Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(34)

“We are told that in the beginning was the word,” Calida said, “and that the world—the entire universe—was spoken into existence. My mother speculated that the best material with which a diviner could work would be words, not human entrails or lines in your palm or a handful of salt cast on a table, but words. And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers…well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view. Now I’m going to ask you a question, Bibi Blair, and you must answer truthfully, frankly, because I’ll conduct the session in different ways depending on your response. Does Scrabblemancy make sense to you—not do you believe it will work, but does it make sense, and to what degree?”

When Calida leaned in to the table, tilting her head toward Bibi, her blond hair shimmered forward and flared slightly to each side of her face, like golden wings, and her eyes were disconcerting in their hawkish intensity and predatory focus. As much as Bibi wanted to like the woman, moments such as this made her feel as though they had been born on different worlds and could never fully relate to each other.

“Does the theory make sense, and to what degree?” Calida repeated in a whisper, and in the glass cups on the table, candles popped and hissed as the flames found impurities in the wicks, as if the melting wax were speaking in sympathy with the diviner.

“It makes a little sense, I mean, in the context of divination,” Bibi said, striving to be truthful without being dismissive. “But I’m more interested in things being spoken into existence than I could ever possibly be in using the occult to discover hidden knowledge.”

“What if things spoken into existence, who spoke them and why, is the same thing as hidden knowledge?”

“But I don’t believe they are,” Bibi replied.

The hawk-eyed diviner seemed to search the depth of Bibi’s eyes as a real hawk, gliding in its gyre, would scrutinize a meadow far below, seeking a mouse to hunt down and snatch up. Then she sat back in her chair, and the wings of flaxen hair closed against her face, once more curtaining her ears. She drank from the refilled glass, again finishing half the wine in one long swallow.

When she put down the glass, she said, “Did you lock the front door when you came in?”

Bibi nodded. “Yes.”

“Is there a second door?”

“No.”

“Are the windows locked?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s begin and finish quickly. The less time we’re at it, the safer we’ll be.”

As the diviner swiped the Scrabble tiles off the table and into the silver bowl, rings sparkling with candlelight, Bibi sipped the wine and savored it, considering whether her parents would be insulted if she refused the second part of their gift and sent this woman away.

Calida returned the bowl to the table. From the seamstress’s packet, she selected the largest needle, held it in a candle flame, and then placed it on the folded white-cotton cloth. She removed the cap from the rubbing alcohol, stuck the thumb of her left hand into the bottle, let it soak for a minute, and then screwed the cap on once more.

When the diviner picked up the two-inch needle with her right hand, Bibi said, “You’re not serious.”

As she began speaking softly in a language that Bibi didn’t recognize, Calida thrust the needle through the plump pad of her own thumb, not through the nail but behind it. The crown with its eye protruded from one side of the thumb, the gleaming point from the other, and about a third of the shank could not be seen because it was buried in the flesh.

“Why the hell did you do that?” Bibi demanded as blood oozed from the entrance and exit wounds and dripped onto the cotton cloth.

Calida spoke a few more words in the arcane language and then, through clenched teeth, hissed in distress before answering: “Your skepticism prevents you from being involved enough for this to work. So I have to be more intently focused to compensate for your doubt. Nothing focuses the mind quite like pain.”

“This is nuts.”

“If you keep up your useless commentary,” the diviner warned, “I’ll have to put a second needle through the meat of my palm.”

“Not if we stop this right now.” Bibi pushed her chair back from the table.

Calida grimaced. “We’ve begun the session. We must complete it, close the door I’ve opened. Or those psychic shock waves I mentioned earlier won’t stop. They’re a beacon. An irresistible summons. You’ll have visitors you do not want.”

Bibi’s skepticism wasn’t absolute. The piercing needle and the blood argued for Calida’s sincerity, if not for her sanity. After a hesitation, Bibi sat. She pulled her chair closer to the table.

Her mother and father had not become strangers to her because of their interest in divination and this bizarre gift. The fullness of her love hadn’t diminished whatsoever. Her comfortable image of them, however, was evidently an inadequate likeness, and her long-held assumptions about their interior lives now seemed deficient, immature, if not na?ve.

Stirring her right hand through the wooden tiles in the silver bowl, Calida seemed to speak to an invisible presence. “I bleed for answers. I cannot be denied. Attend me.” To Bibi, she said, “How many letters should I draw?”