Chapter Twelve
Natasha should have known that Jakob was not someone who would lose his temper—or even become angry—in any discernable way.
Yet it was impossible for one psychic to hide the fact that they were furious from another.
She spoke and he listened to her story, then wordlessly plucked the kitten from her hands, taciturn in the face of how it yowled, miserably, as he wrapped it in a fresh towel. “You smell bad, Natasha.” This, mildly. “Clean up.”
Okay, perhaps ‘furious’ was not a strong enough word. “Jakob—”
He picked up his phone.
“I—who are you calling?” Would it be Railey? Would he summon her to B.C. to take Natasha home?
NO!
That voice was not Jakob’s. It was not even human. Her back prickled and a Shadow surged forth, a dark veil snapping up like a rapid stage curtain, and she saw…
A cottage. This cottage. Except…it was filled with her things, her keepsakes, her furniture, everything she owned back home in Echo Creek.
Ne! The Shadow snapped again. This is home.
Her jaw swung and the Shadow pushed the image, a rush, right into her face.
Then it was gone.
“J-jakob?” she whispered. What had just happened? Her Shadows didn’t have a mind of their own. They were her mind, just…just knowing things most people didn’t.
“I am searching for a veterinarian,” he said distractedly, and flashed the screen of his phone.
Part of a slogan—Vets for Pets!—registered as the kitten mewled. “Oh, dítě,” she moved to it, but Jakob pivoted as she came forth, held it out of reach.
“Dost!” she said, and he shot her a thought
—Clean up. NOW!—
as into his phone he spoke, all smooth aplomb. “Good evening. Are any of your doctors available for a call-out?”
Natasha shouldered past him as he set the kitten down on an ottoman, clucking as the tiny creature purred so hard her wee body quaked. Had she not read somewhere that cats purred when they felt anything intensely—especially fear or pain? “Poor sweet baby,” she crooned and noted, for the first time, that its little feet were marked with white boots on each paw, a stark contrast to the rest of its smoky fur. “Why, look at you!” she cooed. “You have shoes!” She tsked again when the kitten cringed, away from her hand.
Jakob, on the phone, said “Its name?” and it was perversely pleasing to hear him sound uncertain.
“Shoes,” she answered and
—Shoes—
she reasserted. “Her name is Shoes.”
—Dost, Natasha! Go clean u—
—Stop it, Jakob! I am not a child and I am not your child!—
He flinched and “Shoes,” he replied smoothly, into the phone, then “Yes, of course. I’ll be there shortly.”
He hung up and she did not recoil when he glared. “Stop it,” she repeated, aloud now. “You know I did the right thing.”
A beat ticked by. Then another. Then—“The right thing,” he echoed. “You went out all alone. Blocked my Shadows with music. Placed yourself so near the threat you could have been caught—”
“I was caught.”
His gold eyes sprang wide and…fear. It coursed through his gaze so quickly he could not, even though she knew he was a master, disguise it. Her breath was short when she said “Whoever tortured this kitten knew I was there. Psychically knew.” She described the cloak of tangible darkness, how it had engulfed and blocked all her Shadows.
“How?” he barked, rhetorically she knew, and any other time she would have congratulated herself for stumping him. Tonight, though….the same chill from out in the orchards seeped under her skin. Her teeth chattered.
“Blackness,” he echoed, ciphering. “What is blackness, Natasha? What does it represent? Filth? Evil?”
Evil? That was a judgment word. A moralistic word. Not a Jakob word. “You…you don’t believe in evil, bratranek.”
“I am here, aren’t I?”
Another, colder chill snaked through her and "There is something he is not telling you". Railey’s words, resonating so strongly it was as if she were here, and yet…Think! she told herself. When it came to Jakob, Railey would indict him even if…
He lifted Shoes, carefully re-wrapped her in the towel that had loosened.
…even if he doctored a tortured kitten.
Ergo Railey’s judgment was not credible. And nor was her own; she’d just been frightened, horrified, then psychically stalked.
This last set a biting weight in her belly.
Jakob said “Lock the door behind me, Natasha. I am taking your creature for what I am seeing will be stitches.”
The kitten mewled, a sound as helpless and frightened as she felt. “Jakob, I—”
“Lock the door,” he repeated. “Clean up and get rid of your clothing. It’s bloody. It smells.”
She winced. At some point on her wretched drive home, (steering mostly with one knee while she clutched Shoes to her chest), the kitten urinated, the stench joining the stinging odor of vomit. Now her impeccable cousin regarded her and her cheeks flooded with the heat of embarrassment. Still—“Jakob, how could I have done nothing? In my Shadows I could hear this tiny thing shrieking, and I—”
“—you were as brave as I told you you were,” he said, softly now, no bite, and turned for the door. “Lock this,” he repeated.
“Wait!”
He paused and she didn’t really have anything to say, was just reluctant to be left all alone. Brave? Since when? “What…what will you tell the vet? About Shoes?”
He flicked a hand. “Teenagers. A BB gun.” This with a shrug clearly surprised that she was bothered to wonder how someone like him would come up with a lie so trivial.
