God's Eye (2 page)

From what she had seen before, and from the way she had cornered the cat behind the toilet tonight, she had to believe that the creatures could pass through walls and floors. That would mean the large black dog of two weeks ago had passed through her closet into her living room, then somehow escaped from there. But she hadn’t found him in her living room, or in the common hallway. Nor had any of her neighbors complained. There had been just enough time between the last visit and this one to make her believe maybe it had simply ended. Clearly it hadn’t–the black ash on her floor now said otherwise.

If her previous theory was correct, this cat had dropped through the bathroom floor into the unit below. The soot was the remnant left as the beings passed through physical matter–the carpet or wall or barrier remained unchanged once the mark was washed away. But she didn’t believe the dog had passed into the neighbors’ unit, and she was certain the cat hadn’t dropped to the condo one floor down, which meant that she didn’t know where they had gone. Katharine didn’t want to know. Taking a deep breath, she let the smell be a reminder that she was no longer allowed the luxury of ignorance. Her only recourse was to learn what she could. So she knelt down and stuck her finger into the soot.

•  •  •

As she opened the door to her office, Katharine winced at the stab of pain and made a note to keep her finger from touching anything. Mostly it was an easy lesson–when she forgot and touched something, the pain served as a strong punishment even through the thick bandage.

It was also a constant reminder of what she had seen the night before.

Turning her thoughts back to the task at hand, Katharine slid behind her desk again, gingerly setting down the stack of files she had pulled from the library. Not much remained on paper at Light & Geryon. The library had been a constantly expanding force in her younger days, but the firm’s computerized programs had slowly edged out the old paper filing systems. Still, her research required that she check all angles and see what had been invested in before, so she pulled paper and electronic files alike, wondering when her duties would change again.

She didn’t have long to wait. The change came that very afternoon as she was wincing again at the pain in her finger. Katharine knew she must have bumped it to make it flare up, but she was just as certain that she hadn’t hit it at all. The knock at the door distracted her and she stood as two people entered; she met her new trainee with her left hand grasping her right wrist, her bandaged finger held high, and her face scrunched in an expression her mother would frown upon even from heaven.

“Miss Geryon.” The voice was crisp and modulated and the expression, much like Katharine’s, was held steady, but Lisa Breu was clearly agitated. “Mr. Light has decided that you need an
additional
assistant. This is Mr. West.”

Katharine rushed to assure her young associate that it was no failing of her own that brought about the second assistant. Though she couldn’t be entirely sure that was the case, she didn’t think Lisa was getting pushed out or passed over; her own position at Light & Geryon was held by the strong but slim thread of her lineage. She reminded herself to reassure Lisa before the day was out that neither one of them was at fault for this maneuver. “Thank you,”

Pushing Lisa to the back of her mind, she shifted her focus to the young man standing before her. He was of indeterminate age, but everything else about his looks was more easily definable: he was dark in every way. Katharine stuck out her hand and braced for the pain. “Mr. West.”

“Allistair, please.” He grasped her fingers firmly and etiquette demanded equal pressure.

The sting did not come. Somehow, Allistair managed the solid clasp without triggering the sensitive nerve endings in her finger. Katharine nodded, too impressed by the lack of pain to add that he should call her Katharine.

She spent the rest of her morning showing him around the building and ignoring Lisa’s pointed looks each time they passed in and out of the office. Lisa sat at the desk situated just outside Katharine’s door, but Mr. West was to have a desk
in
her office, an arrangement Lisa clearly considered an omen of her own replacement.

Katharine thought no such thing. While her office certainly had space enough for a second desk, the situation was demeaning. The first time Mr. West had excused himself for a moment she had called her father, demanding explanations. In hushed whispers, she argued with the man who held all the strings to her life. In his standard overpowering and dismissive way, he replied that training other, newer employees was merely the next step for her.

The next step in what?
Katharine remained forever unaware.

