Page 8 of Death and Divination
Chapter 4
Ophelia
Itook the stairs up to the third floor, bypassing the elevator in favor of getting some exercise. Pushing open the heavy door, I stood in a white carpeted hallway, flanked on one side by the elevator bays and on the other by tall glass doors with gold embossed lettering on them.
Prosecutors didn’t normally have fancy offices in the closest thing Accident had for a high-rise professional building, but then most towns didn’t have a panther shifter for a prosecutor.
Grabbing the brass handle, I swung one of the glass doors open and entered. Marcus’ office was like a jungle. Hot. Humid. Chock full of plants. I could barely see the woman behind the desk from all the greenery. She stood, scooting a huge philodendron aside to greet me with a smile.
“Ophelia! What a pleasant surprise. Does Marcus know you were coming?”
I knew Ducha. I’d gone to high school with her but where I’d gone on to be a paramedic, she’d become a paralegal, working with Cassie for a little while at Tower and Mulkeefie. Where better for a hyena shifter to work then a law firm owned by two sphinxes? Last I’d heard, she was in her third year of law school. This gig with Marcus must be some sort of internship, although there was a good chance Ducha was angling for his job. Or thinking of eating him. Hyenas were like that.
“Is Marcus still the prosecutor, or did he suddenly decide to become a horticulturist?” I ducked under a hanging asparagus fern and wove my way through a maze of red veined prayer plants.
“I thought I’d spruce up the office a bit.” She gave me a toothy smile. “Make the place a little homier.”
Homey for her maybe. I’d seen what Marcus’ office looked like a few years ago, and I’d been in his condo once or twice. The guy liked spartan living in high places. His decorative style was best described as geometric minimalist. I was surprised he’d let Ducha get away with this sort of thing. The panther shifter was no lightweight when it came to asserting himself, although Marcus tended to use charm and sex as his persuasion techniques and I wasn’t sure how well that would work on a hyena shifter. Don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty sure Ducha liked sex as much as anyone, but hyenas never let a good roll in the sheets cloud their judgement or their determination to have things their way.
“Well.” I looked around, trying to think of something complimentary to say. “It’s…lovely.”
The hyena shifter beamed. “Of course it is. Now, is Marcus expecting you?”
“Nope.” I stood there for a while and counted. One, two, three, four.
Ducha met the challenge, trying to stare me down. But where the hyena was going for dominance, I was simply standing my ground patiently. Finally, she laughed, reaching out to run her fingers across the fronds of something that looked like a small palm. “Go on in. I won’t even warn him because I like the way you roll, Ophelia. Always have.”
“Back at ‘cha, Ducha.” I gave her a quick salute, then slowly made my way through the mini forest, thinking that next time I’d need to bring a machete. Clear of the shrubberies, I went down a short hallway that led to the huge glass-walled conference room that doubled as Marcus’ office.
Marcus looked up at me as I entered, then shot an irritated glance over my shoulder. “Clearly I need to have a discussion about job duties with my intern.”
“Be careful. I think she bites,” I warned him. Actually, I knew Ducha bit. Several of our town residents bore the scars. And yes, every one of the bitten had deserved them.
The panther shifter’s eyelids drooped, turning the irritated glance into one of pure sex. “So do I,” he purred.
I caught my breath, knowing full well why Cassie had stayed with this guy and put up with his philandering ways for so long.
Turning down the seduction a few notches, Marcus shifted in his seat and suddenly became every bit the serious, professional town prosecutor. Don’t get me wrong, this hot-lawyerly dude he’d suddenly become was still…well, hot, but in a different way then panther-shifter-with-the-sex-drive-of-a-porno-character hot.
“So, what can I do for you, Ophelia?”
His voice still purred, and I steeled myself against his charm, plopping down in the chair across from his desk. He’d done this even when he’d been dating Cassie. It had been weird knowing that your sister’s boyfriend would happily boink you and your other sisters—either individually or all together. It wouldn’t have meant anything to Marcus. It wouldn’t have changed how he felt about Cassie. For panther shifters, sex was sex, and relationships were relationships. It had been something Cassie had always struggled to reconcile herself with, and eventually she’d issued an ultimatum which Marcus, to his credit, had tried to comply with.
Tried and failed. Which was just as well because Sunday family dinners were a whole lot easier without constantly being propositioned by your sister’s boyfriend.
But this was hopefully all water under the bridge. I was here for a reason, and it had nothing to do with Marcus bending me over his desk and screwing my brains out.
“I been having dreams, so I did a divination spell and you were in the vision.”
Suddenly every bit of sexual tension evaporated from the room. Marcus clenched his jaw and let out a slow measured breath. “Me?”
No one wanted to be in my visions. My eldest sister may have been named Cassandra, but I was the one who’d become the prophetess of doom, not her. Finding keys and predicting weather was fine, but people got uncomfortable around oracles. Everyone says they want to know the future, but when it comes down to it, they don’t. Nobody wants to know they’re going to be hurt in a terrible car accident, or that their wife is going to run off with her co-worker, or that their friend is going to steal money from their wallet.
Nobody wants to know when and how they’re going to die.
None of my visions or divinations had revealed that sort of detail, but that fact didn’t stop people from being a bit afraid of me and what I might tell them one day. Marcus was clearly terrified that I was here to inform him that he’d drown next Tuesday or be crushed by a falling piano or eaten by his hyena intern.
“In the vision, I saw blood and smelled something dead over by a tree line—not you, though. You weren’t bloody or dead,” I told him hastily, seeing his eyes widen. “I didn’t actually see a corpse; I just smelled one. And there was blood on oleander leaves, a mountaintop with a choice, and the moon…and golf balls.”
