CHAPTER ONE
“Kate! What a delightful surprise! Come in! Come in!”
Kate Valentine’s lips curved into a smirk as she entered the office. “Surprise? I told you I was coming here.”
“And it was a surprise,” the office’s occupant said. “I’ve met you many hundreds of times over the years, yet I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times those meetings have taken place in this office.”
That was true. Kate considered Professor Gabriel Levine to be more than just an academic mentor.
He was a great friend and one of the few people on Earth she believed came close to understanding her, including herself.
Yet their meetings almost exclusively took place at Pixie Hollow, a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan, a few miles away from his office at New York University.
It struck her, as it had many times before, how little she knew about his personal life, or his life at all.
She'd only learned a month ago that he had a sister and a fondness for marijuana-laced baked goods.
She still wasn't sure if those two revelations were connected.
Yet another relationship of hers was characterized as much by what was hidden as by what was shared.
“Well, the conversation I want to have with you today isn’t really appropriate for the public.”
Gabe raised an eyebrow above the ivory-colored rims of today's preferred eyeglasses.
Fake ivory, of course. He'd never support such a brutal habit as poaching endangered animals.
"Oh? As opposed to our ordinary conversations, which would make excellent subject matter for 'A Day in the Life of New York City? '"
“Well, I’m not from New York City, so there’s that.”
“Shocking. I would never have guessed.”
Kate gave him a dry look, but behind the frivolous mew of his lips, the mirthful gleam in his eye, and the chin resting casually on one upraised palm, Kate could see a new emotion.
Gabe was nervous. That was unlike him. A man confident enough to wear brightly colored and loudly patterned suits—today a tartan jacket over forest-green pants—and who stood roughly five feet tall while towering above every other active researcher in the field of linguistics had little to be nervous about.
Oh, but he does, doesn’t he? Or sure thinks he does. And has good reason to.
She sighed. “You know what? I’m sorry. You’re right, this is weird. Let’s just go grab coffee and have a normal talk.”
She got to her feet, and he said, "Sit down," in a firm voice.
Kate sat down. She stared at Gabe, who had raised his voice on exactly one occasion in Kate’s memory when giving a lecture about how volume is used to emphasize meaning in differing ways depending on the language being spoken.
He hadn’t exactly raised his voice this time, but it still stunned her to hear him speak with authority.
He popped up and clapped his hands, beaming. He looked every bit like the Pixie Marcus still called him, though her partner would never say that to Gabe’s face. “This calls for tea!”
“For what?”
“Tea, dear! The second-most widely consumed drink on Earth after water! It’s delicious, and I’ve become fond of it recently. It’s possible to discover new things even at the age of seventy-five.”
It was also possible to stall while you work up the courage to face something unpleasant. Heaven knew Kate had more than enough experience where that was concerned.
“Now, my dear,” Gabe said, pouring a bottle of water into an electric kettle and switching it on, “tell me what’s troubling you.”
“I didn’t say anything was troubling me.”
“Oh, please,” he scoffed. “You want to meet here instead of our usual spot. You react with shock at my choice to drink tea instead of coffee. You nearly leave your seat and throw the entire conversation away in favor of an afternoon of trading frivolities at the aforementioned usual spot—this after driving all the way down here from Portland—”
“Actually, I was already in town.” He blinked at her. “For the cryptanalysis conference?”
“Oh. Right, right, right, the conference.” The kettle squealed, and he gave a little jump. “Oh! You must try the Darjeeling I’ve selected. Its perfume is absolutely heavenly.”
Kate was beginning to get an idea of why Gabe might be nervous. "Am I interrupting something?" she asked, "Preparation, maybe, for a lecture?"
He scoffed. “My dear, it’s been considerably longer than your lifetime since I’ve needed to ‘prepare’ for a lecture. Any research I do in advance is purely for my own interest.”
“So, you’re not worried about the keynote speech you’re going to make in twenty-one hours?”
"Of course, no!" he said too brightly.
He hummed as he brought their tea to the large, ornately carved wooden desk.
It appeared to be crafted from a single piece of some dark, reddish wood, possibly mahogany, and sported the heads of what could be eagles or vultures on either side.
The rest of the office was equally eclectic.
The chair was as ornately carved as the desk but in lighter wood and upholstered with crimson fabric that clashed awfully with his current outfit.
