God's Eye (21 page)

He had barely closed the door behind her before she found herself engulfed in a hug of epic proportions. He whispered
“Shhhh”
and
“Baby”
over and over while he rocked her there on her own feet, in the middle of her own office.

Her head found his shoulder, a safe place to land, and she didn’t know how long she stood there being held like an injured child and finding comfort in nonsense words and a soothing touch. Finally he lifted her face and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Her breath sucked in and her eyes blinked, wetter than even she had known. “My TV got stuck.”

She couldn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t look at her like she was an idiot. He just waited. Another deep breath and a near hiccup later, she managed to form words. “I saw what we put our money into.”

When he frowned because he didn’t understand, Katharine launched into an explanation of the story she had seen on TV and her subsequent research. Still feeling safe in the circle of his arms, she grew more upset as she spoke. “And then my father didn’t even acknowledge that it wasn’t right. He says we aren’t responsible for what other people do.”

“He’s right.”

With that, she jerked away. Her hands pushed hard against his chest, nearly toppling him. She felt heat behind her eyes again. “He
isn’t
right. We shouldn’t give our money to this.”

Allistair cocked his head to the side. “He
is
right. But you’re right, too. We aren’t responsible for what other people do. We can’t control it. But,” he emphasized the word as her anger with him was peaking, “we are responsible for our own parts. The question is: what’s our part?”

“We gave them the money to do it. We funded a portion of this war.”

He shrugged. “If it hadn’t been us, then someone else would have.” “But if we all stepped back we could keep the guns from going there.”

He shook his head. “We help a company that makes guns. We don’t advocate killing. People get killed by … baseball bats and kitchen knives. Should we stop the manufacture of those, too? Or better yet, cars.”

“Allistair, those things aren’t made for killing. These guns are. They are produced without serial numbers or identifying marks just for this purpose.”

“Maybe the right people are buying them for protection.”

“These firing pins, they backfire. They make the gun explode in the shooter’s face.” She was pacing the office now, waving her hands in rapid gestures that punctuated her words.

“Then maybe that’s a good thing.”

“Allistair!” How could he not see? How did no one see? Katharine was surprised by how alone she felt suddenly and how disappointed she was. She had expected him to understand.

“Fine then. But there’s no way everyone would pull out of this. If not us, then
someone
would have come along and all the same damage would have been done.” He stood looking at her, his expression unchanging.

“But it wouldn’t be
us.
We would be able to sleep better at night.”

He actually laughed at that. “I don’t think either your father or Toran Light will miss a moment’s rest over this one.”

Her feet planted, her back straightened and she stared him in the eye, some kind of brave new Katharine. “I haven’t even started to tell you about the gem mine. So tell me you’re just playing devil’s advocate. Tell me that you understand. That it’s wrong to get rich from other people’s suffering.”

She stayed there rooted while he smiled. Didn’t move when his arms came around her, or when his mouth neared her ear. “Of course, baby.”

Only then did she let herself sag against him and lean on his strength.

•  •  •

“Doesn’t it seem wrong to make money off their deaths?”

“We’re not profiting from their deaths.” Allistair protested. Though she rested within the confines of his arms, he needed to push her to see how far she would go. Her morals were finally being decided, and he needed to see where they landed and whether he could alter them. And whether Zachary could alter them.

“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 librarian 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.