What will happen to Heather if she makes the wrong choice? Meg thought, knocking her hand against the underside of the sorting table as she reached for the magazines. She almost cried out at the sudden stab of pain, but she swallowed pain that turned into mild agony, too surprised to speak when the cover of a magazine kept shifting into a different picture. Only pieces, so she never saw the whole image, as if she was seeing bits of several pictures. Then, struggling to focus on the vision, she saw a date—and blood soaking the paper.
When she came back to herself, she realized no one had noticed anything had happened. Ruthie and Merri Lee were still talking, still trying to offer Heather some sympathy and encouragement. But their friend didn’t need sympathy and encouragement. She needed …
“Heather, you have to go,” Meg said quietly.
They all stopped talking and looked at her.
“I’d rather stay here and work with you,” Heather said. “There’s too much strange fur and fang in the library.”
“No.” Meg walked over to the counter, picked up the phone, and dialed. “You have to hand in your notice today and go.”
“Meg?” Merri Lee said. “What’s going on?”
She shook her head as Vlad answered the phone at HGR. “Vlad? Can you come to the office? We need to talk to you. No, just you.” She hung up before turning to look at her friends and the maps and the notebooks, but she didn’t see anything else, didn’t feel any warning prickles.
“Meg!” Vlad rushed into the sorting room moments later and jerked to a stop.
“Heather needs to leave,” Meg said. “She can’t work in the Courtyard anymore.”
“I hadn’t decided that!” Heather protested. Clearly frightened, she turned to Ruthie and Merri Lee for support. “I didn’t say that.”
“She didn’t say that,” Merri Lee said.
Vlad gave Heather a considering look, but Meg didn’t think the decision surprised him. Then he sniffed the air and walked around the table until he stood next to her and said gently, “Let me see your hands.”
“What?” Meg said.
“Your hands,” Vlad repeated.
“What’s going on?” Ruthie asked.
“Meg?” Merri Lee said.
She held out her hands. The gouge on the top of her right index finger was tiny, barely the size of a pinhead, but it was just enough lost skin for blood to rise in the wound.
“How did you do that?” Vlad asked.
“I hit my hand on the table when I reached for the magazines. I must have scraped something?”
“And you saw …?”
She saw Merri Lee scramble for a notebook and pen. Distracting. Another image. Not the answer to Vlad’s question. “I saw the cover of the magazine.” She tried to point but Vlad still held her hands, so she tipped her head to indicate the stack of magazines on the table. “But the one in the vision wasn’t the current issue. I saw blood. All the pages were soaked in blood.”
“What does that have to do with Heather?”
“Her family wants her to stop working here. When I reached for the magazines, I was thinking about what would happen if she made the wrong choice, and then I felt pain … and I saw …” She looked at Vlad. “She has to go.”
“Yes,” Vlad said, giving her hands a gentle squeeze before releasing them. “I’ll take care of it.” To Heather he added, “Gather your personal belongings, then meet me in the store’s office. I’ll give you your pay.”
Heather stumbled to the back room and out the door.
“I’ll make sure she has enough money to take care of her bills for a couple of months,” Vlad said. “That will give her time to find another job. And I’ll have Blair come by to sniff out the spot where you damaged your finger and repair it so you won’t get hurt again.”
“But I don’t even know how I did it!” Meg protested. “How can he find the exact spot?”
Vlad smiled. “He’s a Wolf with an excellent sense of smell. He’ll find it.” The smile faded as he waved a hand to indicate Merri Lee and Ruth. “What about the rest of the human pack?”
No pins-and-needles feeling in response to the question. No other vision. “They can stay,” Meg replied. Then she added silently, They’ll be safer here.
She couldn’t be certain of that, but the thought felt right.
“All right,” Vlad said. “I’ll have to tell Simon, so take care of that wound before he shows up howling about it.”
Once Vlad left the building, Ruthie turned to Meg, wide-eyed. “Okay, that was weird. What was that?”
“That,” Meg replied, “was prophecy.”
Simon wasn’t happy that Meg had called Vlad instead of him, but after he went off by himself for a few minutes to snarl about it, he thought he’d worked out the human logic. Since he’d summoned the terra indigene leaders to Lakeside, he was in charge of the big meeting, which left Vlad in charge of the bookstore. And Heather leaving and being paid was bookstore business.
Realizing Vlad would also be stuck with the employee-quitting paperwork cheered Simon up considerably. He hated filling out that paperwork.
Of course, finding new humans to work for them wasn’t going to be a romp in the woods.
We’ll make do, he thought as he checked the list of pictures he was supposed to look for. Most Courtyards don’t have any human employees except the Liaison. Even Lakeside didn’t have other humans working for us on a regular basis until I became leader and opened a couple of stores to human customers. Most Courtyards don’t have humans like Lorne running a little printing business that is strictly for us.
Now most of those humans were gone. Would the terra indigene who couldn’t pass for human feel more comfortable shopping in the Market Square now? Would the human employees who were left respond badly to Others who didn’t look like them?
No point in chewing on a bone that wasn’t there, so he focused on the task he could see.
He had found half of his list of images when he gathered up the books and magazines and headed for the Liaison’s Office. He just wanted to see Meg, make sure she was all right. He deserved a reward for politely calling the office instead of rushing over when Vlad told him about Meg’s vision. No reason to think Vlad would make light of anything that hurt Meg, so the injury really was nothing to howl about—just a puncture so tiny that Meg hadn’t realized why she’d seen the vision until Vlad had scented blood and checked her hands.
It probably would be considered bad manners to sniff her just to make sure the Sanguinati hadn’t missed another injury—especially if the other girls were still in the office.
