by Anne Bishop
“And you?” Monty asked.
“We look at the same things, but we don’t see the same things. It made me realize how easy it can be to screw this up and send the wrong signal.”
Monty looked out the window and wondered what sort of signal the new mayor and police commissioner were going to send.
• • •
Meg opened the Liaison’s Office, then glanced at the clock. Nathan was late, but Jake Crowgard was at his spot on the shoulder-high brick wall that separated the delivery area from the yard behind Henry’s studio.
Just as well she had the office to herself for another minute or so.
Her arms tingled. It wasn’t the pins-and-needles feeling that warned of the need to cut and speak prophecy. This was milder, more like a memo than a screeching alarm.
Opening a drawer, she lifted the lid of the wooden box Henry had made for her and looked at the backs of several decks of fortune-telling cards that she was learning to use to reveal prophecy instead of cutting her skin with the silver razor. Maybe today she would finally take all the cards out of the box and start discarding what wouldn’t be needed to create the Trailblazer deck of prophecy cards.
She stirred the cards in a vague effort to shuffle them. Not that it mattered. When a question was asked, her hands would prickle, and the cards were chosen based on the severity of that feeling.
Meg closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t influence her choice by recognizing the back of a particular deck. Placing her fingertips on the cards, she whispered, “What will the appointment of the new mayor mean to Lakeside?”
Nothing. Nothing. Her fingers brushed the cards while even the tingling faded away to nothing. Then a buzzing in the fingertips of her right hand. She brushed away the top cards until she reached the one that created the buzz. She picked up the card and opened her eyes—and knew the answer before she turned the card to see the image. The card had come from a children’s game and had been mixed in with her prophecy cards. But the images from the game had proved useful, even if the answers they provided were usually unwelcome.
What will the new mayor mean to Lakeside? A big question mark. Future undecided. Lakeside’s future had been undecided ever since the terra indigene here realized the Elders’ response to the Humans First and Last movement’s actions was going to be very, very bad.
But she’d hoped for a different answer today.
She’d put the card back and started to close the box when she thought of another question. Lakeside was a human-controlled city, but the Courtyard belonged to the terra indigene. Any outbreak of hostility between humans and the Others could have terrible consequences in the wake of the recent conflicts.
Meg closed her eyes and placed her fingers on the cards again. When she’d first begun working with the decks, she had decided that a three-card draw would represent subject, action, and the result. She didn’t know if that was the way other people used fortune-telling cards, but it seemed to be working for her.
“What is going to happen to my friends in the Courtyard?” She repeated the question over and over while she searched for the images that would provide the answer. When she’d selected the three that had produced the severest prickling, she took them to the big wooden sorting table and turned them over in the order she’d chosen them.
The first card had three images: train, bus, car. The second card had an explosion. The third card . . . the question mark. Future undecided.
That was not good.
She took a notebook out of a drawer, turned to a fresh page, then wrote down her questions and the cards she’d drawn as the answers.
She felt reluctant to put the cards away before she called someone to look at them and felt equally reluctant to tell anyone from the Business Association about this particular answer. Maybe one of her human friends? Ruth Stuart lived across the street in the two-family house on Crowfield Avenue, and Merri Lee was moving into an apartment in one of the adjacent stone buildings the Courtyard had recently purchased to provide a place for their employees to live if they were turned away from human-owned rentals.
A knock on the doorway between the sorting room and the back room made her gasp. Then she relaxed when she saw Twyla Montgomery waiting to be acknowledged. The sorting room was usually out-of-bounds to humans except for a special few, and with so many new people visiting the Market Square, the boundary was being reinforced with snarls and sharp teeth.
“Good morning, Miss Twyla,” Meg said.
She heard a scrambling in the front room and realized Nathan must have come in while she was using the cards.
“Good morning, Miss Meg.” Twyla crossed the room and set a travel mug and container on the sorting table. “And good morning to you, Mr. Nathan. It’s going to be a sticky day, and I don’t envy you having to wear a fur coat, no matter how fine it looks.”
Silence. Then Nathan acknowledged the words with a soft arroo and went back to the Wolf bed under one of the big windows in the front room.
Meg smiled. Twyla Montgomery was Lieutenant Montgomery’s mother. A thin woman with dark skin that was beginning to sag with age, brown eyes that usually looked kind, and short, curly hair that was more tarnished silver than black. But Twyla also had a no-nonsense attitude and didn’t take sass from anyone—a trait that made the Wolves keenly interested in observing her from a safe distance.
“Mr. Simon came into A Little Bite grumbling about yogurt and girl innards and how you don’t like bison,” Twyla said. “I thought he might have some kind of brain fever and was talking nonsense, but Miss Tess said you must not have eaten enough for breakfast, so she made an egg salad sandwich and a bit more for you.” A pause. “You skimping on food, girl?”
“No, ma’am. I didn’t eat much at home because I planned to pick up something when I got to work.” When Twyla stared at her, Meg added, “I really don’t like the taste of bison.”
