Chapter Three
E mma stared at her home, wide-eyed. Speechless. For once.
“Fair to assume,” he murmured, “yer no’ just a messy housekeeper?”
Her eyes, when they met his, were brimming with shocked tears. She could only shake her head.
Stepping over the chaos, he lifted a wooden dining chair back onto its feet, out of her way as she staggered into the room, looking at what was left of her furniture.
“Who did this?” she whispered, picking her way through the detritus. She reached for a fallen picture frame—a photo of her and Aubrey—but her hand passed right through it. Her gaze frantically met his. “Who would do this to my house?”
Connor scanned the destruction. “Someone who’s not fond o’ cats?”
“Winston!” she shouted, moving through the house and taking in the absolute destruction. “Here, kitty, kitty! Here, baby!”
Connor followed her, a wary eye on suspicious corners where a cat might hide. He wasn’t scared of the buggers. He just didn’t like them.
But Emma’s question couldn’t be ignored.
Who would do this to her? Or drive her off the road?
Someone wanting something from her? Looking for something, clearly.
Had they found it? Were they connected somehow to the accident she’d had?
He didn’t believe in coincidence, so…likely.
But what could they want from Emma, a woman with no obvious enemies but a roomful of friends in the waiting room, praying for her recovery?
Chances were the cat wouldn’t see or hear her calling him out. Only certain animals could. But he wouldn’t convince her of that.
“You live here alone?” he asked her. “Except for the cat, I mean.”
“No. Aubrey is staying with me for the summer. Only until she gets a place of her own. Her idea, not mine. I’d let her stay with me forever.
She just graduated college. This place was fine when I left yesterday evening.
This must have happened after Aubrey heard about my accident, after she went to the hospital. Thank God she wasn’t here, or—”
Or she might’ve been caught up in whatever was going on with Emma as well, he thought. It was not just this room that was tossed. Every room in her house had been gone through with sledgehammer precision.
After looking in every corner of the house, Emma stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the chaos.
Overwhelmed seemed too poor a word to describe her state.
Despairing seemed more accurate. Because not only had her life been imperiled by what had occurred last night but now, it seemed, her niece’s life might be as well.
Whoever had broken into her place had spared no violence in their utter destruction here.
As if to leave a message to her. With an effort, he reined in his impulse to comfort her.
He couldn’t allow himself to care about this woman. She was a job, nothing more.
“Can ye see anything missing?” he asked her.
“My cat,” she answered. “I can’t find Winston.”
“Maybe he got out when whoever did this came in. The wee buggers always find a way. Nine lives and all that.”
“He’s never been out a day in his life. He wouldn’t.” She bit her lip. “Do you think they took him?”
Not if they valued their lives.
The cat was her one true possession, he surmised, the thing she valued most after Aubrey.
Violet, too, had been an animal lover. She’d been mad for the mare he’d gifted her when they’d gotten engaged—a pretty, dapple gray she’d named Easter for the nearby Easterlin Valley she’d loved so well.
Even now, he could recall the tender care she’d taken with the mare and the animal’s devotion to her in return.
The horse followed her around like a pet dog.
He could still remember her sparkling laughter at his gentle ribbing that she’d ruined a fine hunting animal with such tenderness.
How ironic that such a woman could so easily betray the man whose heart she’d held in her hand, as she had him.
Connor slammed his eyes shut to gather himself, pushing away the memory of her.
He had no will to dredge up Violet in his mind any more than he wanted to feel sorry for this version of her standing before him now.
Emma might’ve been a different woman than the woman he’d once loved, but her soul was the same.
If, instead of becoming a guardian, he’d returned for another go at the world, no doubt he would have stumbled into her circle once more as a mortal.
Because this wasn’t the first time since that long ago life that he’d encountered her in the intervening centuries.
But if he had his way, it would certainly be the last.
Distracting himself, he looked under a table beside the sliding glass door, which was open a crack. “Anything else obvious they took?”
She shook her head, rubbing the heel of her palm against her damp cheek.
“Everything’s here. Electronics”—her television was upside down on the floor; a cracked-screen iPad was lying nearby—“photos. Even my jewelry, which is mostly worthless to anyone but me.” The entire contents of her jewelry box were scattered across the kitchen floor.