Neither he nor Vlad understood why the prophecy meant Heather had to leave the Courtyard today, but they didn’t challenge Meg. For one thing, none of the other leaders had seen a cassandra sangue speak prophecy. When they did witness a cut, he wanted them to have no doubts about the accuracy of what was said.
Interpretation was something else. Meg wasn’t always right when it came to interpreting images. She’d thought she was going to die in the Courtyard because of the prophecy she’d seen about herself. And she had come close to dying. But she’d survived, which proved her wrong.
Not something he intended to mention.
Charlie caught up to him as he walked out of the library and headed for the Liaison’s Office.
“Tess the Scary says the girls should take a break. Get some food and fresh air,” Charlie said.
“That’s a good idea.” Too bad they couldn’t play prey. Meg was a fun squeaky toy when she was the pretend prey, but there was too much risk right now of her getting hurt by a Wolf who wouldn’t remember it was pretend. And seeing a human being chased might scare the other girls into resigning. Once all the guests went home and everyone settled down, there would be time to play again. “And don’t call Tess names.”
There was no one around them, but Charlie lowered his voice. “There are stories about her kind throughout the world, and those stories are very old.” He studied Simon. “You do know what she is?”
“I have some thoughts. Henry knows for sure.” He’d found and read some of those old stories, but he hadn’t told anyone what he knew about Tess’s kind of terra indigene. Not even Henry. Safer that way for all of them.
“And yet you let her stay.”
“My choice,” Simon said in a tone that would have warned anyone else that the conversation was done.
“Did you know they’re called Plague Riders in some parts of the world?” Charlie said.
He did know. In contrast, calling them Harvesters made them sound more benign—until you saw what they could do.
“You would be wise to keep that information to yourself,” Simon said. “Especially while you’re here.”
A beat of silence. “Wasn’t intending to share it with anyone but you.”
They walked into the office. The girls had taped maps on the walls and then pinned notes on the maps. Spread out on the table were photos of trains and buses and pictures Theral must have printed off the computer of signs that read WELCOME TO … some town or other.
Seeing the images, Charlie grinned, then said in a conductor’s voice, “All aboard! Next stop, Wheatfield!”
Meg spun around so fast she stumbled into the sorting table. “What did you say?”
Charlie backed up. “I don’t know. I was just—”
Merri Lee leaped at Charlie and held up a list. “Say the names of these towns, just like you did that other one.”
When Charlie looked at him for some explanation, Simon just shrugged, too busy trying to keep his ears from shifting. His human ears hadn’t heard whatever Merri Lee and Meg had heard, but the Wolf ears wouldn’t do any better because it was the tone that had significance. Human ears could hear that just fine. His brain understood but his instincts weren’t convinced.
Charlie obliged, saying the town names the way a conductor would. Meg shook her head or nodded. Merri Lee wrote in that damn notebook while Ruthie made notations on the map. When Charlie called out the last name, the girls sagged, and Simon realized Tess was right—they needed to rest.
“That’s it,” Merri Lee said.
“What’s it?” Simon asked.
“That’s what I remember of the journey to Lakeside,” Meg said, sounding too weary. “It’s broken up, and there are too many possibilities of how I got to the first town name I remember hearing. I’m sorry, Simon. I don’t think I can get closer than that.”
He looked at the map. “Nothing to be sorry about. We started with the whole continent this morning. You’ve narrowed it down to a region.”
“That’s still a lot of towns and cities,” Ruthie said, sounding uneasy.
“It’s fine.” He tried a smile. When Ruthie and Merri Lee paled, he ran his tongue over his canines. Damn. Those were definitely not human anymore.
“We should take a break,” Meg said. “Get some air. And I could use another sandwich.”
There was something too deliberate about the way the girls set their notebooks on the sorting table before heading out.
“Can we look at these?” Charlie asked, reaching for Merri Lee’s notebook.
“I don’t know,” Simon replied, wishing he knew either more or less about human females. <Henry? Gather our guests and bring them to the Liaison’s Office.>
While they waited, Simon studied the map. Either Meg had been scared witless or she’d been attempting to hide her trail from a hunter. She’d been right to assume the Controller had sent men after her, but he’d seen rabbits with a Wolf on their tails zigzag less than she had. And since the bus station and the train depot were both in the downtown part of Lakeside and south of the Courtyard, how had she ended up north of the Courtyard in order to head back down until she reached the Liaison’s Office and Howling Good Reads the night she applied for the job?
She may have been a brainless female for being out in a storm that night, and she probably arrived on the last bus or train that had reached Lakeside, but she’d gained enough time to escape capture and find the terra indigene.
The room usually felt like it had plenty of space, but with so many earth natives crowding around the map, he was glad he didn’t have a tail right now that could get stepped on.
“So, the enemy is in the Midwest,” Joe Wolfgard said. “That’s confirmation enough for us. We know what we need to do.”
“That can be the last choice,” Simon said. “First, we’ll try to narrow the search for the prey.”
They didn’t want it to be a last choice. He saw that truth in the eyes of the Midwest leaders. Humans were causing too much trouble. It was time to seriously thin the herds. He wasn’t opposed to thinning if it needed to be done, but that would mean abandoning everything humans made in that part of Thaisia or asking terra indigene to take up those tasks. Which meant more of the Others staying in human form for hours a day in order to do the work.
Maybe the Midwest leaders were also considering what they would have to ask of their own because Cheryl Hawkgard finally said, “How do we narrow the search?”
He bared his teeth in a smile. “Now we get the police to help us.”