Yet for all his ability as a liar and master of deceptive body language, he had not been able to conceal that strand of fear in his eyes when she’d told him how she’d been detected by a psychic much stronger than they.
But was that all that unnerved him? Or did he know something more? He left and she locked the door as he’d instructed then flicked on every light, flooded the cottage with illumination.
Still, every real shadow made her twitch for how they echoed that consumptive darkness out there in the orchards. “Another psychic,” she whispered. “Owen Brophy?” Was he what Gregory had titled an ‘Extra-Sensory Cognitive’ back when he’d studied her abilities? “Can you tell when something from the past wants to be heard?” he had asked and this had confused her; the past was never at rest. Time was a continuum. “Our history lives in our skin,” she’d replied. “Why do you think some people have this trait—or any trait—in the first place? The past will always make itself heard.”
It was just a matter of whether it spoke with a whisper or a scream.
Her thoughts remained in the past as she stripped. Showered. Slipped into the comfort of a soft, clean robe. The past. Her first language, Czech, had also surfaced unbidden here in Vestemere, particularly strong near Blue Eyes and Heart-Face. Czech too was her past. Owen Brophy, the Sea-Eyed Knight, had been introduced to her as Rob’s oldest friend. Also the past. Then there was the malice, the vindictiveness, in the threats her Shadows showed to be directed at Jessalyn. What was the need for vindication if not to right a perceived wrong from “…the past,” she whispered, and sank to the wingback where she’d placed the fairytale tome. Fairytales. They too were centuries old. The past again. Even this cottage—Rob had once lived here, he’d told them so during their walk-through. The past, over and over again. Her hands formed a cup and “Show,” she whispered.
A flurry of images spilled forth, Shadows sooty in the bright bath of all the lights she’d turned on. She scrolled through the images. Unfamiliar faces, former occupants, distorted as the Shadows leaned and moved. Then—“Blue Eyes!” She straightened and the scene sharpened, like a transparency laid over the room she was in now; different furniture, different colors, but Rob Haslom, and he said “Can I marry your daughter?”
Natasha swiveled. The man he spoke to was directly to her right, a redhead with a spray of freckles over his nose. He dropped his jaw theatrically. “Unbelievable!” he said, then brayed laughter as lively as his bouncing red curls. “I didn’t think young men even asked that anymore. Yes!” he said, then clapped with such alacrity Natasha laughed. “You may marry my Jessalyn Jane.”
Her heart bounced happily as the redhead beamed, but then her smile dwindled when his did. “Just promise one thing,” he said.
Blue Eyes, (who was wringing his hands) nodded. “Anything,” he said. “I’ll—”
“Be true.” The redhead did not broker so much as a gleam in his eye and Natasha squirmed, feeling…caught. ‘Be true’. Another way to say ‘don’t cheat’.
A murky Shadow floated past, Gregory, stripping, and…she flicked a hand. “Don’t show,” she whispered, looking away.
Still, her belly flipped. She hated it.
The redhead, on her right, said “It happens more….more quietly than you would think.”
God, was that true.
The Shadow of Gregory prodded her periphery.
“First you just enjoy her company. She makes you think. Makes you laugh. You’re intrigued, and that’s all it is, until…”
“Until you look for reasons, invent reasons, to go see her,” she replied, as though the redhead were speaking to her.
“The touching,” he said, nodding in the distance, “it’s almost secondary. Unnecessary. The real affair happens long before.”
That was true too. The real affair was all in the subtext, all in the repartee and wicked eye contact that could cling from across the proverbial crowded room.
“Before you know it you’ve shattered so many lives.” The redhead was looking at his lap now and Natasha felt a keening to somehow reach out to him, to place a hand on his shoulder. To tell him he was not the only one who had been there. Made colossal mistakes there.
But of course she could not. The past wanted to speak, this was true, yet retrocognitives could only ever bear witness—for unlike the future, history was inalterable.
Yet when the redhead raised his face, it seemed like he really did peer through time, looked straight at her. “The last thing you want is to be kept in the dark,” he said and, to her shock, a squall of Shadows left his lips. It was a memory, his memory. It was—
Blackness. That same inking out suppression that had blinded her out in the orchards. This man, this redheaded father to Heart-Face…
Natasha’s heart thumped. “He’s seen it too.”
A rap on the front door scattered her Shadows, gray wisps and soft colors jettisoning to hide Jessalyn’s father, back into history.
“No! Wait! Show—”
Thwack-thwack-thwack! The door again, louder this time but not loud enough to quell one last voice, sing-songing out of the Shadows. “Stay true, Beloved.”
“Baba?” It was like a scored knife down her spine and the last thing she saw before rising for the door was the redhead again, a flash across years of time. She watched him tear open old-fashioned stationary, a perfumed letter that smelled of—“Peonies,” she said, and a second blade tracked down her backbone.
“Unbelievable,” the redhead said again, but with none of the merry joviality he’d affected with Rob.
Natasha read the letter as rap resounded on her front door again, and her legs shook as she went to unlock it.
Fairytales often end violently
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