Etched in Bone

CHAPTER 21

Thaisday, Messis 23

Meg dreamed about the prophecy the cards had revealed.

The cards had grown tall, like trees, and surrounded her. Penned her in.

So thirsty. How long since she’d had a drink of water? So thirsty.

Hooded figure with a scythe. Police car. Man in jail. Danger!

More cards appeared, repeating and repeating until they formed a prison. Woods. Tombstone. Mirror. Woods. Tombstone. Mirror. They closed in slowly, relentlessly.

Hoping to find a way out, Meg turned, took a step, and tripped. Fell. A pile of leaves in front of her. Her hands reaching out to break her fall. Her hands disappearing into the leaves, slipping on something underneath.

She touched a cold hand.

Something touched her arm.

She screamed, thrashed, tried to hit whoever held her. She had a moment to realize she was free before something soft hit her back, her shoulders, her butt.

“Meg!”

He found me. Relief made her dizzy. He found me!

“Simon!” She threw herself toward the sound of his voice. Her hands closed on something soft, something not Simon. “Simon!”

Hands grabbed her again and hauled her toward something unknown, but what she grabbed in turn were thickly furred human shoulders.

A light came on, blinding her, and Vlad said, “Blessed Thaisia! What is going on?”

“I don’t know,” Simon growled. “Meg? Meg! Look at me. Are you awake?”

“I—” Was she awake? “It was cold. The hand was so cold.”

“My hands are not cold. Look at me, Meg.”

She looked at his face, not sure what had happened or why he was angry.

Was she really awake, or was this part of the dream?

“I am not naked,” Simon said.

She didn’t know why that was important, but she said, “Okay,” which seemed to satisfy him.

Something thumped the front door. Hard.

Meg leaped, wrapped her arms around Simon’s neck and her legs around his waist. His arms came around her, supporting her, protecting her.

“Meg, it’s all right. It’s just Henry,” Simon said.

“And Jester,” Vlad added. “And Tess.” After a moment, he added, “You can let go of Simon now.”

She tightened her legs and was glad when Simon said, “She doesn’t have to.”

“I’ll let Henry in before he knocks down the door,” Vlad said. “Then we all need to discuss what happened.”

Once Vlad left the bedroom, Simon sighed, his breath warm against her neck. “Bad dream?” he asked.

Dreamlike certainly, but was it a dream? “I don’t know. I saw . . . felt . . . things.”

His arms tightened around her. “Then you’d better tell us what you remember.”

Simon took the pitcher of water out of the refrigerator and filled a glass. He drank half the water, refilled the glass, and put the pitcher away before going into Meg’s living room.

Meg sat on the sofa next to Henry, her knees drawn up and her arms around her legs—a scared little ball of human. Tess sat on the coffee table, Vlad leaned over the back of the sofa, and Jester crouched to one side of the table, where he could see and hear everything without being in the way. The Green Complex’s feathered residents were perched on the porch, where they could hear everything through the open window.

“Here.” Simon held out the glass to Meg, who just stared at it. “You woke me up because you were thirsty, so I got up to get you some water. That’s how this all started.”

She didn’t take the water, so he sat on the other side of her and put the glass on the floor. Her brain wasn’t working right, and that worried him. It was like she was stuck between seeing the images of prophecy and seeing the physical world and she couldn’t shake herself free.

Then Tess said, “Speak, prophet, and we will listen.”

Responding to the promise and command in the words, Meg kept her eyes on Tess and told her listeners everything she could remember. She told them about the cards she’d drawn yesterday and what came after the events the first three cards had revealed. She told them the details of the dream—details that provided substance, context.

Had Meg always seen this much detail but had been trained to compress what she saw into a series of images that someone else would interpret? Or was this like Jackson’s prophet pup, Hope, who could draw a few lines that could be recognized as a howling Wolf but could also make a detailed drawing that would reveal a specific Wolf? Maybe these kinds of dreams were the only way Meg’s brain could tell her more when she wasn’t cutting.

