between herself and Milada Daranyi.
When Rachel reached Milada’s house, she found the woman sitting at the back of the porch, hidden behind her sunglasses and her mask of porcelain stillness. Rachel understood why she sat and watched as the gods must sit and watch. Mortals must amuse her so, scurrying about in a constant tizzy, hastening with every skipped step toward the end of their too-short lives.
“How are you feeling, Rachel?”
Rachel stepped onto the porch deck. She was afraid that a sudden sense of intimacy, as one finds in a friendship too quickly formed, would dampen any real friendship that might exist between them. “Quite well, thank you. Saturday morning I was a little woozy—”
“A perfectly normal response.” Milada said, “I do not imagine, Rachel, that you have discussed this arrangement with your husband?”
Rachel shook her head. “I prefer not to have to lie, but no.”
“I agree. I hire people to lie for me.” Her thin smile almost became a grin. “Shall I meet you tomorrow at the hospital then? Around eight o’clock?”
Rachel’s heart skipped a beat. The substance of their relationship rushed into the forefront of her thoughts. She nodded. “Deseret Children’s Hospital, room 3209.”
“Very well. You could give me a ride home. Spare my driver the journey south. He’s a remarkable young man, my driver. Twenty-three, married with two children, determined to enter medical school.”
“I was twenty when I got married.”
“And in my youth, girls were married barely out of childhood. What our elders expect of us we come to deem as natural, even right.”
There was more to that statement than she said. Rachel shifted the weight off her right foot. She meant to bid Milada good-bye, thank her again, step back, and take her leave. Instead she stepped forward. “How did this happen to you, Milada? Who are you really?”
Milada turned her head to look at her. A long moment passed between them. When she spoke, she quoted from a text Rachel felt she should know but couldn’t recall: “And how he fell from Heaven, thrown by angry Jove sheer over the Crystal Battlements.”
Rachel knew the context, the Book of Revelations: The great dragon was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. She said, “Those fallen angels were condemned to never be born into this world, to remain spirits forever. You could not have been one of them.”
Milada smiled at her reassurances. “But I fell softly.”
Chapter 28
No man can serve two masters
Garrick’s mergers and acquisitions team arrived Monday morning to ramp up for the Wylde Medical Informatics takeover. Milada was confident that a deal was in the offing. The accountants from KPMG had already rented the suite next door. Milada directed the troops from her command post in the conference room at Loveridge & Associates. She was the coach taking her college squad into the final four.
They were at that point in the game when things were getting interesting. They’d been running up and down the court for forty minutes, the score was all tied up, and if something important was going to happen, it was going to happen now. Seconds left, a three-point shot arcing high over the basket.
The constant press of the players was for Milada a necessary evil. She preferred to work alone, to reach out through the proxy of her aides, Jane in New York and Karen Talbot here at Loveridge. Even Garrick, as relaxed on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as she was in her empty West Seventy-Second Street brownstone, preferred to retreat at the end of the day to his subterranean cell, to his solitary self.
Den dwellers like the lycanthropes mystified her. The behavior ran in the genes, she supposed—that primeval affection for the group, that inherent desire to belong that made homo lupus ultimately more human than homo lamia, despite the more monstrous and undisguisable nature of their metamorphosis. Wolves lived in packs, far from the madding crowd. She lived alone, but alone among many. It amounted to more than the simple utilitarianism of keeping her food close at hand; that incalculable need to maintain the illusion of her humanness kept her at once insulated from the teeming city, yet cheek by jowl with the peopled world.
Karen sidled up to her. “Mr. Burke is on the phone.”
Milada plucked the receiver off its cradle. “Good morning, Garrick.”
“Milly, turn on CNBC.”
The television was set into a bookcase behind a pair of cabinet doors. Karen found the remote. She clicked through the channels, finally