Bedeviled Read Free Page A

no sense. Still, what about the last fifteen minutes could she possibly explain?
    She needed to get away from here. Fast. Before anything else bizarre could happen.
    “You gotta get up, Mags,” she told herself. “Get up and get out of here.”
    Her vision was still a little wonky, but only at the edges, and who needed peripheral vision anyway? She pulled in a shaky deep breath and told herself again to get a move on. Who knew what else might show up in Joe’s little office of the damned?
    That thought was apparently enough to engage all of her engines. Reaching up, she laid one hand on the edge of Joe’s desk to pull herself to her feet. But when she yanked the heavy wood snapped in two. She sat there for a second, staring at the hunk of oak in her hand, then tossed it aside, muttered, “Termites,” and got up on her own.
    A little wobbly, but considering what she’d just been through, not too bad. “This is not happening,” she told herself, avoiding looking at Joe’s desk chair. “It’s all a weird dream brought on by too much wine and ice cream last night. That’s all it is. I’ll wake up any minute now and promise never to sin like that again. All good.”
    Joe wasn’t gone. There wasn’t a dead whatever sprinkled across the floor, and Maggie hadn’t just killed it. Things like that simply didn’t happen. Feeling better the farther into the land of Denial she went, Maggie reached down to pick up her purse and that’s when she noticed it. Her fingertips were glowing. Like the pendant had been. Her skin actually looked as if it were lit from within.
    “Vision’s still bad, that’s all.” She shoved one hand through her shoulder-length, dark auburn hair, took in a long, deep breath and tried to steady the wobble in her knees. Slinging her purse up and over her shoulder, she curled her fingers into her palms and made a break for Joe’s door.
    If this was a dream, she was perfectly safe. She never died in her own dreams, even if it looked a little iffy now and then. If this wasn’t a dream? Then she needed to get gone before some other hungry something showed up.
    What was that thing? Some kind of mutant? An animal of some kind? But that didn’t make sense. No animal she’d ever heard of had the body of a woman and the tail of a lizard.
    “Oh, God.” That freaked-out feeling rose up inside her again, and she moved even faster, headed for the stairwell that would take her down to the street, where she’d parked her PT Cruiser.
    Her steps on the cement stairs sounded like a frantic heartbeat echoing around her as she took them two at a time. Going down stairs was always easier than up, and who had the time or patience to wait for an elevator? She couldn’t stand still now, anyway. If something hideous and ugly didn’t show up, someone else might. And how would she explain the glowing fingers, let alone what had to be her wild eyes and heavy breathing? Not to mention that if she had to tell someone she’d been in to see Joe, then she’d have to explain that nasty stain on Joe’s chair—oh, God. How could she possibly do that?
    She hit the bottom level, charged the door and stepped into sunlight. Thank God. She raced to her car and hopped inside, locking herself in. Glancing into her rearview mirror, she caught the look of shock in her own blue eyes and knew she was still feeling the effects of whatever had just happened. And something had definitely happened. She was out of breath, her fingers were still glowing and she still had the stink of sulfur up her nose.
    Scanning the area, she saw only the everyday: people scrambling for parking places, shoppers marching down the sidewalk determinedly swinging full shopping bags, bright splotches of chrysanthemums blooming in the pots attached to light posts.
    The world looked so . . . normal. It was the world she knew. The world she wanted . She wished, desperately, that she could be as ignorant of what had just happened as all of these other people