She stared into the crystal, searching for anything that might hint at the cause of her troubles. Why was she experiencing such swings in her powers? Where did the disconcerting memory blanks come from? Was it just her siren nature? Was that normal for sirens? Or for a human fighting siren instincts?
She saw her own face reflected in the surface of the glass and let her eyes focus there instead of in the darker depths of the crystal. Her image was distorted, but she ignored that fact, looking for anything else out of place. Had something changed in her? If so, what? And why?
As she watched, she saw herself pouring hot water into a teacup. That wasn’t much of a help. How many times had she poured tea for one of her clients? Unless the message was that she needed to drink some kind of tea in order to recover her powers, just as Wilson had to recover his memory after fifty years in the Everglades.
But Sarah hadn’t suggested any herb or remedy that she thought might work in Reg’s current circumstances. And Sarah was always quick to jump in with a remedy if she knew of one. Maybe the same remedy as had worked to recover Wilson’s memory could help Reg with her memory lapses? Would a tea of sweet bay leaves put things to rights again for her?
Reg wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but she thought she might as well at least give it a try. Sweet bay leaf was, she knew, an herb with many beneficial properties, and she couldn’t see it doing her any harm, even if it didn’t do her any good. She scratched Starlight’s ears and chin for a few minutes, just feeling safe and cozy sitting with him, then eventually nudged him off her lap.
“I’ll just make some tea,” Reg said. “If it works, it works. If not…” she shrugged. “Then we’ll try something else, right?”
Starlight sat there blinking at her, but he didn’t seem to object to her plan. Reg nodded, resolved. She went to her kitchen cupboards and looked through them. She was pretty sure that she hadn’t used all the leaves that she had brought from the Everglades. She had learned through her lean years never to waste anything that might be useful in the future. She had judged the herb to be of some use to her still.
It was, appropriately enough, in the cupboard with the teabags and jars of tea leaves and herbs. Neatly labeled laurel in Sarah’s printing. Reg vaguely remembered Sarah taking care of it after Wilson was gone.
Reg pulled out the leaves and looked for something to crush them with. When she had prepared the tea for Wilson, she had just broken the leaves up with her fingers, but she had found the leaves to be very tough and sharp, pricking the pads of her fingers and thumb painfully. She still didn’t have a mortar and pestle like Sarah did, but she was bound to have something she could use.
Reg eventually settled on an extra-heavy freezer bag and a hammer, and pounded away at the leaves inside the bag until they were a fine powder. Well, a coarse powder. Maybe not exactly powder, but certainly small enough to be used in the tea. Reg started the kettle heating and poured the crushed leaves from the plastic bag into a teacup. She knew that the lemon hadn’t exactly made it palatable for Wilson. Sarah was always rolling her eyes at how much sugar or honey Reg put in her teas. But Sarah’s teas always needed the extra love.
When the kettle whistled, Reg poured the boiling water into her teacup and watched the leaves steep. How long should she wait? She didn’t want it to get too cool or bitter. It would be easier to get down while it was hot. But the leaves might need time to release their essential oils and special little molecules and magic into the water. She stirred it, watched a couple of short videos about cats on her phone, and then stirred in a bit of lemon juice and a couple of tablespoons of honey. She sniffed the steam coming out of the cup.
It didn’t smell too bad. Not as bad as some of the stuff that Sarah tried to make her drink. Reg sipped the tea and added another tablespoon of honey into it. She watched more videos to distract herself from the taste while she sipped the rest of the oversweetened tea.
“It’s not that bad,” she told Starlight.
Starlight paid her little attention, sitting like a sphinx sculpture, unblinking, staring off into space.
But then he gave a jump as if startled by a noise, and he looked back at the coffee table where Reg’s crystal ball still rested. He walked over to the table and stood up on his hind legs, sniffing the ball and looking down into it.