A houseplant trimmed to look like a head of broccoli—probably not intentional, but with Gabe, you never knew.
A glass case that contained fragments of different manuscripts: a section of scroll with what appeared to be Aramaic written in brush strokes on one side, a fragment of a stone tablet with Akkadian inscriptions, a First Edition quarto of a Gutenberg Bible, which really should be kept under lock and key in a museum.
A grandfather clock, but a lot smaller, maybe three feet tall instead of seven or eight or however tall grandfather clocks usually were.
And the tea kettle, bright, shiny, plastic, utterly out of place, and almost certainly not purchased by Gabe himself.
She smiled slightly. “Is Sally going to be at the conference?”
The mysterious Sally had only been referred to once by Gabe as the provider of the wonderful marijuana brownies he’d tried.
Kate still didn’t know if Sally was Gabe’s sister, friend, colleague, or lover.
He was on the old side to have a girlfriend, but as spry as he was, she didn’t have a hard time imagining—
Yep. Yep, she did. Time to not imagine that, never imagine it again, and forget she ever imagined it in the first place.
“My dear, you’re stalling,” Gabe said, giving her a kindly smile and wagging a finger.
Kate wondered if she should tell him he looked like her mother when she did that and decided against it. Well, she was here now. She might as well get it off her chest.
“Winters mentioned the possibility of assigning someone else to the Lawgiver cases again.”
“Ah,” Gabe replied, carefully removing two wire mesh spoons from the tea and setting them to the side. “And you disagree with her, of course.”
Kate took a deep breath. “Well…”
Gabe lifted his eyes to hers again. “Ah. Now I see why you’re troubled.”
“I’ve just been thinking. With everything going on right now, I just… Maybe…”
She fell silent, unsure how to put her feelings into words. The small grandfather clock ticked softly from its place next to the case of linguistic mementos. Three minutes passed before Gabe gently prodded, “You’ll have to finish a sentence if you want me to help you.”
She took another deep breath and said, "I'm beginning to think that maybe they're right. Maybe this thing with Cox really is an obsession. Maybe it's really going to take a toll on me, and I'm going to regret not letting it go to someone who isn't personally attached."
“Who is right?”
“Everyone. Marcus, Winters, Mom, my therapist, Poppy.”
“Poppy’s commented on your mental health?”
Poppy Klamath was the Portland Field Office’s junior agent. While Gabe had never met her, he knew from Kate that the mousey young agent viewed Kate with a mixture of worship and fear. It was highly unlikely that Poppy would ever say anything about Kate’s mental health, positive or negative.
“Well, no, she hasn’t said anything, but I can tell she thinks that I’m obsessed.”
“Hmm. Do you think you’re obsessed?”
Kate sighed again and crossed her arms. She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror standing behind Gabe’s desk: tall, slim, auburn hair, a dusting of freckles surrounding a not-quite-button nose. Pretty but not breathtaking. Nothing to write home about.
“Kate. You’re stalling again.”
She rolled her eyes. “No. No, I don’t think I’m obsessed. I think that Cox feels he has some sort of connection with me, and even though that’s obviously bullshit, I’m the one most likely to figure out what’s going on with him and his disciples and bring them to justice before… others can.”
“You hesitated at the end there.”
Kate sighed once more. Elijah Cox—she refused to call him Father whatever his past career—was a notorious serial killer who styled himself the Lawgiver.
He and his various acolytes had murdered over a dozen people over the past several years as part of his crusade to…
to… Well, that was part of the problem. She still didn’t know exactly what his endgame was, only that it involved her somehow, and Cox believed it to be the culmination of his God-given mission on Earth.
“I was going to say bring them to justice before they kill too many people. But that suggests that it’s okay to kill a few people, and it’s not. My point is that I need to lead the Lawgiver cases, not because I’m obsessed but because I’m the right agent for the job.”
Gabe folded his hands. “I have an alternate perspective.”
“Please. That’s what I’m here for.”
“Perhaps you’re substituting the Cox case for other pressing concerns in your life.”
Kate blinked. “I’m not sure I follow.”
He smiled kindly. “I’m suggesting that you’re not really conflicted over the Cox case at all, nor are you obsessing over him. Is it possible that you’re choosing to fixate on Cox because doing so allows you to avoid focusing on other areas of your life?”
“What other areas?”