She answered his questions. She didn’t smell lusty like she did when she cut herself and then spoke prophecy, but her voice had the same dreamlike quality it had during those times.
Meg closed her eyes and sagged against Henry. Then she opened her eyes, blinked at all of them, and said, “Is there any water? I’m thirsty.”
Simon handed her the glass of water. She drank it all.
“Still thirsty.” She unfolded her body and stood up.
Before Simon could stop her, Jester hopped up and said, “I’ll help you find the water.” He made it sound like they needed to find a stream in the dark rather than turn on a faucet—and Meg didn’t say a thing to indicate she saw anything odd about that.
Simon waited until he heard Meg and Jester talking in the kitchen. Then he looked at the others in the room. “Do you think she’s sick?”
Vlad came around to the front side of the sofa. “No, not sick exactly.”
“Humans walk in their sleep,” Tess said. “They talk to people, do things around the house, even leave their homes and have no memory of it in the morning.”
“She hasn’t done that before,” Simon said.
“She’s had upsetting dreams before, but this was different, and it’s something Emily Faire needs to know about,” Vlad said. “It may be an indication of something wrong—or something right. The Intuits don’t hurt themselves in order to have the feelings that tell them if something is wrong. Maybe the cassandra sangue didn’t cut themselves in the beginning. Maybe they had dreamed about the future and discovered by accident that the cutting gave them control of the time and place to see the visions.”
“Control of time and place and the euphoria that clouded their minds and prevented them from seeing things that might terrify a young mind to the breaking point,” Tess said.
Simon nodded. “She needs to see the human bodywalker.”
“Maybe our Meg should spend a few days on Great Island,” Henry said. “Merri Lee could go with her. Steve Ferryman and Ming Beargard would watch over them.”
Tess had managed to control her emotions while Meg had looked into her eyes, but now her hair had broad streaks of red and was starting to coil as she focused on the Grizzly. “Why? That would be upsetting.”
“Yes,” Henry agreed. “But she would be out of reach of potential enemies.”
Hearing Henry’s words made Simon feel cold, but he understood. “Meg’s vision at night is no better than any other human’s,” he told Tess. “She was outside and it was dark, but she could still see well enough to describe what was around her.”
“You’re applying waking logic to a dream, which had prophecy cards the size of trees,” Tess argued. “What does her being able to see in a dream have to do with sending her to Great Island?”
“Vlad kept asking her what she’d seen in the moonlight. She didn’t correct him, didn’t say she had a flashlight or there was a campfire that allowed her to see in the woods at night.”
Threads of black mingled with the red streaks in Tess’s hair. “Meg would need sufficient moonlight to see in the dark, and next week is the full moon.”
Meg stared at the glass in her hand. She stared at the clock. She stared at the Coyote.
“Jester? Why are you in my kitchen at this time of night?”
“You should ask me why I’m here at this time of the morning since we’re close enough to dawn.” He studied her. “Are you awake now?”
Why did everyone keep asking her that? Then she remembered.
Dream. Vision. Something in between. This had happened a couple of times since she arrived in the Courtyard. The first time, she thought she was driving the BOW at night and Sam wouldn’t stop howling. But she and Sam had been out making deliveries in daylight—and he hadn’t been howling yet. Then there was the dream of making a cut and seeing prophecy. She recognized the trigger when it came in the real world, and her actions had saved Simon and the rest of the Wolves in the Courtyard.
This was another personal vision, warning her of something approaching in her own life.
Which didn’t explain the Coyote being in her kitchen at that hour.
“Why are we in the kitchen?” she asked.
“You were thirsty and wanted water. I came with you to help you find it,” Jester replied.
Meg looked at the sink. “I think I can find the faucet by myself.”
“If you’re looking for a faucet instead of a stream, you must be awake now.”
Why would she look for a stream? That didn’t make any sense—and that wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense. “Did Simon hit me with a goose?”
Jester laughed. “He whacked you with a pillow. But some of the pillows are stuffed with down, so I can see how you might confuse the two.”
Meg heard a rumbling voice coming from the living room. She knew that voice, but she asked, “Who else is here?”
“Henry, Tess, and Vlad.”
She sighed. “I guess it was a loud dream.”
“That’s the most entertaining kind, even if we’ll all need a nap because of it.”
He sounded cheerful. She should worry about that. Instead she drank the water and set the glass beside the sink. “I’m going back to bed until it’s daylight.”
“You should pee first. You drank a lot of water, even if you don’t remember doing it.”
Since her bladder suddenly agreed with him, she followed Jester’s advice. And she admitted to herself that it was a wee bit cowardly to sneak back to her bedroom and not say anything to the friends who were still talking in her living room.
Jester stepped into the living room and gave everyone a gleeful smile. “Now that we’re all awake, Meg has gone back to bed.”
Simon looked out the window. “Why? It’s almost time to get up anyway.”
Jester shrugged. “Human time makes less sense than ours.”
“Nothing we can do right now,” Vlad said. “We’ve been warned that danger is coming, and we know the result when it strikes.”
“But not the danger itself,” Henry rumbled before looking at Simon. “You’ll talk to Meg about spending a few days on Great Island?”
“There are woods on the island,” Simon said.
“But there wouldn’t be a body hidden under leaves,” Tess said. “The Intuits would have a feeling about something like that, and the terra indigene would have found it by now.”
Simon rubbed his forehead. “It might not happen during next week’s full moon. It could happen a month from now.”
“Not likely,” Henry said. “These days, our Meg’s visions are more often about the immediate future.”
“Talk to her, Simon,” Vlad said. “Talk to Blair and Nathan so they’ll be on the lookout for trouble in the evenings. I’ll talk to Grandfather Erebus and Nyx.”
Jester slipped out of Meg’s apartment and stopped at his own place just long enough to remove the jeans he’d pulled on when the commotion started. Then he shifted to his Coyote form and ran to make his own report to the girls at the lake.
Jimmy left the apartment and walked to the nearest bus stop on Main Street to catch one of the early-morning buses. There were things he needed to find, calls he needed to make, and he couldn’t do that from the apartment. For one thing, there was no phone in the place. You would think the freaks could put in a phone, even if it was a pay phone in the small, piece-of-shit entryway. But no. Either you used a mobile phone, which you paid for, or you had a landline connected at your own expense.
He’d bet his shoes that Sissy and Mama hadn’t paid to have a phone in their places.
Didn’t matter. Despite what he’d told Sandee, he did have a mobile phone, which he would ditch as soon as his plans were made.