“What’s going on?” Reg inquired. She joined him beside the coffee table and sat down, looking at the crystal ball and trying to figure out what had suddenly interested Starlight so much. “What is it?”
Shapes were moving in the core of the crystal. Reg stared down at it, letting her eyes focus on the depths of the crystal ball rather than focusing on the surface. If something in the ball had enough power to call to Starlight from across the room, she thought it must be very important and powerful magic.
Large shapes. Vaguely human. She couldn’t see well enough to recognize who it was in the ball, not even to discern the species. Was it Calliopia again? Hurt or in need of some other kind of assistance? Reg hadn’t heard from either her or Ruan, her mate, recently. Not that she had expected to. She had known that they were leaving town, and that, both having been shunned by their communities, they would be trying to remain inconspicuous during their travels.
She didn’t think that the main figure in the ball was a fairy, though. It seemed too bulky overall to be one of the slim fairies, even with a puffy winter coat. It was spring and, while they would probably still be wearing winter jackets in the northern states, most people in Florida had no need for such things. Reg thought that with the strength of the revelation in the glass that it was something close, not halfway across the country.
“Who is it?” she asked softly. “Who is in my crystal today?”
She put her hand on Starlight, trying to strengthen the vision. The picture became clearer. She thought, was almost sure, that it was a large man in a cloak. There was nothing to compare his scale too, but Reg got the impression of size and strength. The man’s build was largely hidden by his coat or cloak, which was hooded so that she could not see his face.
As if he had heard Reg’s thoughts, the man turned toward her, looking for someone who was not actually visible to him. With his movement, light fell across his features, and Reg knew who it was.
Chapter Seventeen
Etienne.
Reg sat back in her seat, smiling.
She hadn’t expected to see or hear anything from the creature for several months. She knew that Bruce, a skinwalker, received Etienne’s postal mail from him once a month and, at the same time, passed on any mail he had received for Etienne. And Etienne had made it known to Reg that he was very deliberate in his letter writing and might take the whole month writing something to his girlfriend who lived in… where was it? Russia?
So the chances that he would take the time to write a letter to Reg and that it would reach her less than a month since she had left the Everglades seemed very low. More likely, it would take a year for him to decide that he should write to Reg, a month or two to compose a letter, and then another month for it to get to Reg. That seemed more like his pace.
Watching him in the crystal ball, Reg frowned, trying to figure out where he was.
He wasn’t out in the wilderness where his cabin was, all by himself. He seemed to be moving among crowds of people, as if he were walking past them on the street. But what would possess him to go into town? He kept the cloak wrapped tightly around him so that he wouldn’t attract the attention of those around him, but there wasn’t much he could do to disguise his great height and bulk. He was at least a head taller than any of the other human shapes he passed by. As if he were the only adult among a crowd of children.
“Where are you, Etienne? Where are you going? And why was it important for me to see you?”
Unsurprisingly, Etienne did not answer her. Nor did he magically appear in front of her.
Reg looked at Starlight. “He is a friend from the Everglades. He’s… well, there they call him a skunk man, b
ut he doesn’t smell bad. He’s very clean, just like a cat. He’s… very large and hairy. A Bigfoot.”
It occurred to Reg that she hadn’t asked Etienne what he preferred his species be called. One would think that after her experience with Tybalt, who had complained about how the humans called the various magical species by whatever name they liked instead of by the way they self-identified, she would have learned. And of course, many of the names that the humans used historically had derogatory meanings and were used as slurs. Reg didn’t like to give other races offense by calling them something other than they wanted to be called.
“I don’t know if that’s the right word. Forget I said that. Until I find out what the right word is.”
Starlight blinked at her, unfazed.
But she still didn’t know why she saw Etienne in her crystal. Had the bay leaf tea triggered a memory, and that was what she was looking at? She didn’t think so. She had never seen Etienne out among people. At least, not that she remembered. Reg swore under her breath at the circular thinking. She knew it wasn’t a memory because she didn’t remember it?
