License to Ensorcell Read Online Free PDF Page B

Morrison isn’t a Protestant.”
    “No, he’s certainly not! And he’s not mine. He’s just my boss.” I lowered my voice. “A coworker, really.”
    She gave me the stare that her daughter, Clarice, calls the “gimlet eye.” “Well, you should keep your shoes on in his office. What if he’s a foot fetishist?”
    I blinked several times. “You know,” I said at last, “that idea never occurred to me.”
    “That’s why girls have aunts. To warn them about the possibilities.”
    At that point, fortunately, she allowed me to change the subject.
    Once I’d caught up on all the family gossip, I returned to my office. I found Nathan standing at one side of the window and looking out at an angle.
    “See anything interesting?” I said.
    “No. Just checking the lines of sight.” He turned back into the room. “We need to move your desk. A sniper on that motorway overpass with the right sort of rifle could take your head off.”
    “I’d call that very interesting.” For more reasons than one—why wasn’t I more afraid of this possible assassin? Although I suspected that he’d left town, I couldn’t depend on a suspicion, especially since he might come back at any time.
    I shut down the computer and began clearing the clutter off the desk. Once we had the furniture rearranged, I left for the day, but work followed me. In the lobby of the office building, tiled in dirty green, what light there was came from a pair of bulbs in a dust-clogged overhead fixture. In late spring and summer, glare from the street did seep through the glass doors. In winter, only the streetlights outside got through and produced interesting shadows.
    When I stepped out of the elevator I saw movement in one of the shadowed corners. I took a few steps closer to investigate and heard a hiss, more like a cat than a snake. The creature I saw, however, looked reptilian—scaly blue skin, wedge-shaped head—as it rose onto its hind legs like a meerkat. It stood perhaps two feet tall and had shiny yellow claws that looked like they could give its prey a good rip and tear. About this apparition I had no doubts at all. I shifted my bag to my left hand and with the right sketched out a Chaos ward. The creature popped like a balloon. A shriveled skin fell to the floor, then disappeared.
    The forces of Chaos had found my office and sent one of their spies, constructs modeled on some creature from one of the nastier places in the universe. I could see two possibilities: the Chaos masters wanted to kill me specifically, or they merely knew that an agent of Harmony had appeared in their territory and wanted to kill whomever it was. I disliked both options and got the hell out into the open air.
    Back home I took the salad out of the fridge and turned on the TV news to get a quick look at the day before I began working the Internet. The lead story nearly made me choke on my arugula. Another murder that pointed straight to Johnson: a young woman’s body found naked in a deserted area of the Presidio. The news anchor got lurid over the silver bullet that had killed her, and the phase of the moon, just past full, but for a change lurid rang true. It did point to the killer thinking she was a werewolf—or to her actually being one.
    The police, damn them, were keeping her name to themselves, pending notification of her next of kin, nor did the news show a picture of her face. They did say that she’d been dead just under twenty-four hours. When I’d Remote Sensed Johnson leaving the Cliff House, he could have been heading to the Presidio to lie in wait for his kill. Maybe he’d already fled the Bay Area or maybe he was hanging around for me.
    Suddenly I didn’t feel like eating. I’d just put the remains of the salad back in the fridge when the landline rang. I hurried to the machine and saw that the caller ID had been overridden. I picked up the receiver.
    “Nathan?” I said. “What’s up?”
    “How did you know it was me?”
    “How do you