Written in Red

he asked, although he made no move to withdraw.

Nyx replied.

Meg smiled at the deliverymen as they walked out the door together and got into their trucks or vans. She continued to smile until they drove away. Then she blew out a breath and turned to Nyx and the Crow.

“Thank you for opening the office. I don’t mean to be late every morning. Things have gotten complicated the past couple of days.”

Looking over his shoulder at Sam, who was still busily sniffing his way around the sorting room, Vlad said, “That’s understandable.”

“It was entertaining,” Nyx said. “And Jake knew what to do.”

The Crow who was pulling pens out of the holder and arranging them on the counter looked at them and cawed.

“I think there is a package for Mr. Erebus from the movie place,” Meg said. “Do you want to take it with you?”

Nyx laughed. “And deprive him of a visit from you? No. But I will tell him a package has arrived.” She changed to smoke, from feet to chest, and floated over the counter. Returning to solid form, she held out her arm to the Crow, who hopped on to be taken outside.

Meg stared as the Crow flew off and Nyx changed completely to smoke that flowed toward the access way leading to the Market Square. Then she stared at the counter, and finally at Vlad. “Am I the only one who needs to use the go-through?”

Feeling Sam come up beside him, Vlad grinned at her. “No, you’re not the only one. At least for now. I’ll park the BOW in the garage for you. If you don’t find your key, let me know and I’ll drive you home.”

He didn’t wait for her answer. He needed to open HGR, and he wanted to let Henry know Sam was with Meg—assuming Jake hadn’t already told the Courtyard’s spirit guide.

And he still needed to find a subtle way of warning everyone in the Courtyard that, until Simon returned, he and Henry Beargard would be looking after Meg and Sam.

Meg put out kibble and water for Sam, smoothed the fur under the harness, and let him roam the sorting room without the leash. After she barely missed stepping on his tail or toes a couple of times, he settled down where he was out of the way but could watch her sort the mail and packages. The package for Mr. Erebus from the movie place was small enough to go with the mail, but remembering what Nyx said, Meg put it with the afternoon deliveries—including a special delivery for Winter that she hadn’t yet had a chance to make.

The morning passed quickly. When she heard the ponies, she snapped the leash to Sam’s harness and slipped the other end over her wrist before opening the outer door, just in case the pup decided to bolt outside. But Sam, while intrigued, was happy to stay with her as she walked back and forth from table to ponies. For their part, the ponies seemed curious but unconcerned about the pup.

Congratulating herself on getting through another week without getting eaten or fired, she tapped the stack of papers that held her notes about the week’s deliveries. Her little finger slid along the papers’ edge.

A shiver of pain came before blood welled from the slice along the joint. She stared at her left hand, trying to remember something from her lessons that would explain the cut, unwilling to believe that paper could slice skin. Then the pain came, smothering her chest and twisting her belly.

Sam howled in terror.

She looked at the pup to reassure him, hoping to shape ordinary words before the prophecy began flowing through her.

Except Sam wasn’t howling. He stood next to her, watching her anxiously as her own body told him something was wrong.

Sam wasn’t howling. But she could hear him. Even now, knowing he wasn’t making a sound, she could still hear him.

The vision had started. She didn’t know what was coming, what images she would see. But if Sam was part of it . . . If she spoke to experience the euphoria, she wouldn’t remember enough, if she remembered anything at all, and no one would know why Sam was afraid. But if she didn’t speak, if she swallowed the words so that she could see the prophecy . . . For Sam’s sake, could she endure the pain?

“Stay here,” she said through gritted teeth. She hurried to the bathroom and shut the door before Sam could follow her.

Her throat felt clogged with terrible things. Leaning over the sink, she struggled to breathe as pain crawled through her and the vision filled her mind as if she were watching a stuttering movie clip.

Men. Dressed all in black. Even their faces, their heads, were black. Some had guns; others carried rifles . . . skip . . .One man was grabbing at something, but she couldn’t see . . . skip . . . A sound like a car mated to a hornet . . . skip . . . Snow falling so fast and fierce and thick, she couldn’t get a sense of place, couldn’t tell if she was seeing the Courtyard or the city or somewhere else that had a snowstorm . . . skip . . . But Sam was there, howling in terror.

