewelry and then to the tornado that was wrapping itself around the now-screaming, naked whatever.

“Oh, crap,” she whispered, looking around the room as if searching for help that wasn’t coming. “Out of the frying pan and straight into the bonfire.”

That naked female curled itself up into a ball of keening wimpiness—all of her teeth-baring aggression was gone now as she tried to make herself so small that the golden tornado wouldn’t find her. Maggie knew just how she felt. She grabbed up her purse and clutched it to her like it was a shield. She should have been running—she knew that—but somehow she couldn’t make herself stop watching. Horrified, she saw the whirling gold cloud settle over what had eaten Joe and, in an instant, reduce whatever it had been to a pile of lint on the floor.

“Ohmigod.” One word, because she was just too freaked for three. That gold whirlwind spiraled up toward the ceiling, then did a quick about-face. It was moving away from the lint pile and headed toward Maggie. “God. So I’m not going to be eaten; I’m going to be a dust bunny instead. This cannot be happening.”

But it was. She dodged to the left and the vortex moved with her. She leaped right and the damn thing kept pace.

Her tennis shoes slid in something slimy that she so didn’t want to identify. Heartbeat thundering hard in her chest, she bolted around the edge of the desk, headed for the door. She didn’t even come close.

The whirlwind hit her and felt like what she imagined getting slammed into by a train might. Pain. Lots of pain. She staggered, dropped her purse and fell to all fours while the golden cloud settled down over her, sinking into her skin, sliding through her body. She felt it merging with her, traveling through her system, giving her what felt like the fever of the century. Soon, she thought wildly, she’d be lint.

Maggie thought about her sister, her niece. She wouldn’t see them again. Wouldn’t ever find a guy incapable of boring her to death. Wouldn’t become a famous artist and live in Paris. Hell, she wouldn’t even get to see the next Harry Potter movie. Game over.

Groaning, Maggie hung her head, stared down at the floor and realized she couldn’t see it, which was probably not a good sign. She couldn’t breathe, either. Was this what that . . .
thing
had felt? Gagging, coughing, eyes streaming tears, Maggie would have thought she’d been Maced, but as it turned out, this was so much worse.

Visions spilled through her mind: Of a city she’d never seen before, filled with shining crystal buildings and floating people. Huge, ancient trees with windows cut into their trunks lined streets that shone brightly in the sunlight. Fields of flowers stretched out for miles and then blurred into a wash of vibrant color. Then those images faded and other, less pleasant pictures showed up. Creatures like the one who’d just died, and so many others that looked far scarier.

Maggie shook her head, trying to dislodge the images; then she groaned, coughed and struggled to breathe. Slowly the visions faded until there was only one last picture rising up in her mind.

A pair of eyes.

Familiar. Pale green.

Staring right through her.

And then it was over.

She could almost see again, and breathing was easier. She wasn’t dead, and even the nausea was fading, so Maggie gratefully sucked in air like a drowned person after CPR. She felt ragged, like she’d been beaten up by experts.

“Crap,” she muttered to no one, since Joe was gone and the female was dust. “What the hell was
that
?”

Naturally she got no answer, so she collapsed onto the floor, letting her face slap into Joe’s ugly, industrial beige carpeting that somehow smelled like sulfur. Her whole body ached like she’d been at the gym—which was why she avoided most exercise.

But there was a strange sensation of power settling into her, which she could not explain at all. Along with the aches and pains she felt, there was a kind of strength beginning to build inside her that just made absolutely no sense. Still, what about the last fifteen minutes could she possibly explain?

She needed to get away from here. Fast. Before anything else bizarre could happen.

“You gotta get up, Mags,” she told herself. “Get up and get out of here.”

Her vision was still a little wonky, but only at the edges, and who needed peripheral vision anyway? She pulled in a shaky deep breath and told herself again to get a move on. Who knew what else might show up in Joe’s little office of the damned?

That thought was apparently enough to engage all of her engines. Reaching up, she laid one hand on the edge of Joe’s desk to pull herself to her feet. But when she yanked the heavy wood snapped in two. She sat there for a second, staring at the hunk of oak in her hand, then tossed it aside, muttered, “Termites,” and got up on her own.

A little wobbly, but considering what she’d just been through, not too bad. “This is
not
happening,” she told herself, avoiding looking at Joe’s desk chair. “It’s all a weird dream brought on by too much wine and ice cream last night. That’s all it is. I’ll wake up any minute now and promise never to sin like that again. All good.”

Joe wasn’t gone. There wasn’t a dead whatever sprinkled across the floor, and Maggie hadn’t just killed it. Things like that simply didn’t happen. Feeling better the farther into the land of Denial she went, Maggie reached down to pick up her purse and that’s when she noticed it. Her fingertips were glowing. Like the pendant had been. Her skin actually looked as if it were lit from within.

“Vision’s still bad, that’s all.” She shoved one hand through her shoulder-length, dark auburn hair, took in a long, deep breath and tried to steady the wobble in her knees. Slinging her purse up and over her shoulder, she curled her fingers into her palms and made a break for Joe’s door.

If this was a dream, she was perfectly safe. She never died in her own dreams, even if it looked a little iffy now and then. If this
wasn’t
a dream? Then she needed to get gone before some other hungry something showed up.

What was that thing? Some kind of mutant? An animal of some kind? But that didn’t make sense. No animal she’d ever heard of had the body of a woman and the tail of a lizard.

“Oh, God.” That freaked-out feeling rose up inside her again, and she moved even faster, headed for the stairwell that would take her down to the street, where she’d parked her PT Cruiser.

Her steps on the cement stairs sounded like a frantic heartbeat echoing around her as she took them two at a time. Going down stairs was always easier than up, and who had the time or patience to wait for an elevator? She couldn’t stand still now, anyway. If something hideous and ugly didn’t show up, someone else might. And how would she explain the glowing fingers, let alone what had to be her wild eyes and heavy breathing? Not to mention that if she had to tell someone she’d been in to see Joe, then she’d have to explain that nasty stain on Joe’s chair—oh, God. How could she possibly do that?

She hit the bottom level, charged the door and stepped into sunlight.
Thank God.
She raced to her car and hopped inside, locking herself in. Glancing into her rearview mirror, she caught the look of shock in her own blue eyes and knew she was still feeling the effects of whatever had just happened. And something had definitely happened. She was out of breath, her fingers were still glowing and she still had the stink of sulfur up her nose.

Scanning the area, she saw only the everyday: people scrambling for parking places, shoppers marching down the sidewalk determinedly swinging full shopping bags, bright splotches of chrysanthemums blooming in the pots attached to light posts.

The world looked so . . . normal. It was the world she knew. The world she
wanted
. She wished, desperately, that she could be as ignorant of what had just happened as all of these other people were. This side street in Castle Bay, California, was crowded with too many cars and pedestrians. She couldn’t have a meltdown here. Someone would see her, and then what?