A half-dozen artifacts from long ago civilizations were scattered across the floor in various states of brokenness. “These were my sister’s. All of them from places she’d lived. They were all we had left of her.”
She knelt down beside a broken picture frame of a photo of her and Aubrey. She brushed her fingers against the cracked glass. “I don’t have anything anyone could possibly want. I don’t understand. What is happening?”
“We should go back,” he said, hardly tempering the sternness in his voice. “There’s nothing ye can do here now.”
“Back? No. I have to find Winston.”
“Cats are cunning. They can fend for themselves. Leave out a bit of food, and he’ll find it when he’s ready.”
Her expression sank. “I can’t. You know I can’t do that. My hands pass right through things. You do it. I’ll show you where the cat food is.”
Bossy, this one. Fair enough. If that would get her out of here and on to what needed doing. He followed her to the kitchen, where she spotted the plastic container of cat food lying on its side beneath the table.
The skill of materializing was one he’d managed early on and often used in his interactions with the mortal world.
Blending in was simple enough, and he did it without ever drawing attention to himself.
It was often useful in his job—a faculty his mentor, Marguerite, had perfected long before him.
It was she who’d taught him the value of being seen.
Of interacting with the mortal world when necessary.
As he reached for the food, he reminded himself that Marguerite would answer for this assignment as well, putting him in the path of—
The feline banshee-like yowl struck him only a heartbeat before ten sharp talons sank into his back.
He yelped as pain rifled through him. He arched with surprise, tossing the offending cat off his back, landing it in the corner of the kitchen with an almost comical scramble against the tile floor.
It crouched there with a hissing growl in the corner, sending a dagger-filled stare at him as Emma dropped to her knees beside it.
“Winston! There you are! Oh, did he hurt you, baby?”
“Did I hurt him ?” Connor blurted, clutching his wounded shoulder. “Aye, right!”
The little hellraiser instantly mellowed at the sight of his mistress, curious but not terrified by her new form. “You frightened him, appearing the way you did,” she accused.
“Did I? I thought ye asked me to feed the wee monster.”
“The poor thing is half scared out of his mind already with all those”—now she descended into baby talk with the cat—“awful, awful people who terrified you, didn’t they my poor, sweet little boy?”
Winston yowled loudly at him again, warning him off, and Connor glared back before undoing the top of the plastic container and tossing a handful of dry food onto the floor for him. Winston pounced on the kibble, all the while eyeing Connor with suspicion.
“I feed him in a bowl,” Emma pointed out.
“I didna think it mattered, bein’ as all the bowls themselves are already scattered t’ kingdom come.”
“Please give him a little more. A lot more. Who knows when I’ll be back?”
Connor grudgingly obliged, setting down a bowl of water, too.
“I want you to teach me how to do what we did,” she said. “Getting here. That Star Trek teleporting thing.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He slapped the lid back on the cat food. “If ye need to travel, you’ll be goin’ with me.”
“Why is that fair?”
“No one said anything about fair.”
She blinked at him. “Fine. Then take me to the place where the accident happened.”
“Why?”
“I need to see it myself. I need to remember.”
“Because?”
“Don’t be belligerent.”
His jaw worked. “Why do you need to go?”
She reached out to Winston, who meowed plaintively at her.
“There’s something I’m forgetting. It’s important.
We’ll be back in plenty of time for the…
other me to wake up. Once they pull back on the drugs, you’ll see.
This was all a big mistake.” The cat stared up at her.
“I’ll be back, Winston. All of me will be back soon, you’ll see. Don’t be scared.”
Unexpectedly, Winston rubbed up against Connor’s leg before he sat, curling his extravagant gray tail around himself under the kitchen chair.
“See?” she told Connor, who was exploring the painful divots in his shoulder with his free hand. “He likes you.”
“Oh, is that what this is?” he said with a snort of disbelief. “Let’s go, then, before he changes his mind again.”
“Wait.” She turned back to the living room. “First, I want to know. Why am I here?”
“In your living room ?” he asked as if he were speaking to a dim-witted Labrador retriever.
“No. I know what we’re doing here . But why am I…here with you? Like this?”