Vlad’s voice. Soothing, almost seductive, asking about details. Any rings on the hand? Color of skin? Could she see the color of the clothes in the moonlight?

She answered his questions. She didn’t smell lusty like she did when she cut herself and then spoke prophecy, but her voice had the same dreamlike quality it had during those times.

Meg closed her eyes and sagged against Henry. Then she opened her eyes, blinked at all of them, and said, “Is there any water? I’m thirsty.”

Simon handed her the glass of water. She drank it all.

“Still thirsty.” She unfolded her body and stood up.

Before Simon could stop her, Jester hopped up and said, “I’ll help you find the water.” He made it sound like they needed to find a stream in the dark rather than turn on a faucet—and Meg didn’t say a thing to indicate she saw anything odd about that.

Simon waited until he heard Meg and Jester talking in the kitchen. Then he looked at the others in the room. “Do you think she’s sick?”

Vlad came around to the front side of the sofa. “No, not sick exactly.”

“Humans walk in their sleep,” Tess said. “They talk to people, do things around the house, even leave their homes and have no memory of it in the morning.”

“She hasn’t done that before,” Simon said.

“She’s had upsetting dreams before, but this was different, and it’s something Emily Faire needs to know about,” Vlad said. “It may be an indication of something wrong—or something right. The Intuits don’t hurt themselves in order to have the feelings that tell them if something is wrong. Maybe the cassandra sangue didn’t cut themselves in the beginning. Maybe they had dreamed about the future and discovered by accident that the cutting gave them control of the time and place to see the visions.”

“Control of time and place and the euphoria that clouded their minds and prevented them from seeing things that might terrify a young mind to the breaking point,” Tess said.

Simon nodded. “She needs to see the human bodywalker.”

“Maybe our Meg should spend a few days on Great Island,” Henry said. “Merri Lee could go with her. Steve Ferryman and Ming Beargard would watch over them.”

Tess had managed to control her emotions while Meg had looked into her eyes, but now her hair had broad streaks of red and was starting to coil as she focused on the Grizzly. “Why? That would be upsetting.”

“Yes,” Henry agreed. “But she would be out of reach of potential enemies.”

Hearing Henry’s words made Simon feel cold, but he understood. “Meg’s vision at night is no better than any other human’s,” he told Tess. “She was outside and it was dark, but she could still see well enough to describe what was around her.”

“You’re applying waking logic to a dream, which had prophecy cards the size of trees,” Tess argued. “What does her being able to see in a dream have to do with sending her to Great Island?”

“Vlad kept asking her what she’d seen in the moonlight. She didn’t correct him, didn’t say she had a flashlight or there was a campfire that allowed her to see in the woods at night.”

Threads of black mingled with the red streaks in Tess’s hair. “Meg would need sufficient moonlight to see in the dark, and next week is the full moon.”

Meg stared at the glass in her hand. She stared at the clock. She stared at the Coyote.

“Jester? Why are you in my kitchen at this time of night?”

“You should ask me why I’m here at this time of the morning since we’re close enough to dawn.” He studied her. “Are you awake now?”

Why did everyone keep asking her that? Then she remembered.

Dream. Vision. Something in between. This had happened a couple of times since she arrived in the Courtyard. The first time, she thought she was driving the BOW at night and Sam wouldn’t stop howling. But she and Sam had been out making deliveries in daylight—and he hadn’t been howling yet. Then there was the dream of making a cut and seeing prophecy. She recognized the trigger when it came in the real world, and her actions had saved Simon and the rest of the Wolves in the Courtyard.

This was another personal vision, warning her of something approaching in her own life.

Which didn’t explain the Coyote being in her kitchen at that hour.

“Why are we in the kitchen?” she asked.

“You were thirsty and wanted water. I came with you to help you find it,” Jester replied.

Meg looked at the sink. “I think I can find the faucet by myself.”

“If you’re looking for a faucet instead of a stream, you must be awake now.”

Why would she look for a stream? That didn’t make any sense—and that wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense. “Did Simon hit me with a goose?”

