Shadow Woman: A Novel Read Online Free

lasted about twenty-four hours, blah blah blah. There literally was nothing else, except for the comment about how long it had been since she’d taken a sick day.
    Pain streaked through her head like a warning shot. She gripped the edge of the sink and waited it out, trying to keep her mind clear of thoughts, and the pain faded.
    Okay
.
    Something nagged at her, something she felt she should remember but that stayed maddeningly at the edge of—
    No. There it was. And so trivial. Exactly when
had
she last taken a sick day?
    She hadn’t, not that she could remember. Not in the entire five years she’d worked at Becker Investments. So why had Maryjo said she hadn’t taken a sick day in
three
years? When had she been sick? Surely she’d remember, because she was almost never sick. The few times she had been really stuck in her memory, such as when she was twelve and picked up a gross, nasty bug at summer camp that totally knocked her on her keister. She didn’t even catch the normal assortment of head colds that circulated around the office every winter.
    So when, other than now, had she ever been absent from work?
    She thought back to when she started work at Becker.
    This time the pain simply exploded in her head and nausea twisted her stomach. She hung over the toilet, heaving and gasping—and while she did so, she dropped her cell phone on the floor and stomped on it, breaking it apart.
    That was insane
. And yet—the impulse to destroy her cell phone was so strong that she’d simply acted on it, without hesitation, without question.
    When she got control again, she first blew her nose, then splashed more cold water on her face, as she fought for a logical explanation.
    There was none. She couldn’t remember ever being sick enough to be out of work, but that wasn’t what had made her insides curdle with fear. She felt as if a stranger were fighting her for control of her body, and sometimes the stranger won.
    Whatever was going on, whether she was having a completemental breakdown or there really was something colossally
off
, she’d find out, and she’d deal with it.
    Until then, she could only go with her instincts, such as stomping the cell phone to smithereens. She felt almost painfully foolish, but—
    Maybe not.
    She looked down at the cell phone. Just in case it was still working, she said, “Oh, crap,” in her ragged voice, and picked up the little plastic carcass. “Now I have to buy a new phone.” Then she popped out the battery to be certain it was dead, and dropped both the phone and the battery in the trash. After a second she fished the pieces out, put them in the sink, and ran water over them before once again dumping everything.
    She was so scared she didn’t know what to do next, but what frightened her most of all was the realization that
she didn’t remember starting work at Becker Investments
.

Chapter Two
    Xavier got up before dawn and ran his usual five miles. He liked running in the relative cool of darkness; not only was it more comfortable, occasionally it offered some chance entertainment: once some shit-head had made the serious mistake of trying to mug him, and had finally managed to crawl away with nothing more serious than a few cracked ribs, some crushed fingers, and Xavier’s size eleven-and-a-half track shoe planted halfway up his ass. He’d considered breaking the shit-head’s neck, just to make the citizens of D.C. a little safer, but bodies could lead to complications so he’d refrained. There had been a few other interesting moments, but in general, once the shit-heads got a good look at him, the smart ones would back away and let him run in peace.
    He was a big man, pushing six-four, and muscled in a way that had little to do with a gym and a lot to do with staying alive in all sorts of going-to-shit situations. He could swim ten, fifteen miles, and run twice that many, while carrying up to a hundred pounds of equipment. He could fly a helicopter, pilot a boat,and