Jakob had ordered her coffee and a wedge of pie; flapper, topped with about a mile of meringue. Precisely what she’d been planning to order herself. “Stop reading me,” she said and seated herself across from him.
“It entertains me.”
“And annoys me.” She tackled the pie, the frothy cream a delight on her tongue.
Jakob sat back and for a moment sun pooled on their alfresco table. Then he slid a picture across the wrought iron toward her.
Her fork clattered onto her plate. Heart Face. Natasha’s eyes raced over the caption of the picture Jakob had just shared, printed off an arts and entertainment site on the internet.
“H—how did you find this?” Natasha asked, gaze locked on Heart Face. Jessalyn. Her name is Jessalyn.
Shadows misted from all four directions and No. The thought encroached with unerring certainty. She’s called Jessie. Blue Eyes calls her Jessie.
“Ja,” murmured Jakob. “He does.”
Her Shadows fled and she glared at him “Stop it!”
He sipped coffee.
“I will ask you once more: how did you get this?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I am stronger. I see things you don’t.”
“Then why am I here?” She pushed the remains of her pie aside. “If you’re so much more capable, then why—”
“Because. She needs you.” He tapped the picture. “They need us both.”
“But…” she tried ripping her gaze from Heart Face Jessalyn. Impossible. For even though a picture remained a flat, one-dimensional representation of a living, breathing human being, it was still so much more tangible, so much more real than a shadow figures she could see through. She placed her flat hand on the picture. Why do I know you? Why do you know me? My Shadows only ever show me the past…so who are you?
,p>Jakob watched her, but gone was any amused one-upmanship or superior consideration. “You have shunned your Shadows for most of your life, sestranek,” he said quietly. “And when you have embraced them you were mercilessly betrayed and used.”Natasha’s gaze skittered down the street, between maple boughs lending a green canopy down Whyte Avenue all the way to the University of Alberta. To Gregory.
Jakob glanced in the same direction. “Let your Shadows show you something you can make better, Natasha.” He narrowed his gaze toward the University campus. “This will be neither a test nor a laboratory experiment where you will be manipulated by Grigori—”
“Gregory,” she corrected, flat and no accent. “And I was never manipulated. I made a choice. Many choices, about him.”
“All under the falsest of pretenses.”
“Ja. So clearly my Shadows are not quite as accurate as you think—”
“This is real life!” He leaned across the table, voice low and fierce. “Not a laboratory. Not a dissertation for someone to build a career on. Ne. This is a human being—two human beings—who could live or die, all dependent on you.”
“How?” she burst, then wanted to fold herself under the table, when several other Has Beans patrons flinched in alarm. “Jakob—”
“I have secured a commercial venue in Vestemere,” he said. “I have an overage of collectables, as you know, and the Okanagan Valley swells with tourists each summer. Not a soul will question why a collector would want to broaden his business and test-run building a clientele in a new province.”
“You want to physically go there? Be near these people?”
“Not just me, sestranek.”
Her eyes became big enough to swallow the whole block.
“What the Shadows show will become sharper if we’re closer,” he said.
“We don’t know that!”
“No, you don’t know that. But I do.” He sat back and his eyes, gold flecked with blue, replicas of her own, were unyielding. Flinty.
“Jakob…” She stared. “Why is this so important to you?”
“Why do you always assume that nothing ever is?”
She had no answer other than the shame that she felt—shame which she knew he could read. Still—“I…I have clients,” she said, wincing at how small her voice sounded, how lame.
He rolled golden eyes. “You also have a partner.”
Yes. Railey.
“Her champagne tastes outweigh her wage,” he said. “She will be happy to take on your clients and the added bonus will be that she’ll then be too busy to climb into whatever sort of trouble she creates with her over-sized mouth.”
Good God, look who was talking.
“Natasha,” he said, and his hand crept ’cross the table, fingers barely grazing her skin.