Meg came back to herself when the muscles in her hands cramped from holding on to the sink so hard.

Focus on breathing, she told herself. The pain will fade. You know it will fade.

She washed her hands, taking care to thoroughly clean the little finger.

Such a small slice along the edge of that joint. If she sliced it again to lengthen it, maybe she could see more. And maybe she would see another prophecy, but it would be mashed with the images she’d already seen in this small cut. The Walking Names called the result of cutting over a previous cut a double vision, that nightmarish occurrence when one prophecy imposed itself over another and the images collided in ways that usually had terrible, mind-breaking consequences for the girl who saw them.

Sometimes the colliding images weren’t terrible. Sometimes, if the girl could accept what she was seeing, the images could change a life. They had changed hers when the Controller had cut across old scars as a punishment. The colliding prophecies had shown her the first steps of her escape.

Just because she had survived double visions before didn’t mean her mind wouldn’t break if she tried it again.

She dried off her hands, got antiseptic and a bandage from the first-aid kit, and took care of the slice. Moving slowly, she returned to the sorting room and Sam. Opening her personal notebook to a clean page, she wrote down what she had seen while the details were fresh.

She had to tell someone, but who would listen?

Wishing she could talk to Simon, Meg reached for the phone and made a call. The phone at the other end rang and rang. Then the answering machine picked up.

“Henry? This is Meg. I need to talk to you.”

Henry arrived a minute after she locked up for her lunch break. Leaving Sam in the sorting room with a couple of cookies, she found herself unable to look at the big man, let alone say anything.

“You’re hurt,” he finally said.

She shook her head.

“You smell of pain, of weakness.”

Not weakness. No, she wasn’t weak. But the pain, while fading, was still a fearsome thing.

Henry’s voice was a quiet rumble. “What did you do to your hand, Meg?”

“I didn’t know paper could cut.” Even to her own ears, she sounded whiny. “I thought that was a make-believe image.”

“Make-believe?”

“Not real.”

He looked puzzled. “Let me see your hand.”

“My hand is fine. That’s not why—”

He took her left hand and unwrapped the bandage on her little finger. His hands were big and rough, but he touched her with surprising gentleness.

“You have scars,” Meg said, looking at his fingers.

“I work with wood. Sometimes I am clumsy with my tools.” He studied the slice on her finger, then bent his head and sniffed it. Shaking his head, he rewrapped the bandage. “Such a small cut shouldn’t cause so much pain.”

He wanted an explanation, but her pain had no significance in what she had seen, so right now it wasn’t important. “Henry, I saw something.”

Releasing her hand, he straightened to his full height, towering over her. “You saw . . . ?”

Easing around him, she picked up her notebook from the table in the back room and handed it to him.

She watched him read the words, the frown line between his dark eyes getting deeper as he read them again.

“Some prophecies look like a series of images or sounds,” she said. “Some, like this one, look like a movie clip, or a series of clips with sounds and action. The same image might appear in a hundred prophecies, so it’s up to the person who wanted the vision to understand the meaning.”

Henry studied her. “You heard a Wolf howling. Are you sure it was Sam?”

“Does any other Wolf howl sound like Sam’s?”

“No.” Henry thought for a moment. “Why would you have a vision about Sam? He could not have asked you to see anything.”

“No, but he was the only person with me when I got the paper cut.” Meg shivered. “Who are those men? Why do they want Sam?”

With Henry standing in the middle of the room, she didn’t have room to pace.

“I’m so useless!” she cried. “I see this, but I can’t tell you where it will happen or when or why!”

Henry held up her notebook. “I need to talk to some of the others. May I take this? I will return it.”

“Okay. Yes. What about Sam?”

“Vlad will take Sam home. He has been here long enough for one day.”

“But . . .”

The back door opened and Vlad walked in, giving Henry a questioning look. Then he glanced at her hands and stiffened.

Something passed between Grizzly and vampire that neither shared with her. Vlad slipped into the sorting room while Henry fetched her coat from the peg on the wall.

