My skin was damp from my shower, but I still felt unclean.
Roxie and I had fled Leonid’s house, with her speeding like a maniac all the way back. We hadn’t even considered calling the police, because neither of us wanted to get mixed up with the Caudry authorities any more than we absolutely needed to.
The second Roxie got out of the truck, she threw up, and I went to my motorhome to shower. I didn’t want the scent of Leonid’s decaying flesh stuck to me for a moment longer.
“Mara, qamari.” My mom brushed my wet hair back from my face. “What’s happened?”
I was sitting at the dinette, nursing the cup of hot tea Mom had put in front of me, and she hovered beside me. Her eyebrows were pinched with worry, and darkness clouded her smoky gray eyes. Her long black hair was pulled up in a loose bun, and since she’d been doing manual labor today, she’d exchanged her jewelry for old denim overalls.
The air conditioner rumbled in the window behind me, barely held in place by duct tape and a bungee cord. Mom turned it on to keep out the oppressive heat that enveloped Caudry, but it only made the persistent chill inside me take hold even deeper.
“Leonid Murphy is dead,” I told her finally.
She gasped. “What? How?”
“He hung himself in his apartment,” I said, and unbidden, the image of his body dangling in his living room filled my mind. His pale skin covered in flies that crawled over his protruding bones.
“You and Roxanne found him?” Mom asked, slowly lowering herself onto the bench across from me.
“He’d written ‘sorry’ everywhere.” I shook my head, trying to chase away the memories. “Something really bad is going on here. I think we need to get out of here.”
“I know, I know.” She lowered her eyes. “I’ve been thinking that no matter what Gideon accomplishes today, you should leave. You could convince Luka and Hutch to go, and ride with them.”
I scoffed. “Mom, I’m not leaving without you.”
“Gideon can’t leave, Mara,” she told me wearily. “With Roxanne’s motorhome messed up, and Seth out of work, and the tigers injured, we’re in even worse shape than when we got here, and we were in very bad shape then.”
“But it’s not just Leonid or even the attacks.” I moved my cup of tea to the side and leaned forward on the table. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
Mom instantly went on high alert—her shoulders rigid, her lips pursed together, and her eyes narrowed. “What kind of dreams?”
“It’s all dark, and this old woman comes at me. I don’t recognize her, but she looks like she’s decaying,” I explained. “She screams at me, and I can’t understand what she’s saying. Then I get this icy cold feeling in my chest.”
“That’s the dream?” Mom asked, still sitting severely, and I nodded. “What does it sound like she’s saying?”
“Um…” I concentrated, trying to remember the exact string of syllables she screamed at me. “It’s like … id-hab-bee-in-who-nah, I think.”
“Id-hab-bee-in-who-nah?” Mom repeated, then her entire face fell. She let out a pained gasp and closed her eyes. “Oh hell.”
“What? What is it?” I asked.
“I tried so hard to keep this from you.” She shook her head, her eyes still closed tightly. “I didn’t want this life for you. I never wanted you to have this gift.” She laughed darkly, the way she did anytime people referred to her extra senses as a gift.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, and my voice was gaining a nervous tremor. “What’s going on?”
The large skull key she wore around her neck had come free from her shirt, and it lay on her chest, rising and falling with each of her breaths. The rubies of its eyes seemed to fix on me, and they sparkled as it moved.
Mom opened her eyes and smiled sadly at me. “Your great-grandma Elissar was born in Egypt and spent her entire childhood there, so even after she moved to America and had your grandma Basima, she spoke her native tongue around the house.
“It was the first language your grandma Basima ever learned, and she still spoke it from time to time when I was growing up,” Mom went on. “I never became fluent, but I carried her terms of endearment with me, like when I call you qamari, my moon.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes, but she wiped them away. “In the end, when your grandma Basima no longer had her mind intact, she devolved into her childhood, and began speaking almost entirely in Arabic.”
Mom got up and went back into the bedroom. I heard drawers opening and closing, and a few moments later my mom returned with an old picture in her hand. She sat back down in front of me, staring at the picture.