As the last Geryon, she was supposed to take her father’s place at the helm along with whomever the Light position was granted to. After her mother’s death, though, it became more apparent that Arthur Geryon would not retire; he would have to die before he let another take his post–even his own daughter. So Katharine had been shuffled from position to position, following some grand scheme that had never been laid out before her.

She reminded herself that the money made the uncertainty far more than bearable, and that the top position should be hers when it was vacated. She was pointedly not thinking of just how it would be vacated when Mr. West returned. With a tight smile, she greeted him and returned to explaining the file system, using his computer to show him how to review old purchases and see the percentages assigned to particular stocks. She walked him through projections and statistical analyses, all the way through to the actual purchase of the chosen shares. The computer balked at the command to finalize the transaction. “We don’t have access to actually put the order through,” she explained. “That has to come from another division–acquisitions. It doesn’t occur in research.”

West nodded yet again, never asking any questions, and Katharine wondered whether he truly absorbed it all or only wanted to look like he did.

She set him free at 6:00 p.m., and then stopped by Lisa’s desk on her way out of the building. Her reception was chilly. Katharine leaned low, bringing her face level to her underling’s, a trick she had learned in one of the management seminars her father forced on some of his employees and always on her. “I did not ask for another assistant in any way, shape, or form. I believe the point is merely for me to train someone, since you seem to need no further training from me.”

Lisa’s expression did not change; her only acknowledgment was a slight nod as her fingers continued their rapid staccato across her keyboard.

Katharine had expected nothing less. She walked away, her heels clicking along the marble hallway. In her usual practiced movements and sure steps, she made her way down to the parking garage and slid into her BMW. A male employee in a full three-piece suit gave a small nod accompanied by a smile that did not reach his eyes, as he too climbed into his car. She knew what he thought, what they all thought. But, contrary to their belief, she didn’t own the building or the firm. No matter how the security guards might bow before her, she was nothing more than Mr. Geryon’s daughter. Indeed, it seemed to her that little had changed since she was in the pigtails and pinafores her mother had insisted upon.

Yes, the only true difference was that the employees no longer thought she was cute–now they thought she was competition. Which was about as wrong as they could be. She lacked the ambition required to wrest anything away from them, and even if they did try to compete with her, there was no way any of them could prevent her from becoming co-CEO.

As the only child the Geryons would produce, Katharine was both son and daughter–equally schooled in business and deportment. She offered her own tight smile in response to the guard’s as she pulled out and down the ramp. She merely waved at the entrance, never having needed the ID required of other employees.

Making sleek, tight turns in the falling dusk, the car’s dark color mingled with the night. Katharine’s eyes blinked and scanned, paying minimal attention to the road. Her mind wandered, not wanting to worry about what might greet her when she arrived home, but she was unable to keep the thoughts entirely at bay.

The cat had come just last night, which would mean she was likely in the clear for a while. Then again, twice she had come home to find subtle disturbances. Her clothes would still be pristinely hung in her closet, just in a different order. Once, her bed had looked wrong, and only when she climbed in did she realize that the seam she always kept at the foot of the bed had been turned to the top.

Each time she noticed one of these abnormalities, there had been a streak of soot on the floor. She didn’t come upon the first streak until a day after she noticed the disturbance, as it was under her desk and she hadn’t gotten on her computer that night at all. The second had been square in the middle of the living room, nearly a foot wide and impossible to miss. Katharine didn’t like to think how that correlated to the size of the mess the cat had left.

As she pulled up under the portico at her building, the uniformed valet appeared from the shadows to open her door. Quickly, she gathered her briefcase and purse and slid out. Nodding briefly to Rod, the security guard behind the desk in the lobby, she made her way down the plush hallway by routine rather than thought. Her thoughts were worth less than mush, as they usually were at the end of the day, and she was looking forward to a hot meal nuked in her microwave and an evening spent in sweats.