“Come with me,” Henry said.

“My purse is in the sorting room, and my keys are in it.”

Before she had both boots on, Vlad opened the door enough to hand her purse to Henry, and used one of his feet to block Sam’s attempts to join her.

“Where are we going?” she asked when she and Henry stepped outside.

“Not far.”

He led her to the yard behind his shop. A narrow path ran down the center of it to his studio door, which wasn’t locked. Big windows filled the back wall on either side of the door, providing light. The sides of the studio were the building’s brick walls. The floor was wood chips—or was covered in a layer of wood chips so thick she wasn’t sure what the floor was supposed to be. The room felt warmer than outside, but not warm enough that she wanted to give up her coat, and Henry didn’t indicate she should remove her boots.

He pointed to a bench. She sat down, wondering why she was there. Besides several pieces of wood and a cart filled with tools, there was a storage cabinet with a granite top and a round carved table that held a music player.

Henry stripped off his own coat and hung it on a peg before plugging in an electric kettle that sat on the cabinet. While the water heated, he placed her notebook on one of the cabinet’s shelves, then selected a music disc and put it in the player. A few minutes later, he handed her a mug, turned on the music, and began working on the piece of wood in the center of the room.

The scent of peppermint rose from the mug. Not sure what he wanted from her, she cupped her hands around the mug for warmth and watched him as he coaxed a shape from the wood. The music, a blend of drums and rattles and something like a flute, flowed in the air, and the sound of Henry working seemed to blend with the rest.

“I like the music,” Meg said. “What is it?”

He looked at her and smiled. “Earth-native music. When humans invented the music players and the discs that held sounds so that songs and stories could be shared by many, we saw the value of those things and arranged to record the music of our people.”

“Do you like human music?”

“Some.” Henry caressed the wood. “But not here. Not when I touch the wood and listen to what it wants to become.”

Meg studied the rough shape that seemed to be leaping out of the block of wood. “It’s a fish.”

He nodded. “A salmon.”

When she said nothing more, he picked up his tools and began working again. She watched the salmon emerge from the wood, its body a graceful curve. Not finished, to be sure, but not unformed.

She hoped she would still be there to see it when it was done.

The music ended. Her mug was empty. Taking it from her, Henry said, “The pain is quieter now. Eat some food. Rest a little more before you return to your work.”

She stood. “Thank you for letting me sit here. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.”

“You gave us warning. That is help. As for the rest, you are welcome to come here and let your spirit touch the wood.”

Now that the pain had dulled, she was hungry for more than the usual soup and sandwich she could get at A Little Bite, so she walked over to Meat-n-Greens, the restaurant in the Market Square. Training images told her this wasn’t a high-end restaurant—the tablecloths were the kind that could be wiped down instead of cloth that needed to be laundered—but the menu listed everything from appetizers to full dinners. She ordered a small steak with mashed potatoes and peas, savoring the experience of making a choice.

When she got back to the office, she found a container of soup and a wrapped sandwich in the little fridge, and her lidded mug filled with fresh coffee.

“Don’t have to wonder about dinner,” she said as she picked up the copies of the Lakeside News and the Courtyard’s newsletter that someone had left on the back table. She took them and her coffee into the sorting room, then opened the office for the afternoon deliveries.

Henry, Vlad, Blair, and Tess gathered in the Business Association’s meeting room.

Henry set the notebook on the table. “This is Meg’s. I think whatever else is written here is private, but she offered these words for all of us to see.”

None of them spoke as they read Meg’s record of the vision, but Blair began growling.

“If this was a book, the vision would have included a newspaper that would indicate the date something would happen,” Vlad said.

“But it is not a book,” Henry replied. “She gave us much for such a small cut. An accident,” he added when Blair stared at him.

Blair nodded and went back to studying the words.

Henry looked at Tess. “You said there was pleasure in the cutting. All I smelled in her was pain. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Tess replied. “Maybe it’s the difference between an accidental cut and one made deliberately. Maybe it was because there was something she wasn’t able to do alone, so she experienced pain instead of euphoria. I told you all I know about blood prophets.”

