God's Eye (39 page)

“So after Halloween we can lock him back up? That’s too long to wait.”

“I know. I just thought it might help. We’re on the right track, and something here is going to lead us to exactly what we need.”

“I know you’re right. I don’t mean to sound negative. I’m just impatient.”

“No problem, I’d be impatient too, in your shoes. I did find a handful of binding spells.” Margot handed a few over to Katharine. Two looked more like recipes than articles. “The idea is that you can stop the creature from harming others, and ‘others’ would include you. But your spell has to be more powerful than his magic. So that may be an issue.”

Katharine nodded.

“The other option is”–Margot sifted through the mix–“a protection spell.” She sifted more. “I had two of them. Together. Crap.” She flipped papers and thumbed through the stacks of Catholic and voodoo information, her brows pulled tighter and tighter together while she looked. “I brought them with me … I thought.”

After fifteen minutes of checking her bag and looking around the apartment, she declared the binding spells officially lost. She said she must have left them behind by accident. She had kept them out separate, after all.

Katharine leaned back on the couch. “So sometime tomorrow, we’ll figure out how to protect me from him.” “Nah, let’s go now.”

“It’s eleven. Even I know the library is closed.” Margot smiled and pulled out her keys. “But I’m the head librarian. I can get in whenever I want.” “Really?”

“Oh yeah. I should drive, so it looks less like someone trying to break in. It’ll be my car in the parking lot. If anyone sees it, they’ll recognize it’s me. It makes the visit look more legit.”

With her purse slung over her shoulder, Katharine followed her friend down to her car, uneasy about going into a closed building. She didn’t think she’d ever done this before. It was a little too close to B & E, as far as she was concerned. But her friend seemed to think it was no problem. And Katharine’s desperate need to know what was in those spells more than outweighed her concern.

It wasn’t far to the big ultramodern building. Margot parked in an employee spot and walked up to the door just like it was 8:30 a.m. and she was there to start her shift.

Though there was a light overhead, it was dark at the doorway and she had trouble getting the key to fit.

“Margot, the cops are going to come.” Katharine had never had a run-in with the police before recently, and she sure didn’t need another. Not so soon.

“The police aren’t coming, wimp. I have a master’s in library science–surely I can work a key!” But it took another minute of Katharine sweating bullets and watching out for the boys in blue before the key worked. She probably looked even more guilty, the way she kept glancing around, but she couldn’t help it. She was grateful to get into the building with the door closed behind her.

Margot led her into the office and looked around, then softly swore one more time. “Pam would have put all the papers left on the counter into recycling. I’ll have to go find it again.”

Though they put the lights on in the back where the offices were, Margot didn’t want to light up the whole library or even just the reference overheads; it might alert someone driving by that they were there. So she grabbed two flashlights and started down the aisles.

It was eerie as all hell.

Katharine wasn’t one to be skittish in the dark before this, but lately she had become more and more so. The quiet clicking seemed to be normal for the building, but though it didn’t faze Margot at all, it was making Katharine jumpy.

Then there were the glass windows. They were high up on the walls, where the two of them were waving their flashlights, and she didn’t think anyone on the street would see the lights. But that concerned her less than the thought that she might see something in the reflections.

Luckily, Margot had no designs on keeping them out in the stacks for long. Since she couldn’t remember exactly which books she’d found the protection spells in, she started pulling whatever she could. By the time she was done, Katharine must have had about fifteen huge volumes stacked in her own arms and Margot was balancing almost as many.

They walked the books back to the office and set them down.

Methodically hunting for the spells they needed, the two women would periodically stop and point something out, then photocopy it. By 1:00 a.m., they had only one spell–but a huge stack of pages to read through later.

Katharine was getting tired and was about to ask if they could come back and try again tomorrow, when Margot grabbed her arm tight enough to make her wince. But her friend didn’t notice. Katharine leaned in. “Did you find the spell?”

“No. Look.” Turning the book around, Margot held up a two-page reproduction of a painting for Katharine to see. She didn’t point, only spoke. “I’m thinking about what you described to me. You said it changed sometimes … not the animals, but the creature itself.”

Katharine nodded. The painting depicted beasts like the ones she had seen, some black and tarry, the others silver and slick, long blades of fingers ripping at each other’s flesh. They all bore wings, and some hovered overhead, held aloft by an unseen breeze on black or silvery membranes, like skin stretched taut enough to see through. Mouths barely contained sharp teeth that could only be made for tearing at each other.

Transfixed by the picture, her blood was running colder and colder. “Yes, that’s what I saw.”

Her beast had appeared to her in both ways, black and silver. And when Margot asked exactly that, Katharine could only nod.

This was what she had been seeing. This was not a similar idea or a pencil sketch. Some artist had seen just what she had been seeing, only he had seen legions of them. And he had depicted them with a near-photographic skill that took her breath away.

Margot’s voice was so soft that she almost didn’t hear it.

“Katharine, the painting is called
The War of Demons and Angels.”

Katharine sat stunned.

But Margot didn’t. “Didn’t you say Zachary had bruises? Right after you saw that fight in the shop window?”

Katharine nodded. “But he doesn’t have them now. Maybe I imagined it.”

“No, you didn’t imagine any of it, and that’s the problem.” With a very troubled look marring her pretty features, Margot set the picture down across the desk in front of them. The book was huge, fifteen inches tall, and when open it was almost two feet across. The painting was horrific. “How could you have just imagined the exact same thing other people saw?”

