Free God's Eye by A.J. Scudiere Page B

cradled in her lap and shook her head again. “I already found that in the dictionary. I can’t think of anything I even could give in to. No one is pressuring me. I’m not involved in any legal problems. No personal or corporate battles. At least none that I know of.” She sighed and raked her hand through her hair, “I mean, wouldn’t I have to know something to surrender it?”
    “Sounds like you’re right. That doesn’t make any sense.” Margot stood to her full height and tapped her foot in a way that said she was thinking. “It was just a note? With just the one word?”
    She looked down long enough for Katharine to nod. It was only a semi-lie.
    “Is it part of a series? Perhaps it will mean something after you have all the pieces?”
    Katharine shrugged. “It’s the first of its kind. And I have no idea what sort of message would start with cave.” “Then maybe it isn’t in English.”
    What?
She was opening her mouth to say all that. To say that she’d thought of another language, and already dismissed it.
    But Katharine didn’t get to say it. Margot was already at work, and besides, she was a professional researcher. She was probably going to make a fool out of herself. But first she told Katharine what she was thinking. Margot immediately dismissed the Chinese, Japanese, and Russian dictionaries out of hand. Katharine asked why.
    “Nothing in them even could resemble the word
cave.
You would never have mistaken it for English.” She turned her long face back to the shelves in front of her, her mouth pursed as her brain worked. She pulled down the German dictionary, then dismissed it too, only passing it over her shoulder to Katharine when she asked for it. But there was no mistake; the
C
section was barely a few pages, and the only thing even close was
café.
That wasn’t it. Margot hadn’t had to open it to know that.
    The French dictionary actually had
cave
listed, but it meant “cellar.” That was even less likely than the English meaning. Margot persisted. Italian had only
cavo,
meaning “hollow” or “rope.”
    Katharine’s gut twisted when Margot tried the medical dictionary. If the word had meaning there, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Luckily there was only
cavum,
meaning a recess. Which was a hell of a lot better than if the word
pox
had shown up on her mirror. Although at least she would have known what that meant. Then she had another thought.
    Maybe she was dealing with a stupid beastie. There was no law stating that being paranormal meant being intelligent, right? Somehow her mouth got ahead of her brain and she blurted, “Could it be Aramaic?”
    Margot frowned as Katharine scrambled for a plausible excuse for what she’d said–something that didn’t involve visitation from black cats and creatures with razor claws. But Margot asked no such thing, just launched into another display of nerdy intelligence. “Aramaic isn’t right. Again, the alphabet is so different, you would have recognized right away that it wasn’t English. But it might be Latin.”
    Her long fingers snaked for a thick purple book, reminding Katharine of the talons she’d seen the other night. Deftly, the librarian thumbed through the pages, then stopped. “Did it have a bar over the
E?”
    Katharine scrambled to her feet for the first time since Margot had approached. “Yes, kind of.”
    Her heart scrambled in her chest, trying to get away from what she didn’t know. She had been telling herself the mark was a glitch, an old fingerprint on the mirror, a smudge and nothing more. A bar over the letter
E
complicated things immensely.
    Margot turned the dictionary toward her, one long, almost ghoulish finger pointing to the word just as it had been on her mirror that morning:
cav$$.
Her voice was almost condescending, but Katharine’s pulse was too fast for her to bother being offended. “It’s not pronounced
cave,
it’s
cah-way.”
    Katharine didn’t care about that, only what she read