“I used the computer to check for books or any writings about them,” Vlad said. “There are stories that have cassandra sangue as characters, but they were listed under horror or suspense novels, so I doubt there is any useful information. I added a couple of them to the next book order coming to HGR. I’ll keep looking.”

“Someone knows about them,” Tess said.

“Meg knows,” Henry said quietly. “In time, she will tell us.” He looked at the Wolf. “Blair?”

Blair let out a breath slowly. “Could be this year, could be five years from now. There’s still plenty of time for a storm like that before the cold girl yields to her sister. That sound. Smaller than a car, but not a BOW. Has to move well over snow.”

“I can help Vlad search the computers for such a vehicle,” Tess said. She hesitated. “Should we tell that policeman who talks to Simon?”

“Are such visions ever wrong?” Blair asked. “Can we know that those men coming in with weapons and hidden faces aren’t police?”

“Why would the police want Sam?” Vlad asked.

“Why would anyone?” Henry countered.

Flickers of red danced in Blair’s amber eyes. “Daphne is dead, so Sam is the Wolfgard’s child. Would anyone be foolish enough to touch him and start a war?”

“Someone will be foolish enough,” Henry said. “Meg has seen it.”

Silence.

Finally Blair said, “Clear skies today. Unless someone angers the girl at the lake, we shouldn’t have another storm for a few days.”

Tess leaned forward and brushed a finger over the page that held Meg’s notes about the vision. “Even if a blood prophet is never wrong, what she sees is open to interpretation. Meg has shown us the beginning of a fight, but there is nothing here that shows how it will end.”

She looked at the three men. Despite his strength as a Grizzly, Henry felt a shiver down his spine when he saw the way her hair began to coil.

Tess left the room, apparently deciding there was nothing more to say.

“Sam’s not going to accept being left behind all the time,” Vlad said. “And being around Meg is good for him.” He gave Blair a pointed look. “You don’t like the harness and leash, and I understand that, but a couple of days with Meg has pulled Sam away from the bad place he’s been in since Daphne died. That should count for something.”

“I can’t speak for other Wolves, but it counts with me,” Blair said. “We’ll keep Sam safe. And Meg too.”

Vlad shifted in his chair. “She hasn’t seen a Wolf yet. Except Sam.”

“There’s always a Wolf on duty at HGR,” Blair said.

“Yes, but she hasn’t been in the store since she became the Liaison, so she hasn’t seen one of you.”

“I’ll assign a couple of Wolves to keep watch around the office. In human form.”

“Keep in mind that they’ll see Meg and Sam,” Henry said.

Blair growled. “That is for Simon to deal with when he gets back.”

“Agreed.”

Satisfied they had done what they could for the moment, Henry stood. “I am close by during the day, and the Hawks and Crows keep watch when Meg is working. They will alert the Wolves if there is a threat.”

The three went back to their own work.

As Henry walked the narrow path to his studio door, he looked at the Crows gathered on the wall.

Jake replied. He sounded disappointed.

Back inside, Henry hung up his coat and walked around the pieces of wood waiting to be given a new kind of life—and thought about the female who, despite being human, he was beginning to see as a friend.

In between deliveries, Meg scanned the Lakeside News, but didn’t see anything she thought should be reported to Henry or Tess—and wondered if she was out of place to even be looking. Surely Tess or Vlad did that anyway. But they didn’t have all the images she did and might not recognize something that could have an impact on the Others.

She noticed the sale ads, which were set up as Asia said, but she didn’t know if any of the residents would be interested in such items.

She read the comics and didn’t understand most of them. But there was a comic strip about the Others that disturbed her. It seemed to be part of an ongoing story, so the words had little meaning, but the slavering Wolf, standing upright and looking like a furry man with a wolf’s head, made her uncomfortable. Maybe it was a way to diminish something that was feared, but it felt dangerous. She couldn’t say if it was dangerous to the Others or to the humans, but she absorbed the image, then looked at the date at the top of the newspaper. Another image.