“I tried a slice the other day and can’t say it appealed to me either. But I suspect if it was a choice between eating bison and going hungry, I’d like it just fine—and so would you.”
Meg nodded. “If that was the choice, Simon might learn to like yogurt.”
Twyla laughed. “You think so?”
Meg imagined being given a plate of rolled bison slices dipped in yogurt. Shuddering, she wondered if you could make a salad out of grass.
Twyla tapped a finger just above the three cards on the table. “What’s this about? Or can’t you say?”
“These are fortune-telling cards, but I call them prophecy cards. I’m trying to see if some of the cassandra sangue can use them to reveal prophecy instead of making a cut.” A thousand cuts. It was said that was all a blood prophet had before the cut that killed her or drove her insane. Since most prophets didn’t survive past their thirty-fifth birthday, Meg, at twenty-four, felt highly motivated to find an alternative to the razor.
“What do these tell you?” Twyla asked.
“I’m not sure. I asked what was going to happen to my friends in the Courtyard. These cards were the answer.” Meg waited until the older woman came around to her side of the table. She pointed to each card. “Subject, action, result.”
Twyla frowned at the train/bus/car card. “Does that mean travel or the transportation itself?”
“Could mean either. It was drawn as the subject, so that should mean the thing itself, but it could mean that one of these forms of transportation is bringing someone or something to Lakeside. The explosion, being the action card, could mean a ‘call the bomb squad’ kind of explosion or an emotionally explosive conflict between groups of people. So maybe a group of people traveling to Lakeside are going to cause some kind of trouble for the Courtyard. I’m getting pretty good at finding the cards that answer the question, but Merri Lee and I are still working on correctly interpreting them.”
As she watched Twyla study the cards, the skin between he
r shoulder blades began to prickle.
“What does the question mark mean?” Twyla asked, sounding troubled.
“Future undecided. That was the same answer I drew when I asked about the city of Lakeside this morning.” Meg studied the older woman. “You know what the cards mean, don’t you?”
“I have a thought, but nothing I’d want to share. Not just yet.” Twyla walked toward the back room.
“Thanks for bringing the food,” Meg said.
Twyla turned to look at her. “You’re welcome. Don’t you be skimping on food. There’s no need for that.”
Meg heard the back door of the office close. Then she reached over her shoulder and scratched at her back. She liked Twyla Montgomery, and even the Others offered the older woman a trust they rarely gave someone they’d known for such a short time. That was the reason Meg felt uneasy now.
She just hoped Miss Twyla decided to share her thoughts about the cards before something bad happened.
• • •
Twyla polished the desks at the consulate—the building in the Courtyard that was the domain of Elliot Wolfgard. He was the Courtyard’s public face, the terra indigene who talked to the mayor and the city council members, who attended political events, and who talked to the press. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that Elliot might be the urbane spokesWolf for the Courtyard, but Simon was the real leader.
“It never took the other humans this long to clean the desks,” Elliot said.
Twyla jerked upright in surprise and turned to face him. She hadn’t heard him come down from his office on the second floor.
At first glance, he could pass for the CEO of a successful company: expensive suits, thinning hair that was cut by someone who probably charged more than she usually made in a week, lean body that spoke of hours in a fitness place. Yes, he could pass for one, and she would bet plenty of CEOs and politicians had made the mistake of thinking that looking like them meant he thought like them. But the amber eyes belonged to a Wolf, and even if humans sometimes overlooked what he was, she was certain Elliot never did.
“I can see they didn’t take that long to clean in here, which is why it’s taking me longer than usual to give it a proper cleaning now,” she replied.
Elliot studied her. She was getting used to that. The Crows who worked in the Market Square had more questions than a houseful of small children, and at least one of them joined her whenever she went into a store to buy anything, wanting to know why she chose one thing over another. The Wolves studied her, studied all the humans who were allowed some access to the stores in the Courtyard, but she noticed they watched her and Nadine Fallacaro and Katherine Debany, Officer Debany’s mother, more than the younger women who were Meg Corbyn’s female pack.
Who taught the young in a Wolf pack?
“Come over here,” Elliot said. When she didn’t move, he added, “Please.”
He led her to the filing cabinets along one wall, then pointed to a stack of folders teetering on a small table tucked against the last cabinet. “Do you know how to file these the human way?”
She picked up a folder, looked at the designation on the tab, and chose the appropriate file drawer. Then she chose another drawer. And another.
She closed the drawers and turned to face him. “What sort of nonsense is this?”
“That’s the human way to file papers.”
“So you say.”
A flicker of red, like a flash of lightning, filled Elliot’s eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It means that whoever did this had his own system to find things but made it near impossible for anyone else to put his hand on the proper file, or the fool just shoved things into drawers and hoped he’d never be asked to find anything.” She stepped forward to drop the folder on the teetering stack, and Elliot took a step back, watching her in a way that made her think he wanted to tear into someone’s flesh and hers would do.
“Can you fix it?” he asked.
