Forest Whispers by Kaitlyn O'Connor Page A

was,
had the eyes of a fucking eagle. If there was so much as a speck of
dust or a smudged fingerprint, the old bat would make her start
over from the beginning.
    She’d been trying to convince herself this
was just the ‘new girl’ shake down, typical of most jobs where the
boss led you around by the short hairs and cracked the whip over
your head until they were certain you’d been properly broken in and
cowed. If she could just make it through the initiation phase, it
would be smooth sailing after that.
    The intricate carving of dragons and vines
and strange, exotic flowers was beautiful, she supposed. She’d
thought so before she was told to clean and polish the damned thing
anyway. All the tiny crevices and grooves collected dust, though,
and a cleaning rag and polish just didn’t get it insofar as
removing the dust in the minute fissures.
    Unconsciously rolling the kinks out of her
shoulders and back, she glanced surreptitiously around the foyer
again. Seeing no sign of Ms. Hatchet-face, Raina lifted her head
for a more thorough search. All the doors along the foyer within
her view were firmly closed and after a moment, she slipped the
toothbrush out of her jeans pocket.
    The woman would probably shit a squealing
worm a mile long if she caught her using a toothbrush, which was
why Raina didn’t intend to get caught. She also didn’t intend to
spend the entire day cleaning the fucking balustrade that wound up
both sides of the foyer in a grand, horse shoe shaped curve.
    Draping her cleaning rag over the handle of
the toothbrush, she dipped the soft bristles in the cleaning
solution and made short work of the balustrade support, darting an
occasional guilty glance around to make certain she wasn’t caught
at it. When she’d finished, she used another rag to wipe off the
excess cleaning solution and then stood up and leaned over the
balustrade to clean the outside.
    Somewhere in the rounds of balancing and
cleaning and the need to finish the task quickly, she became so
focused on what she was doing that she not only forgot to keep a
look out for her nemesis, the housekeeper, but she also didn’t pay
any attention to the march of many feet on the upstairs landing
until they slowed and finally stopped.
    It was the cessation of the sound that
finally penetrated her absorption. Instinctively, she glanced up
and froze as she met the gaze of the man standing at the top of the
stairs.
    His eyes were unlike any she’d ever seen--on
any human, or animal for that matter. Even with the distance
separating them the color--a strange gold flecked with
orange-rust--seemed to jump out at her. The black pupils didn’t
look ‘normal’ either. Instead of round, as they should’ve been,
they were elongated, almost diamond shaped.
    It wasn’t the eyes, though, that caused her
such a jolt. It wasn’t anything her eyes were registering, because
she wasn’t actually aware of noting and cataloguing his physical
attributes at that suspended moment in time. She wasn’t the sort of
person who went around talking or thinking in terms of ‘auras’ and
yet she’d felt his even before she looked up, an almost electrified
charge in the air that had already been crawling over her and
prickling her skin even before she looked up. Once she did look up
and met his gaze, she was enveloped in something like a force-field
that was ten times stronger than that first awareness, a powerful,
unidentifiable ‘something’ that seemed to suspend her breath in her
chest and her heart and then jumpstart both with an electric
current that made her heart take off like a runaway freight
train.
    He seemed almost as frozen as she was,
though she was quite sure, later when she could think at all, that
it wasn’t for the same reason or anything approaching it.
    For her, the closest she could come to
describing her feelings later was that she was awestruck, as if
she’d found herself in the presence of some deity, or a being with
god-like powers--or a