Giles licked his lips again and looked around the impromptu courtroom.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began, using his best storyteller voice, modulating it to the size of the enclosed room. He hated the way the walls deadened the sound. “I’m, gosh, I’m sorry for any impertinence. It was unconscious, nothing but a storyteller using his imagination. I don’t know what more I can say?”
Killington tilted his walrus head and looked at Giles as though wondering how loudly he could scream. Sweat popped out on his face. He knew that looked bad. “I’m sorry for any indiscretion.”
“Indiscretion” sounded like he knew something and was hiding it.
“Er, any words which might have hinted that I know, um, people about whom I know nothing.” Don’t say anything about a place. And just a slight stress on the word nothing, don’t overdo it. “I’m ready to apologize, I do apologize, and I will be more careful in the future.”
With a sinking feeling, he realized that they didn’t believe him. He looked desperately around the room. With a start (too perceptible) he realized that the gorgeous blond woman in the gold silk lame skintight was a demon. (It did not occur to him until much later to wonder how he knew.)
Her bored expression might have been sympathetic as he flashed her a thin, pleading smile. But the stunning, vapid face studied him as though he were a dull museum exhibit. She looked away with an exaggerated yawn, took out a nail file and began smoothing a rough edge. Giles’s heart sank.
Then there was a stir at the entrance. “Let me through, please,” said a voice of authority, a cultured woman’s voice with a rich British accent, Oxford trained.
When the woman walked in, everyone felt they knew her, that she was in charge of something important. She had hair so black it was almost blue and her eyes flashed a secret amusement.
Those eyes swept the courtroom and locked onto Giles.
“There. You. Are.” she declared.
People cleared out of her path as she pushed through like an icebreaker ship and locked her arm in his. “We have a workshop to present in less than one hour and I don’t have time for nonsense. If you’re finished with my main presenter—?”
Killington bowed. It was so clear that this woman, this festival bigwig, thought Giles innocent that there was no point in continuing the trial. She practically marched him out of the courtroom.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
When she’d touched him, he’d felt a passionately sexual heat course up his arm. But he didn’t dare look at her until they were safely outside and lost in the crowd. They stopped under a bay laurel. His babbling gush of gratitude faltered as he looked into her black eyes and realized who had saved him.
When Tiffany smiled, her whole face was radiant. She was the most beautiful demon he had ever seen. “They’ll forget all about it within ten minutes,” she said in that a rippling voice. “Stay out of sight until then. And stay out of trouble, dear.”
She patted his cheek, then walked away into the crowd, disappearing just too quickly to be human. Giles would have given anything to follow her but he didn’t dare leave the safety of the laurel for those crucial ten minutes. He stood there dazed and in love. He had met Tiffany. She had saved him.
Back at the courtroom, people would be getting up, murmuring briefly to one another, feeling a sense of completion, wandering away to other things, knowing all was well. The case of Giles Hammond was dropping from their minds like bits of dirt falling from an old wall. Ten minutes later, he stepped out into a world which had forgotten his crime.
Tiffany! She’d saved him. Him, she’d saved him. The other demon had left him to his fate but Tiffany had stepped in and saved him. His heart swelled like a radiant star. Had she thought him important, or had she fallen in love with him? These thoughts spilled around and around in his brain.
It took courage to face people who had been in the courtroom fifteen minutes ago, ready to see him die by lethal injection of sleepy dark. But Tiffany had been right. People greeted him or ignored him just like usual.
He had nowhere to be now that his show was over. (But it would take heart-thumping bravery to go on stage again tonight). Moved by a desire to see her again, though the chance was slim, he walked in the general direction in which she’d disappeared.
About fifteen minutes later, he gave it up. A demon wasn’t to be found like this unless she wanted to be found. He sank down onto a park bench and watched the people and thought.
In the heart of San Francisco, Mary Hammond put down her book with the picture of the dissolving double helix and listened to a sudden rush of sound from outside.
She walked to the section of wall where the noise seemed to emanate. It was louder now. It sounded like something rasping away at the plaster.
She was not afraid. She stood regarding the wall, a tall, erect woman with a head of straight, snow white hair, double dip reading glasses on a silver chain. Her unfinished painting of the Kenmare Stone Circle stood beside the spot where the sound emanated.
As the roar reached a crescendo, she reached out with her left hand, the blue glass ring catching the light and glinting. Mary Hammond knew a great many things and she recognized the sound. She had heard it once before.
A hand reached through the wall as she had known it would. It was silver and the palm was gold. There was no plaster dust, no hole in the wall. The roar had been the thunder of a waterfall, heard on a magic night when she was young.
Her heart leaped with hope as the hand approached. “I knew ye’d coomb,” her rich Irish voice crooned, soft as velvet.
The silver hand touched her heart and she fell against the wall without another word.
When Jasmine found the body later during her daily meanderings and brought her parents through the little door, Hiyako said to RJ, “Look at her face.” She had seen that face on a statue in Rome 20 years ago in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
On the face of Mary Hammond was the ecstasy of Santa Teresa as the angel pierces her to the heart with a spear of gold.