Jester laughed. “He whacked you with a pillow. But some of the pillows are stuffed with down, so I can see how you might confuse the two.”

Meg heard a rumbling voice coming from the living room. She knew that voice, but she asked, “Who else is here?”

“Henry, Tess, and Vlad.”

She sighed. “I guess it was a loud dream.”

“That’s the most entertaining kind, even if we’ll all need a nap because of it.”

He sounded cheerful. She should worry about that. Instead she drank the water and set the glass beside the sink. “I’m going back to bed until it’s daylight.”

“You should pee first. You drank a lot of water, even if you don’t remember doing it.”

Since her bladder suddenly agreed with him, she followed Jester’s advice. And she admitted to herself that it was a wee bit cowardly to sneak back to her bedroom and not say anything to the friends who were still talking in her living room.

Jester stepped into the living room and gave everyone a gleeful smile. “Now that we’re all awake, Meg has gone back to bed.”

Simon looked out the window. “Why? It’s almost time to get up anyway.”

Jester shrugged. “Human time makes less sense than ours.”

“Nothing we can do right now,” Vlad said. “We’ve been warned that danger is coming, and we know the result when it strikes.”

“But not the danger itself,” Henry rumbled before looking at Simon. “You’ll talk to Meg about spending a few days on Great Island?”

“There are woods on the island,” Simon said.

“But there wouldn’t be a body hidden under leaves,” Tess said. “The Intuits would have a feeling about something like that, and the terra indigene would have found it by now.”

Simon rubbed his forehead. “It might not happen during next week’s full moon. It could happen a month from now.”

“Not likely,” Henry said. “These days, our Meg’s visions are more often about the immediate future.”

“Talk to her, Simon,” Vlad said. “Talk to Blair and Nathan so they’ll be on the lookout for trouble in the evenings. I’ll talk to Grandfather Erebus and Nyx.”

Jester slipped out of Meg’s apartment and stopped at his own place just long enough to remove the jeans he’d pulled on when the commotion started. Then he shifted to his Coyote form and ran to make his own report to the girls at the lake.

Jimmy left the apartment and walked to the nearest bus stop on Main Street to catch one of the early-morning buses. There were things he needed to find, calls he needed to make, and he couldn’t do that from the apartment. For one thing, there was no phone in the place. You would think the freaks could put in a phone, even if it was a pay phone in the small, piece-of-shit entryway. But no. Either you used a mobile phone, which you paid for, or you had a landline connected at your own expense.

He’d bet his shoes that Sissy and Mama hadn’t paid to have a phone in their places.

Didn’t matter. Despite what he’d told Sandee, he did have a mobile phone, which he would ditch as soon as his plans were made.

More annoying today was the lack of a phone book in the apartment. The last tenants must have taken the thing. Which meant he needed to find a coffee shop or diner that had a phone book he could look at while he had breakfast.

The bus pulled up to the stop, and the people going to work downtown piled in. Some smiled at people already on the bus and sat next to them. Coworkers maybe. Others found an empty pair of seats and claimed both, daring other passengers to ask them to move their daypack or carry sack. Jimmy was big enough and looked rough enough that he didn’t need a daypack to claim extra room. He just looked at a person eyeing the seat. That was usually enough to convince them that standing was good exercise.

The bus pulled away from the stop, and Jimmy began to relax.

He’d spent most of the night thinking it through, considering the plan step by step. Easier to reestablish himself in Toland or Hubbney, but those would be the first places CJ and the other cops would check. So it had to be somewhere new, someplace large enough for him to disappear. Shikago. Yeah, he’d start his new life in Shikago, give himself time to learn how to use his new asset and acquire enough money to grease the necessary palms to travel anywhere he wanted in Thaisia. Then he would set himself up on the West Coast and become a behind-the-scenes big shot.

Asset. Yeah, he liked that word. Made him sound like a businessman. He should invest in a suit and a couple of dress shirts. That would attract better customers than the lowlifes he used to deal with. His asset would help him find the right people, the ones who could pay his fees.

She could, and would, help him with a lot of things once she understood who was in charge.