“He can’t be coming here. That wouldn’t make any sense. Do you think maybe I’m supposed to go see him in the Everglades? It doesn’t even look like that’s where he is. And why would he want to see me again so soon?”
She had sent him a box of Hershey’s bars, apparently Etienne’s one indulgence. Maybe he just wanted to tell her thank you, so he had sent her a message in the vision. But then wouldn’t it have been something more straightforward? Etienne mouthing “thank you,” or showing her the Hershey’s bars in his special cupboard? Or toasting her with an opened Hershey’s bar?
Walking through a crowd didn’t feel like a message.
So if it wasn’t a memory and it wasn’t a message, then what was it?
Thinking about Hershey’s bars made Reg hungry, so eventually, she let the vision go and got up to see if she had any ice cream or other treats.
Chapter Eighteen
Reg tried to keep to what was her normal schedule, staying up until the small hours of the morning before going to bed, hoping that the regular sleep schedule would reset things and everything could go back to normal. Sleep deprivation could do a lot of weird things to the body and the brain. If she had accidentally deprived herself of sleep, perhaps her memory lapses and problems accessing her powers could be attributed just to that. She needed to get the right amount of sleep, and then everything would turn out right.
Going to sleep at the right time of day should have minimized nightmares. She would be tired enough that she could just go to sleep within minutes and rest comfortably until her usual wake-up time. But it didn’t turn out that way.
Reg tossed and turned, falling asleep and then waking up again repeatedly. She saw Etienne in her dreams again. And Sarah, with the candles and markings of the spell that had been cast. And snakes. Slithering in the darkness. Rearing up before her, rattles shaking and buzzing noisily.
Other shapes in the darkness. A watcher she couldn’t identify. Was it Davyn, cloaked? Was it Etienne or someone else who simply did not wish to be seen for his own personal reasons? Or was it something more sinister? Someone watching Reg and trying to force her out of the neighborhood? Someone who didn’t appreciate being hoodwinked by a siren.
Reg shook off the thoughts. They wouldn’t think that way if they knew her. If they knew her, they would see that she was not going to hurt anyone. She wasn’t going to hunt on the land or the waters. She wasn’t that kind of person, no matter what the fractional amount of siren DNA in her blood.
She tossed and turned some more and found herself in another dream. The quality was different. She was immersed in it, as if it were real life, instead of being aware that it was full of symbolism and meanings. She didn’t feel like herself and she didn’t know what she was doing, there in the graveyard, moving from one row of tombstones to another. She had no idea why she was there or what she was looking for.
But she knew something. She wasn’t going to like what she found there.
Reg jolted awake. Going from the darkness of the dream to the brightness of the room was disconcerting. She took several deep breaths, trying to calm the pounding of her heart. She had not known that it was a dream and it took her a while to convince herself that it was. There was no graveyard. She hadn’t been there. The grittiness that she could still feel on her skin was only an illusion and would fade within seconds.
What had she been looking for?
She tried to shake the dream off without asking the question, but it kept coming back into her mind, forcing itself into her consciousness. What had she been looking for?
She was glad to be awake. She was not interested in trying to find sleep again. She would just keep falling into nightmares and she would rather be tired during the day than have to go through another dream.
Starlight meowed loudly from the floor beside the bed. Reg looked over the edge at him. He stared up at her, imperious, commanding her to get up and fill his bowl with good fish. She had lazed around in bed too much already.
“A cat is telling me I sleep too much?” Reg demanded. “You’re the one who sleeps the day away in the sunshine.”
He just glared and didn’t explain himself.
“All right,” Reg grumbled. “I was getting up anyway, though. It’s not because of you.”
He waited until her feet were on the floor and then led the way to the doorway. He waited for Reg to lead the way through the door, then ran ahead of her to his dish, to sniff at it and remind her that her first priority needed to be his welfare.
