“Absolutely not.”
“If I drank coffee all day the way you do, I’d be doing cartwheels off the ceiling.” She glanced at the cards spread out on the counter. “I interrupted your game.”
“Just passing the time.”
“Hmm.” She studied his card layout. “It’s often called Réussite-or Success-in France, where some historians believe it originated. In Britain, it’s Patience, which I suppose you have to have to play it. The most interesting theory I’ve come across is that in its early origins the outcome was a form of fortune-telling. Mind?” she asked, tapping the deck, and he shrugged his go-ahead.
She turned up the card, continued the play. “Computer play’s given the game a major boost in the last couple decades. Do you play online?”
“Rarely.”
“Online poker?”
“Never. I like to be in the same room as my opponents. Winning’s no fun if it’s anonymous.”
“I tried it once. I like to try most everything once.”
His mind took a sidetrip into the possibilities of “most everything.” “How’d you do?”
“Not bad. But, like you, I found it lacked the zip of the real thing. Well, where should we do this?” She set her drink down to pull a notebook from the massive area of her purse. “We can start with you giving me the details of this morning’s visitation, then-”
“I had a dream about you.”
Her head angled slightly. “Oh?”
“Given the X rating, you can have the option of sharing it with the others, if you think it applies, or keeping it to yourself.”
“I’d have to hear it first.” Her lips curved. “In minute detail.”
“You came to my bedroom upstairs. Naked.”
She flipped open the notebook, began to write. “That was brazen of me.”
“There was some moonlight; it gave the room a blue wash. Very sexy, very black-and-white movie. It didn’t feel like the first time; there was a sense of familiarity when I touched you. The kind that said, maybe the moves would be a bit different, maybe we’d change up the rhythm, but we’d danced before.”
“Did we speak?”
“Not then.” There was interest in her eyes, he noted, and amusement-both on the cool side. And no pretense of embarrassment. “I knew how you’d taste, knew the sounds you’d make when I put my hands on you. I knew where you like to be touched, and how. When I was inside you, when we were… locked, taking each other, the room began to bleed, and burn.” The interest sharpened; the amusement died. “It rolled over us, that fire, that blood. Then you spoke. Right as it took us, right as you came, you said bestia.”
“Sex and death. It sounds more like an erotic or stress dream than foresight.”
“Probably. But I thought I should pass it on.” He tapped a finger on her book. “For your notes.”
“It would be hard not to have sex and death on the brain, considering. But-”
“Do you have a tattoo?” He watched her eyes narrow in consideration, and knew. “About this big,” he continued, holding his thumb and forefinger a couple inches apart. “At the small of your back. It looks like a three with a small wavy line coming out of the bottom curve, then a separate symbol above-a curved line with a dot in the center.”
“That would be Sanskrit for the Hindu mantra of ohm. The four parts stand for the four stages of concentration, which are awake, asleep, dreaming, and the transcendental state.”
“And here I thought it was just sexy.”
“It is.” Turning, Cybil lifted the back of her shirt a few inches to reveal the symbols at the small of her back. “But it also has meaning. And since you obviously saw it, we’ll have to consider your dream had some meaning.”
She let her shirt drop, turned back. “We both know that what we see is potential, not absolute. And that often what we see is crowded with symbolism. So, going by your dream, we have the potential to become lovers.”
“Didn’t need to dream to get that one.”
“And as lovers we have the potential to pay a high price for the enjoyment.” She kept her gaze steady on his as she spoke. “We could further speculate that while you want me on a physical level, on the emotional and mental levels, you don’t. The idea of us pairing off strikes too close to following suit behind our friends, and you don’t care to fall in line. Can’t blame you, as I don’t either. It’s also irritating-an irritation I share-to consider this pairing up could be part of a larger plan put into place hundreds of years ago. How am I doing so far?”
“You’re hitting the highlights.”
“Then to finish up, I’d include the fact that your pessimistic nature-which I don’t share-would sway your subconscious, or your gift, over to the get in, get off, get dead arena.”
He let out a short laugh. “Okay.”
“For me, I don’t make decisions on lovers based on the possibility that orgasm might include being consumed by evil forces. It just takes all the romance out of it.”
“You looking for romance, Cybil?”
“Everyone is. It’s the personal definitions thereof that vary. Why don’t we take this outside, on the deck? I like spring, and it doesn’t last long. We might as well grab some of it while it’s around.”
“All right.” Taking his coffee, he opened the door to the back deck. “Are you afraid?” he asked as she moved by him.
“Every day since I’ve come here. Aren’t you?”
He left the door open behind them. “I used to be. I used to spend a lot of my life being afraid and pretending not to be. Then, along the way, I got to the fuck-it stage. Just fuck it. Now, mostly, the whole business just annoys me. It doesn’t annoy you.”
“Fascinates.” She took sunglasses out of her purse, slid them on. “I think it’s good all of us don’t have the same reaction. This way we cover more ground.” She sat at one of the tables on Cal ’s deck, facing his back gardens, and the green woods that stood along their edges. “Tell me about Ann Hawkins.”
So he did, and she took her notes. “Three,” she began. “Three boys, descended from her and Dent. Faith, that’s Cal ’s area. Believing not only in himself, in you, in the town, but having the faith to accept what he can’t literally see. The past, what happened before him. Hope falls to Fox, and his optimism that he can and will make a difference. His understanding and trust in what is. Which leaves the vision to you-what can be-for better or worse. A second three-Q, Layla, me-falls in with that, forming subsets. Cal and Q, Fox and Layla, and now you and me. Three into one-three men, three women, three subsets, into one unit. We’ve accomplished that in a very real sense. Just as we accomplished re-forming the three pieces of the bloodstone into one whole.”
“Still doesn’t tell us how to use it.”
“But she made it clear, at least to me it’s clear, that we have what we need. There’s no other tangible element. That’s something. Tears.” Frowning, Cybil drummed her fingers on her notebook. “She wept for you, and if I’m interpreting correctly, she’s saying I will. I’m happy to shed a few if it sends the Big Evil Bastard back to hell. Tears,” she repeated, and closed her eyes. “They’re often an ingredient used in magickal arts. I think they’re usually female tears. You’ll have your tears of a virgin, of a pregnant woman, of a mother, of an ancient, blah blah blah, depending. I don’t know that much about it.”
“There’s something you don’t know that much about?”
She shot him an answering smirk, tipped down her sunglasses to peer at him over them. “There are worlds I don’t know much about, but almost nothing I can’t find out everything about. We need to see. She appears to be saying that while the other subsets may certainly be called on to do more in their specific areas, they’ve done the bulk of their job there. It’s time to look ahead, and that’s up to you and me, partner.”
“I can’t whistle it up like a German shepherd.”