Annoyed and oddly out of sorts, Meg gathered the prophecy cards that were scattered all over the sorting room floor. “Darn it, Sam,” she muttered. “I told you these cards weren’t playthings.”
He’d been curious about them. Of course he was. Wolf pups were curious about everything. But she’d told him these cards were special. And she knew that Simon and Henry had talked to the pup, explaining that these special cards were tools for visions. Like the razor. Something potentially dangerous. Not something for pups to play with.
And now the cards felt odd, off, filmed in a way she couldn’t explain.
She spread the cards over the surface of the big table, backs facing up. Each deck had a distinctive design on the back, so it would be easy enough to sort the cards into their proper decks. But she didn’t try to restore order. Instead, she touched the cards, and as she shuffled them around the table, a suspicion rose in her.
Sam wouldn’t play with something that belonged to her. But what about Lizzy, Sarah, and Robert? The back door of the Liaison’s Office wasn’t locked when she was working. Pete Denby had an office on the second floor, and Sarah and Robert sometimes played up there when Eve Denby needed some child-free time. And Lizzy spent a lot of time around the Market Square playing with Sarah and Robert.
Unlike the terra indigene young, who alternated between being interested in everything around them and napping to rest their little brains, human children quickly became bored with what they could have and whined to have the next thing they saw. At least, it sounded like they were always pestering their parents for “this,” and if they couldn’t have “this,” then they wanted “that.” If they’d been told they weren’t supposed to do something, it seemed that was the very thing they just had to do.
And they had been told they couldn’t play with the prophecy cards.
Maybe those things were normal for a human child. Having been raised in a compound where she had lived a very regimented life, she didn’t have any experience with “normal” when it came to children. She couldn’t tell the difference between youthful exuberance and misbehavior that would make the Others angry and cause trouble for all the humans. She’d made a mistake when Lizzy first came to the Courtyard, and the consequences of that had left her feeling anxious about everything the children did.
When she wasn’t feeling so out of sorts, she would talk to Ruth, who had taught school, or Eve Denby, who was a mother, and get some guidelines so she would know when the anxiety justified a cut and when it should be dismissed as normal. She’d like to feel as easy around the children as she did around the Wolf pups, whose games were a lot more rough-and-tumble but didn’t make her afraid.
Which brought her back to the prophecy cards someone had dropped on the floor.
Meg braced her hands on the table. Had she locked the door when she’d left for her midday break? Had Jenni, who had a key to the back door of the Liaison’s Office, come in to pick up the mail for Sparkles and Junk and forgotten to lock the door on her way out? Had the children, bored with themselves and their available toys, tried the door and, finding it open, come inside to poke around? And finding the cards, had they decided to play a game, and then dropped the cards when they lost interest—or heard something that reminded them they weren’t supposed to be in the Liaison’s Office in the first place? Nathan would know. If she asked, he could sniff around the room and tell her exactly who had been there. But that would get the children in trouble.
Meg stared at the cards and realized two designs were missing. She rushed to the drawer where she’d kept the decks. The nature deck was still there in the back of the drawer. She pulled it out, removed the cards from their box, and shuffled them in with all the others scattered over the table.
Shuffled all of them in, including the cards with the drawings Jester had warned her to keep a secret.
After making a space at the top of the table, Meg closed her eyes and ran her hands lightly over the backs of the cards. Dozens of cards. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of combinations. Wasn’t that always true with prophecy? Thousands of learned images and sounds and smells still came down to the particular images and sounds and smells that answered the question the blood prophet was expected to answer.
She didn’t have a question, didn’t know why she was fiddling with the cards instead of sorting them back into their decks and getting on with her work. She just felt odd today and made a decision to see what she might see.
Three sets of three, she thought as she selected cards based on the severity of the pins-and-needles feeling that stabbed her hands, her legs, her chest. Three sets of three. Subject, action, result.
She opened her eyes and flipped over the first set of three—and realized the prickling along the right side of her jaw increased as each card was revealed.
Bison. Rifle. Tombstone—a thing that still existed in some parts of Thaisia from a time when cremation wasn’t required to conserve space in city burial grounds.
She flipped the next set of cards.
Wolf. Knife. Hooded figure with a scythe.
“No,” she whispered as she turned over the last set.
City skyline. A montage of Elemental forces—tornado, tidal wave, fire. And the last card . . .
Put them in with the nature cards and hope you never see any of them again. That’s what Jester had said. But there was one of those cards representing the result of something that was going to happen.
The prickling along her jaw became a buzz.
“Where?” Meg cried in frustration. “When? How will I know?”
“Arroo?” An idle, conversational query from Nathan, who was snoozing in the front room.
Her right hand buzzed. The index finger burned. Meg turned over the card beneath that finger.
A communication card—drawings of a telephone and a telegraph key.
Breathing hard, Meg looked at the phone on the counter.
“I’ll get a call.”
“Arroo?” No longer an idle query.
“It’s nothing.” Meg raised her voice enough to carry to Nathan. “I’m just talking to myself.”
That would stall him for a minute, maybe two. Then the watch Wolf would come into the sorting room to have a look around.
The prickling faded in her hands, in her jaw.
Meg retrieved a notepad and pen and wrote down the three sets of cards in their proper order, and then added the communication card. She left the pad on the counter, facedown. Then she scooped up all the cards and dumped them in the drawer. She would ask Henry to make her a special box big enough to hold all the decks. A box with a lock. A lock with two keys. She would keep one. Who should hold the other? Simon? No, too easy to find a key if left at Howling Good Reads or his apartment. Henry or Tess?
Grandfather Erebus. Yes, the Sanguinati should hold the other key to the box.
There was no evidence of what anyone had been doing in the sorting room by the time Nathan leaped over the counter and came in to sniff around. A Wolf didn’t need evidence. His growls made it clear that he knew exactly who shouldn’t have been in the sorting room.
He trotted into the back room and returned a minute later in human form, wearing a T-shirt, denim shorts, and sandals—clothes he’d left in a bin in the storage area.
“I need to talk to Simon.” Nathan gave her a hard stare. “Are you expecting any deliveries?”
“No.” A message, yes, but not a delivery.
“Jake will keep watch and give warning if anyone comes in.”
“Okay.”
She waited. Winced when she heard HGR’s back door slam. Then she braced her hands on the counter beneath the sorting room’s open window and shouted, “Henry? Henry, I need to see you.”