Katra stood deep in the shadows and watched as Nick left the bar and trudged down the street towards the Garden District. She followed behind him at a distance that he wouldn't notice. She had a hunch that Nick's mental adjustment was flawed and potentially disastrous so she was going to follow him until she found out the truth. When Zebulon had asked her to confront Phaedryn she hadn't figured that the woman would argue with her. No one argued with the Cthonians, ever. But this woman seemed to not care a whit about the possibility that she was angering one of them. Katra herself didn't know the full extent of the Cthonians' powers but she did know that they were known as god killers, and one of them told her to do something she didn't question it. They were the ones that were sent out when something went so far wrong that no one could fix it, not even a god. So when ZT had called her and asked her to look into the situation that Phaedryn instigated, she did so willingly.
However, she found herself somewhat conflicted because she actually liked the other woman even though she had been on the defensive at their meeting. Phaedryn seemed to be genuinely nice and relatively harmless even though she claimed to be Savitar's sister. Kat didn't quite believe that claim since Savitar had been around for a very long time and no one had ever mentioned a sibling of his before. Of course it was altogether possible, Savitar was a great mystery to everyone and his background was shrouded in so much fog it was practically non-existent. No one even knew what Savitar was much less who his family was if he had one. So Kat didn't discount that Phaedryn could be his sister and therefore as powerful as he was. Or, on the other hand, she could be totally innocuous.
Because of that first thought, she hung back a little farther and let Nick glide away from her. She had to observe him totally covertly because if Phaedryn got wind of it, or worse yet, if Savitar did, then things could get very ugly indeed.
OoOoOo
Nick slammed the door behind him and stomped across the kitchen to the living room. He flopped down on the sofa and let out the deep sigh of frustration he'd been holding back since the bar. He should have known that someone would say something about his mother and he should have been ready for it but damn it, it hurt so much still. His mother had been his best friend, a lifeline for him as he muddled his way through his teenage years and into adulthood. And when she died, that lifeline was cut and he felt so painfully alone.
He had been trying so hard to move past her death and he simply couldn't. It was dragging him down into a despair that he didn't think he would ever get out of. If only he had someone he could talk to about it all. Ash would be the logical choice, no one knew Nick and his mother better, but that certainly wasn't an option now that Nick had screwed their relationship up entirely. One simple mistake and his whole world had come crashing down around him and there was no way of getting himself out of the hole he'd dug.
He balled his fists and rubbed at his eyes as the pain behind them started to throb. Groaning as the headache grew, he got back up and walked to the kitchen where he reached for a bottle of anything alcoholic and leaned against the counter taking a deep swallow from the bottle. Soon the pain would go away.
OoOoOo
Kat stood hidden in the shadows outside the window watching Nick try to drown his sorrows in the bottom of a bottle. He certainly didn't seem to know anything was amiss and from the way he was acting she thought he might very well have no recollection of what had really happened to him. She still didn't like the fact that Phaedryn had altered the course of time. It just wasn't natural.
Of course she changed the flow of time for no one but Nick. Everyone else still had done what they had originally been destined to do, they just had no memories of anything other than Cherise's murder and Nick's despair. Still, it wasn't intrinsic and time had a funny way of reverting itself when someone messed with it. That could cause all kinds of headaches to the powers in charge. Powers like the Cthonians that were the watchdogs of the supernatural beings. Hence ZT's request for Kat to investigate Nick's new time line.
She shook her head as he slammed back the liquor and wondered how long he'd been hiding from the pain he felt. She'd lost a lot of close friends and it had hurt for a very long time but she didn't think it measured up to what Nick was feeling. She knew his history and the bond he had with his mother but she thought that maybe he was wallowing in his grief a bit more than was healthy. He totally reminded her of Sin when he'd told her stories of his daughter and how she'd died. Nick needed someone to talk to, obviously, and more importantly, someone to lean on as he worked though his grief. Right now he didn't have anyone like that. Maybe there was something she could do to assist him.