Katharine was about to give some non-answer when Margot charged into the fray again. “Why did we suspect these guys in the first place?”

That she could answer. “You asked if there was anyone new and charismatic in my life. You read that a demon may appear that way. And I said there were two men like that.”

She wanted to vomit. Somehow she had held it together when it was just a demon. Somehow, through all that craziness and all the unexplained things, she kept up appearances, even to herself. But now …

“Katharine! Are you all right?” Margot didn’t wait for an answer, just pushed her gently into the nearest chair and ran to fetch a mug from the break room. “It’s just tap water, so it isn’t too cold, but you should drink it anyway.”

She pushed the mug at Katharine until she was forced to take it and drink the lukewarm water that didn’t taste too great. That was L.A. for you. She managed three sips before she started to break down again. Her voice came through in just a whisper. “I had sex with both of them … I didn’t really think about that before. I just got mad that it had taken advantage of me. I kept thinking that at least one of them was the real deal, but now …”

“Take a deep breath.” Margot breathed with her and pulled up another chair.

The seats were barstool height so the staff could work at the high counters. But right now Katharine just feared she would fall off and hurt herself. She feared a lot of things. But one of those things had hovered at the back of her mind for days. It was begging to be acknowledged. Only now, in the middle of the night, in a locked public building alone with Margot, could she bring herself to voice it. “What if I’m pregnant?”

“What!” Margot did almost fall off the chair. “Oh God, that never occurred to me.” She straightened herself and began straightening the office, too. She gathered books and jotted down a few of the titles, then put them all in the drop-off bin. Then she took Katharine’s hand and tugged her off the stool. “Let’s get that first one taken care of right away.”

After locking up the library, they drove around. Luckily, it didn’t take long to find a pharmacy that was open twenty-four hours. Leaving Katharine in the car by herself, Margot ran in and came back out with a small box in a plastic bag.

Twenty minutes later, Katharine was lying on Margot’s bed with tears running down her face. “Oh God. That had me so scared.”

“Hey, at least it came out the way it did. I don’t even want to think where we’d be if you were pregnant.”

“We?” Katharine shook her head. “Where
I’d
be. I’d be the pregnant one. You’ve been doing all of this because you’re just nice.”

Margot laughed, and it occurred to Katharine that the librarian laughed more than anyone she’d ever known before. “I’m not just nice.
Nice
is why I helped with the first translations. Then I looked into it because I was curious–which is just a natural fault of mine. But if you were pregnant, it would be about where
we
would be. Because we’re friends. Sometimes you act like you’ve never had one before.” That stopped Katharine in her tracks.

Surely she’d had friends before. There were a few girls from school that she kept in touch with. But when she thought about it, she did that because they were in the same sorority and their parents knew each other. They had lunch when they were in town; they caught up. But that was about it. She showed up to charity functions for her Dad, and even planned a few. She knew the women who fit in there, they had gone out for drinks. She’d gone clubbing a few times with some of her coworkers, but that hadn’t lasted long.

No, she didn’t think she’d ever had a real friend before. But she didn’t say it.

Neither did Margot. Her new friend just handed over a soft, pink Victoria’s Secret sleep tee and told her to stay where she was. Margot took the futon in her own guest room.

Katharine slept until sometime right before dawn, when she woke up, sensing that something else was in the room. She didn’t flinch, even though it took a full minute to remember where she was. Then she was mad. It had come to Margot’s home.

The faint light of dawn sifted in through the thin curtains, revealing a shape sitting in the middle of the floor. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that not only was it a panther, but it was stretched out as if it had made itself comfortable.

Leaning over the edge of the bed, she did her best to stare it in the eyes. Her voice was low and mean, and she said the words the way Zachary had when he had gotten rid of the wolf. “Get out.”

This was the creature that had tormented her. It had toyed with her for months, showing up in her condo, disappearing, leaving traces of soot, and rearranging small things until she thought she would go insane. To what end? What purpose had all that served, except maybe to show that it could get to her? No more. “Get out.”

Just then, the door opened, throwing light across a sector of the room. Katharine jerked her head up to see Margot standing in the doorway. “I thought I heard someone–oh, holy shit.”

She looked down at the panther. And as Katharine watched, it looked back up at her. Its head moved, almost as though to nod, and then it turned its gaze back to Katharine before sinking into the floor.

If she hadn’t been so pissed off that it had come here, she would have laughed hysterically at the look on Margot’s face. Her expression of horror went over the line of comical. But it didn’t last long. As usual, her friend held it together. “So, that was the thing that visits your place?”

“Yes.” Katharine was now sitting up on the side of the bed, legs dangling over the edge as she looked at the huge spot of soot the panther had left. She was just as pissed that she’d have to clean up the mess as anything else.

“Well, at least it’s official,” Margot declared. “You aren’t crazy. I just saw a panther in my room and it sank into the floor.” “Amen to that. Do you have a wet vac?”

“No.” Margot frowned at her. “Are you always this calm about it?” “At this point, it has happened enough that recently, yes, I have been rather calm. I’ll bring my carpet scrubber by later and clean this up.” “Do the animals always look like that?”

“Like what?” Katharine was puzzled. Black? Kind of silent? What?

“Its coat was black, but there were so many colors reflected in it. The way colors reflect in an oil slick. It looked solid and real but not quite like something I could look up and find in an animal guide.” Margot’s brows pulled together in the look that told Katharine she was thinking of how to say what she wanted. “Like we would find out that breed of cat doesn’t come in pure black or something. Like something was just a little off.”