A rumble of Shadows made sounds and, from her periphery, Natasha noticed other customers frowning up at the sky, searching for whence thunder came. “Don’t,” she whispered, but too late. The Shadows built pictures and there was Heart Face. Blue Eyes. The little bootie-shoe. “But it’s not a little shoe,” she rasped and from the Shadows she heard it.
“Drop the shoe,” she whispered.
The width and breadth of the bootie grew. The heel became lethal and long.
“Blue Eyes! Be careful!”
Jakob kept his light touch on her hand and thunder cracked. The Shadows said
Natasha gasped as the heel met its mark and blood bloomed over Blue Eyes’ chest.
“Very violent,” she repeated, and felt like she’d been caught in a trance. “Very violent.”
“Very violent,” Jakob echoed, and gently set her hand aside.
Natasha knit her fingers together and tucked them under the table. In the sky and around them, the Shadows were gone. The strange anomalous summer thunder had been swept up by street sounds and the patrons at Has Beans all shrugged. Had they ever really heard anything at all?
Yes, she thought sadly, and felt sorry. You were not imagining.
“I can still hear them screaming,” said Jakob, and touched Jessalyn Chandler Haslom, Heart Face’s, picture.
“Ja. Yes.” She could too.
“Natasha, how long is vacation from a typical job?”
How long…she wasn’t sure. Head To Heal was her massage clinic. She was self-employed. “I…two weeks?” she guessed.
“Sounds reasonable.” He nodded. “I will strike you a deal, sestranek. Take two weeks of vacation and come stay with me—no expenses—in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of British Columbia.”
“But—"
“And if in two weeks there is nothing new, then even if your Shadows show you that nothing has changed for Ms. Jessalyn Chandler—”
“Chandler-Haslom,” she corrected.
“Correct.” A tight smile. “Chandler-Haslom. Then simply pack up. Come back home.”
It had seemed like a good compromise—until she told Railey.
“Tash, this is crazy.”
“Rae…” She sucked a breath through her teeth. “You know I never see future. And you know I never see strangers.” Railey also knew that her ability never injured her either—but if she told her that lately every trip into the Shadows left her with nosebleeds that rendered her exhausted and weak, she’d take unhinged to a whole new level.
Still, she always underestimated how intuitive her friend could be, for as Railey positioned herself in front of her—five foot two to Natasha’s five ten, yet still somehow a giant—Natasha cowered as she wagged a finger in her face. “I know you see danger for this artist and her husband,” Railey said. “But here’s who I see danger for: You.”
Natasha swallowed.
“If you trot off to this…this Where-ever, B.C—”
“Vestemere, B.C.”
“—and start snooping around two total strangers, then you’re the one courting danger. Because even if you weren’t doing something totally creepy—and stalking is the epitome of creepy, by the way—here’s a newsflash that’s never going to change: it is lunacy for women to travel all alone. You’re putting yourself at risk, you could easily get hurt, and I am your best friend and will not let that happen!”
Oh, dammit. There really was no way around admitting—“Jakob’s going too,” she mumbled, and pivoted, made herself busy packing.
“What?” Railey pivoted also, glaring at her from over her suitcase. “Jakob Michael?”
“I’m not quite so formal that I use both his names.”
“Well I do! Tash—”
“Do not. Do not start, Rae.” Why—why—did it have to be such that the only two people in the world who loved her also hated each other?
And why did she think Railey would stay quiet?
“So two people are in danger and that spooky prick is involved? Well, call me Sherlock, Natasha, but I have solved your mystery. You want the culprit, the bad guy, the henchman, call him what you will? Take a long, hard look at your cousin.”
“Spooky, Railey? That’s the best you can do?”
“If you’d like, I’ll try harder.”
Natasha closed her eyes. “Everyone thinks what they will—even me—about my bratranek. But just the other day he asked why I always assume he cares for nothing and no one.”
“Right. Ever think he was just testing the waters? Trying to see notwhat you believe, but rather why you believe it? Jakob Michael knows very well your Shadows are stronger than he thinks—or at least stronger than he’d like them to be.”