“Bathroom first.”
He stood by his dish, watching her disappear into the bathroom and shut the door. But she didn’t linger for too long and, in a few minutes, was back out and looking through the fridge for the tuna she remembered being there. She looked through all the bowls, with Starlight winding around her legs and encouraging her loudly the whole time, before finally giving up and deciding that she must have finished it off the last time she had fed him, even if she didn’t remember.
“Okay, okay. I’m opening a new can. But you could eat your kibble, you know; you’re not starving.”
But kibble was not for breakfast. Starlight would eat it throughout the day because, unlike the tuna or canned cat food, it would stay good, but he liked something better for his first meal of a new day.
Reg managed to get the food from the can to his dish and put the rest away in a bowl in the fridge, carefully sealed so that it wouldn’t make everything else in the fridge smell like fish.
“Okay.” Reg started her coffee brewing and went over to the couch to sit down and look at her phone while waiting for it. She had not put her crystal ball away after the previous viewing and it still sat on the table in front of her. Reg did not look into it; she just gazed toward it, her eyes focused somewhere beyond the crystal, letting her brain wake up at its own speed.
She was aware of shapes in the crystal, but didn’t want to exert herself by seeing what they were. Not before having her coffee. She suspected that it was still the same vision as the day before, Etienne moving through the crowds of people. But even without looking at it, she sensed that he was closer now. Was he coming to her? Why would he? He would never leave the Everglades. And if he did, why would he go to her?
There was a heavy knock on the door.
Reg hadn’t even pulled on her robe. The day was advanced and it was warm inside, the A/C already running. She was in shorts and a t-shirt. Not exactly dressed for company. She rubbed her eyes with her fingertips and tried to figure out whether to answer the door or just to ignore it.
What if it were someone who didn’t want her there? Someone come to bully her into leaving Black Sands? It wasn’t Sarah, or she would have just let herself in. If it were Corvin, Reg would have felt his pull. Jessup usually announced herself, and Reg didn’t think she would have let her new partner show up there by himself. The heavy knock did not sound like a client
, though, of course, it could be.
Reg sighed and boosted herself up off the couch.
The wards inside the house would protect her from intruders and those with malice in their hearts. And Sarah had now set wards in the yard, so no one should even be able to get to her door if they had evil intentions toward her.
She opened the door a crack with the chain still on. “Who’s there?”
A red-brown, furry face appeared immediately in front of her face, making her jump.
“It is I,” Etienne announced.
Reg slid the chain and threw open the door. “Etienne! What are you doing here? I saw you in the crystal, but I didn’t know you were coming here.”
He nodded, smiling shyly at her. He straightened to his full height, so her eyes were somewhere around his chest level. “It has been a strange journey,” he admitted. “It was unexpected.” She loved his faint French accent and old-world way of talking.
“So why are you here?” Reg realized herself and motioned for him to enter the cottage. “Come in, come in. Tell me all about it.”
Etienne entered. He looked at the wicker furniture and hesitated. He was not a small man and the furniture looked too fragile to hold his weight. He grabbed one of the sturdier wooden kitchen chairs and put it into the conversational grouping of wicker furniture. He sat down with a sigh and pulled off the dark cloak, which he certainly did not need in the warmth of the room. He ran his hands over his furry arms and legs and settled himself in.
“Do you remember I told you about Ilka?”
“Ilka. Your girlfriend. Yes, I do. I remember she is from Russia and that her coat turns white in the winter.”
Etienne’s whiskers bristled and pointed upward as he smiled. Reg suspected that if she could see his skin through his hairy face, he would be blushing. He was both shy and proud of his girlfriend.
“Yes, that is right,” he agreed, nodding. “And I told you that… our courtship is not so quick, as with Homo sapiens. We have traditions… we take time to get to know each other, discuss families and arrangements, and get the proper blessings of our family and community. It is not a quick process.”
Without Foresight Page 10