Folding the paper, she reached for the Courtyard’s newsletter, then stopped. Too much information, too much to absorb already today. Besides, distributing that new catalog to the residential complexes had produced a flurry of orders that had arrived that afternoon, so she still had to separate a cartload of packages and contact the complexes to come and pick up their orders.

She locked up promptly at four o’clock, filled the back of the BOW with small packages for the Chambers and the Green Complex, made sure she had her package for Winter, and headed out to make her deliveries.

It still made her nervous to get out of the BOW at any of the mausoleums that housed the Sanguinati—except Mr. Erebus’s home—but she was getting used to the smoke that flowed out of the buildings whenever she stopped the BOW. The Sanguinati in smoke form didn’t flow beyond their fences when she was around, and the ones who remained in human form didn’t speak to her or approach. She always bid them a good afternoon as she tucked packages into the delivery boxes—and always breathed a sigh of relief that none of them wanted to make a meal out of her.

Mr. Erebus, on the other hand, came down the walkway to meet her as she got out of the BOW.

“Your movies arrived,” Meg said, holding up the package. She noticed his fingernails didn’t look as yellow or horny as they had the first time she’d seen him, but maybe that was because she’d been nervous and the doorway had been dark.

“I do enjoy my movies,” he said. “Such a sweet girl to bring them to me.” Then he pointed at the black delivery boxes to indicate she should put his package inside. Even when he came out to meet her, he wouldn’t take a package directly from her hand.

“I’m pleased to do it,” Meg said.

Erebus studied her as she put the rest of the packages inside the delivery boxes. “Vladimir is kind to you?”

The question surprised her. What surprised her more was the feeling that Vlad’s well-being depended on her answer. “Yes, he is. He and Nyx were very helpful this morning.”

“That is good.” He stepped back. “Go finish your work, then enjoy the night.”

“I will.”

As she drove toward the lake, she wondered if that was a warning that she should stay within the Green area of the Courtyard after dark.

Winter was skating on the lake, wearing the same white dress. Meg parked in the same place as the first time she’d visited, pulled a scarf out of the shopping bag, then walked down to the edge of the lake.

The girl gradually joined her.

“It is the Liaison,” Winter said. “Do you skate, Meg?”

“I never learned.”

“Humans wear metal on their feet to glide over ice. I have no need of such things.” Winter tipped her head. “Did you come to collect the library books? We have not finished reading them.”

“No, I’m not here for the books. I brought you this.” Meg held out the scarf.

The girl stiffened, and the eyes that fixed on Meg were filled with an inhuman anger.

“You brought me the color of Summer?”

Staggered by the depth of the anger, Meg looked at the green scarf. “Summer? No. I didn’t think of it as a summer green.”

Winter seemed taller than she’d been a moment ago—and less human. And the air, which had been tolerable that afternoon, suddenly had a bite.

She had insulted the girl. That much she understood. It sounded like Winter and Summer didn’t get along, despite being sisters. Were they sisters?

“When I saw this, I thought of you,” Meg said, hoping to explain.

“Me.” The word was a furious whisper. Snow suddenly whipped around the other side of the lake, a curtain moving toward them.

“Because of this.” Meg unfolded the scarf, revealing the snowflakes that became the white ends and fringe. She struggled to find the right words. “Winter isn’t an absence of color; it has all these shades of white. And then there are the evergreens with their branches tipped with snow, their color an accent for the white. When I saw the scarf at a shop in the Market Square, I thought of you because your dress has shades of white, and the green would be an accent for the dress like the evergreens are for the land.”

The snow on the other side of the lake quieted. Winter studied the land and the trees, then looked at the scarf. “It is the color of the evergreens.” She reached out and rubbed the scarf between her hands. “Soft.”

Meg hardly dared to breathe.

“Kindness,” Winter murmured, taking the scarf and wrapping it around her neck. “So unexpected.”

The eyes that would never be mistaken for human stared at her. “Thank you, Meg.”

“You’re welcome, Winter.” She walked back to the BOW and waved before she got in. The girl didn’t wave back, but as Meg drove away, a second girl glided over the ice and linked hands with Winter.

During the drive back to the Green Complex, Meg noticed how the snow beside the road swirled in the air like skaters twirling over the ice on a lake.