“My God, Rae.” Natasha stared at her. “To say such things about him…do you think I’ve forgotten how you two were in Vienna? Have you forgotten Vienna?”
“Nothing happened in Vienna!”
Really? Then why was Railey’s gaze suddenly fastened to the floor? And why was all sorts of hurt radiating from her, not a single Shadow necessary to feel it?
“I…” Railey’s eyes stayed locked upon years-ago scratches on hardwood. “He takes risks, Tash.”
“With himself? Yes. But never with me. Railey, Jakob loves—”
“I’m aware of how deeply he loves you, Natasha. But I also know he loves himself even more.”
She scowled. “You know the Jakob you fear,” she replied. “The Jakob who hurts you and makes you angry. But you do not know just…just Jakob.”
Railey considered her, lips pursed.“And you only know the Jakob who’s held you every time you’ve been hurt,” she said. “And that’s made you blind.”
Natasha blew out a breath. “He says he sees me do something crucial that saves both Jessalyn and her husband—”
“Yet he hasn’t bothered to tell you what? Tash, do you hear yourself?”She held up a hand. “—but even if he saw nothing of me in his Shadows, I think…Railey, you believe that going out to B.C. will hurt me, but Jakob…Jakob thinks I’m being hurt right here.”
“By me?”
“Ne, ne. By…here.” She pointed, out the window, where the gravel streets of tiny Echo Creek were as dusty and bleak as the Alberta prairie the town sat on. “Five hundred ignoramuses in a piss-pot,” Jakob always said. Her mouth twitched a bit. He was no different than her; when he got worked up his accent did too, and how it sounded was ‘pease-pot’. Still… “That Village of Idiots has the audacity to shun you, Natasha? Try to drive you away?”
Yes. Sometimes brutally and other times juvenile; eggs and tomatoes thrown at this, the sweet little bungalow where her Baba—as squat and warm as the small house itself—had always tried keeping her safe, rocking her and crooning when the kids at school would be cruel and shriek ‘Witch!’ and ‘Seer!’. Railey had not seen. She had not grown up here, was what the locals called an ‘import’—and so was not really any closer to acceptance (and never would be) than Natasha herself. She gazed at her diminutive friend now and Railey, though having no ability to pull forth any Shadows of her own, understood. It was present in her sigh. Still—“If Jakob Michael wants you gone, couldn’t he just set you up in the city? Or anywhere else his gobs of money can easily afford?”
“Yes, if I let him. But remember, this is about his Shadows. They see—”
“He says his Shadows see, Tash, but I do know Jakob Michael, ’cause I do remember Vienna. And what I am sure of is that he’s manipulating you.”
Manipulating her. Just as Railey and Jakob agreed (miracle of miracles) that Gregory—acclaimed scholar, university professor, very married Gregory—had manipulated her too. Seemed that besides having mutual loathing in common, the people she loved also concurred she was weak. Soft-willed. So desperate for love and acceptance that she’d fall hard for any story or be open to any outlandish suggestion. “It may come as a shock,” she said dryly, “but I actually have reasonably sound judgment. Case in point: I live in a town of five hundred yet nonetheless lock both my house and my vehicle before I go to bed every night.”
Railey rolled her head back and looked at the ceiling. “Natasha, the last thing I’d ever call you is stupid—”
“Yet naïve and crazy work fine?”
“I just—”
“He’s begun to look me in the eye,” she announced and was pleased that this drew Railey’s gaze back to her. “Blue Eyes, from my Shadows. We’ve started locking gazes, and when we do, he…he speaks to me.”
Railey’s jaw dropped. Still—“It’s Jakob Michael,” she croaked. “He’s feeding your Shadows—”
“Blue Eyes says ‘Help me, Natasha’.”
Railey clapped a hand over her mouth and Natasha nodded, at last satisfied. “He calls my name. Not Jakob’s So even if my bratranek is feeding my Shadows….” She let it trail off and at last Railey had nothing.
©bonnie randall 2005