The elevator gave a soft ding and she stepped in. She waited out the short ride to the tenth floor, only to find the hallway in turmoil when she arrived. Katharine sighed. It just figured.

Movers were everywhere. Several large, blanket-wrapped pieces of furniture were propped against the wall, some identifiable, most not. Men in T-shirts and gloves hauled furniture into the corner unit next-door to hers. The freight elevator at the end of the hallway arrived and another pair of men spilled into the space with more wrapped items.

This was the second time in a month that her hallway had been overtaken by movers, and she knew from before that she would be able to hear some of it through the walls. She had only seen the elderly couple that used to live in the corner unit a few times during her three years in the building. In fact, she’d be hard-pressed to say who most of her neighbors were. But she hadn’t recognized the man orchestrating the clearing of all the furniture, and as he’d looked a little strung-out, she’d eyed him warily. He’d explained that his parents had died. Together. In their sleep. In the kind of romantic, in-each-other’s-arms death that Katharine, along with the rest of the world, longed for. Apparently, it didn’t lessen the grief of loss. The unit had stayed empty for the five days it took to sell, and then didn’t even get a full thirty-day escrow period. Not a wasted minute–here was the new owner, hallway full of possessions and all.

Without making any eye contact Katharine slipped her key into the lock and pushed her door open. She breathed in the scents of home–lemon and a hint of rose from something the maid used. She wondered if she had again been able to work her magic and get the soot out of the carpet. “Wait!”

The voice jerked her back into the present and out of the folds of comfort. “Yes?”

She was every inch a Geryon daughter now, polite to the tips of her toes. She stepped back into the hallway, presenting herself to the speaker.

The voice belonged to a strikingly handsome man. Pale blue eyes looked warm under an unbrushed fall of gold-colored hair. His build was powerful, but more than that there was something magnetic about him. Katharine felt compelled to take a step closer, and another. As though he had an aura about him, she had to prevent her hand from reaching out and touching … something–his arm, his face.

Her eyes were wandering his features when she caught the twist at the edge of his mouth, so it was only her peripheral vision that caught the movement as his hand extended to her. “I’m Zachary. Zachary Andras. It looks like I’m your new next-door neighbor.”

This time she did reach for him, and he clasped her fingers in a warm grip that radiated up her arm and into her core. It was all she could do to get the word through stunned lips. “Katharine.”

He smiled fully now, the grin creating a glow in his features. It reached his eyes, crinkling the edges and transforming his entire face from stunning to unbelievable.

Abruptly, he dropped her hand and stepped back. “I have to go make a decision on where the couch belongs.”

Just like that, he was gone, ducked back into his apartment amidst the voices of the movers. Now she could distinguish his from the other’s, but that didn’t matter much as she stood in the hallway, her own door hanging open, forgotten in the spell the man had woven.

•  •  •

Allistair lay back against the comforter. The bed took up a good portion of the small room. Land out here wasn’t cheap. Light & Geryon paid well, but his salary wouldn’t buy him space. In Los Angeles, he wasn’t sure if there even was a way to buy space. At least he had a yard. Or what passed for a yard in this town.

Still, he had all the creature comforts he needed. And he loved his creature comforts just a little too much. His dinner had been line-caught halibut he’d bought from the pier on his way home. He’d stopped in a bakery for hot French bread and had been enjoying putting his nose over the bag and inhaling the fragrance when he passed by a farmers market that was folding up for the night. He’d haggled for the last bundle of asparagus. No detail of his dinner had been overlooked.

He had enjoyed the heat radiating from the stove top as he sautéed the vegetables and seared the fish. The bread knife sawed an easy rhythm through thick crust and soft center, adding to the already luscious smells wafting around his tiny kitchen. Putting out one setting of nice china that was soothing and cool to his findertips, he then loaded up his plate and sat down to eat, savoring every bite. He let his dinner roll and melt on his tongue as though it had been millennia since he had tasted anything so divine.