Vlad walked over to the archway and looked into A Little Bite before returning to the checkout counter. “Officer Daniel Hilborn is Officer Debany’s new partner. He comes here a couple of hours before his shift starts and observes. He’s learning who is who and who works where.”
“He called me ma’am. I think he’s afraid of me.”
He has good reason to be, Vlad thought. “Sally Esposito is a psychologist from Ferryman’s Landing who has volunteered to come to the Courtyard a couple of days a week to provide counseling for anyone who needs some help.”
“Meg?” Tess’s voice was quiet, but Vlad wasn’t fooled—not when black threads suddenly appeared and her hair began to coil.
“She’s having bad dreams. And she’s had a few episodes of seeing things that aren’t there. The doctors at Lakeside Hospital are fairly confident that her brain wasn’t damaged by . . .” He stopped. How much did Tess know about the way that Cyrus had cut Meg? Better not to bring it up since he didn’t want to deal with her if her mood turned deadly. “Anyway, Ms. Esposito came here with Steve Ferryman to talk to the Business Association about providing some counseling—not just for Meg but also for Lizzy, Frances, and Sarah Denby.”
“Getting inside the brain of a blood prophet must be a professional coup.”
“You weren’t here to voice an opinion when we had to decide,” Vlad said coldly. “Then again, you weren’t exactly absent, were you?”
“I didn’t ask Nyx to come with me on that hunt,” Tess replied just as coldly. She looked away. After a brief silence, she said, “How is Leetha?”
“She’ll heal, although she may have some scarring around her mouth when she’s in her human form.” Thinking of that, Vlad relented. “The newspaper said the men drank household cleaners in some kind of lethal, winner-take-all game.”
“One of them drank what they had added to the skin cream.” Tess didn’t look at him. “Harvesters are usually lone predators. Do you understand how rare it is for one of us to have friends? What happened to Leetha . . . She barely touched that . . . human, wasn’t trying to feed. But it could have been Nyx—or you. It could have been a Wolf biting an enemy.” She used one finger to shuffle a book request back and forth on the counter. “When we found those men, one of them smeared the cream on his arm and told Nyx they would give her two hundred dollars and all the blood she could drink if she could bite his arm.”
“Fucking monkeys,” Vlad muttered.
Tess nodded. “We made a counteroffer. Or I did.”
Seeing a companion die because of one look at Tess would be a game changer.
“After they saw the first one’s brains leaking out of his ears, they swore they were just getting their own back at that Sandee for cutting into their girls’ profits, swore they didn’t know the cream would really hurt the Sanguinati. We knew he was lying because of what that Sandee had told Captain Burke.”
Either Burke hadn’t noticed smoke hiding in the shadows when he interrogated that Sandee or he’d pretended not to notice. Either way, it explained how Nyx and Tess had reached the men first.
“When it started to rain inside the second one’s skull, the third one grabbed the liquid and chugged it down.” Tess shrugged. “Maybe he really believed he would survive drinking the stuff. He already knew he wouldn’t survive me.” She turned toward the archway but didn’t step away from the counter. “Sandee made a bargain with the police to avoid the terra indigene’s wrath. Jail in exchange for information. Is that acceptable to Simon?”
“As long as she never returns to Lakeside, it’s acceptable.”
“Well,” Tess said. “I’ll let you get back to work.”
Vlad watched her go into A Little Bite, but he didn’t go back to work. Contact, familiarity. Those things cut both ways, exposed the Others’ vulnerabilities as much as it exposed the petty ways humans hurt one another. That pettiness could lead to actions as deadly as a flat-out war, could wipe out Courtyards or towns. One human like Cyrus Montgomery coming into a mixed community could sour everything, shatter trust.
Perhaps the Elders had been right and studying that Cyrus and his family pack had been a useful lesson that they would share with the rest of Namid’s teeth and claws. But Vlad wondered if Simon and Meg, and even Lieutenant Montgomery, felt that way.
To: Jackson Wolfgard
We found Meg. She sprained her ankle and has to use crutches for a while. Her brain is a little strange right now, but she’ll get better. Tell Hope her vision drawing helped the police pack find the bad human’s car, so Meg wasn’t lost very long.
—Simon
Dear Meg,
Steve Ferryman and a woman named Sally Esposito came to see me at the Gardners’ farm yesterday. They told me you had been abducted, but you were missing for a few hours at the most, and you’re safely back at the Lakeside Courtyard now. They told me the man had cut you across old scars and had made the new cuts too close and too deep so they reopened while you were captive. They said you’ve been having “episodes.”
I have “episodes.” I guess that’s why they wanted to talk to me. When I told them what I could remember about the times when old and new prophecies collided—and continue to collide even now, even when I haven’t made a new cut—Sally Esposito said it sounded like whenever something provided a trigger that unlocked some of the memories of old prophecies, my mind spewed out the images in a dreamlike jumble—a visual hairball I cough up to feel better. (She didn’t say “spew” or “hairball”; she used nicer words, but it amounted to the same thing.)
But there is something I didn’t tell them. Something you need to know. Those episodes show me terrible and terrifying things. Bizarre things, like a huge chicken with a cow’s legs and a goat’s head. Images that got stuck together because, while the parts belong to animals, the whole doesn’t make sense. A jumble, like Sally Esposito said. But since I came to live at the farm with the Gardners, whenever I have one of those episodes, there is always one image that appears every time, whole and unchanging. For me it’s the image of someone handing me a jar of honey. I saw that image when I was still in the compound, and it was something Lorna Gardner did the first day I came to stay with them.
I think you have a constant thing too, something you can trust when you’re not sure what is real and what is a vision. You know what it is. You recognize the symbol for it. Hold on to your talisman until you heal. You’re strong, Meg. You won’t have these episodes forever. And, hopefully, neither will I.
Your friend,
Jean
CHAPTER 33
Windsday, Messis 29
Walking out of the Market Square Library, Monty spotted Simon standing in a bit of shade watching the medical office on the other side of the square. Then he looked at an office on the second level. There wasn’t a sign on the door—not yet anyway—but Monty was already familiar with Sally Esposito’s office.
G et some counseling, Monty, Burke had said. And take some personal time.
Sound advice, especially when he closed his eyes at night and saw Meg’s silver razor and Jimmy’s lower jaw positioned on the shredded clothes.
There was no mercy in the wild country.
But there was a kind of rough compassion. The doctor who had been found in the woods had been tortured by people who wanted to locate the cassandra sangue who were hidden in settlements throughout the wild country. But something else had piled leaves over his body, had prevented small scavengers from eating what was left of the man.