He seemed to be having some trouble pronouncing the words, and she wondered what was wrong with his mouth now when it had been fine a minute ago.
“Do you know how to work in a place like this?”
Everyone in the Courtyard had a job. Everyone in a Wolf pack had a position. And while not all the humans who were being allowed to share in the Courtyard’s bounty had been assigned tasks, it had been clear that the Others expected all the newcomers to figure out what skills they could offer that would justify their being accepted.
Twyla considered what Elliot was saying. It would be a change from mopping floors and scrubbing toilets—although they needed someone to do that too. She didn’t think many people bothered Elliot, so it would be calmer than working at one of the Market Square stores, and she could use a little calm in her day if she was going to help look after the children in the afternoons.
“I never learned about typing and computers and such,” she finally said. “Answering the phone and filing—that I can do for you. But only in the mornings when the children are having their lessons. I came to Lakeside to help Crispin take care of Lizzy, and that has to come first.”
“Of course,” Elliot said calmly, his pronunciation once more crisp. “We take care of our young.” He paused before offering, “Sam is my grandson.”
Twyla smiled. “He’s a fine boy.” She’d seen Sam around the Market Square, sometimes spending time with the other children but more often in the company of Meg Corbyn and a young Wolf named Skippy. The first time she’d seen him and noticed the gray eyes, she’d thought he was a human child with hair that was an odd mix of gold and gray. And she’d thought he was Meg’s younger brother or a cousin. Then she’d seen Meg with a Wolf pup who had that same coloring.
“The Sierra listed computers and typing as some of her skills,” Elliot said. “Maybe she could—”
“No.”
The sharpness in her voice surprised her more than it surprised Elliot. But she’d had time to think about the prophecy cards Meg had drawn that morning. She didn’t know how someone else would interpret those cards, but she knew what she had deduced from them about her family. It made her angry, and it made her heart ache, to realize Sierra had lied to Crispin when the girl insisted that she had no way of contacting their brother, Cyrus. If she had been honest, Crispin still wouldn’t have paid for Cyrus’s train fare to Lakeside the way he had for his mother, sister, and two nieces, but he would have called his brother and warned him to leave Toland before the storm hit.
Twyla looked at Elliot. Not the actual leader, but he had a significant position in the Courtyard and among the Wolves. She couldn’t ask Crispin for help in confirming what she suspected. As a police officer, he had the means to find out, but it would create trouble between him and his little sister once he realized Sierra was in contact with Cyrus. “My Sierra is a good girl. She’s smart, she’s kind, she’s a hard worker, and she loves her children. And most days and about most things, she can be trusted. But we all have our weaknesses, Mr. Elliot, and Sierra’s weakness is her brother Cyrus. He twists her up and convinces her to do things she shouldn’t do—things she knows are wrong.” Twyla looked around the first floor of the consulate. “This is like a government office. Some things are everyday and don’t matter, and some things are no one’s business but yours. If Sierra worked here for you and Cyrus came by to pressure her into giving him information that would be worth selling, she might resist for a little while, but eventually she would give it to him and then try to justify why he should have it. That would cause trouble for her and for the rest of us.”
“But the Cyrus isn’t here,” Elliot said.
“I think he might be on his way here.” She went to one of the desks and wrote down the phone number for Howling Good Reads. She tore off the sheet and handed it to Elliot. “Sierra told me and Crispin that Cyrus hadn’t left a number where we could contact him. I think she lied. I t
hink she’s called him a couple of times since we got here. Can’t say if she made calls on other phones without permission, but when I saw her using the phone near the cash register on a day when Mr. Simon and Mr. Vlad weren’t in the front of the store, she got flustered and claimed she was ordering pizza. I can tell you the children didn’t have pizza for lunch that day.” She hesitated. “The police have ways of checking calls made from a particular phone, but I can’t ask Crispin to check this. Even if I’m wrong about her calling Cyrus since we arrived in Lakeside, the lie she told before we left Toland will create tension between her and Crispin.”
Cyrus had always managed to create tension between his siblings, even when Crispin was standing up for Sierra.
“A lot of calls are made from the bookstore’s phone,” Elliot said.
“Most likely it would be a Toland phone number. One Mr. Simon and Mr. Vlad wouldn’t recognize.”
“All right.” Elliot folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “If your pup isn’t suitable, can you think of someone else who is?”
“Katherine Debany,” Twyla replied. “She worked as a personal assistant. Probably knows how to run an office like this better than the rest of us combined. I know Pete Denby was asking her about working for him a couple of afternoons a week.”
Elliot didn’t ask why a skilled worker would be available, and Twyla didn’t offer an explanation. Like her, Katherine had been dismissed because she wouldn’t join the Humans First and Last movement in order to keep her job.
“Tell the Katherine to see me.” Elliot headed for the stairs. His foot was on the first step when the phone rang. He looked back at her.
“You want me to answer that?” Twyla asked.
“Yes.” Elliot headed upstairs. “Thank you.”
Smiling, she picked up the phone. “Courtyard Consulate, Twyla speaking.”