Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(36)

“I command the secret knowledge regarding Bibi’s cancer cure,” she said, her husky yet musical voice conveying an intolerance for resistance from whatever occult power she meant to interrogate. “I bleed for answers. I can’t be denied. Attend me. Why was Bibi Blair spared from gliomatosis cerebri?”

She dropped four tiles upon the table, and they clicked like dice, and then two more, and three, and a final two. Some tiles were facedown, and she turned them over. She arranged them from A to V and had this: A, A, E, E, F, I, L, O, S, T, V. She lined them up on the table so that if she turned to her left and Bibi to her right, both could read them.

From eleven letters, even if there were duplicates, many words could be formed. Although Bibi made no move to organize the tiles, she saw LEAVE, LEAF, FAST, FEAST, SOFT, SOLVE, FLOAT, SOLE….

Calida fingered four letters out of the lineup—EVIL—which didn’t improve Bibi’s mood.

“We must use all eleven of them to find the true message,” the diviner explained. First she spelled out A FATE SO EVIL and studied it for a moment, but then said, “No. That’s not an answer. At most, it’s a half-assed threat.”

“Threat? Who’s threatening you? Or is it me being threatened?”

Rather than answer either question, Calida rearranged some of the letters to spell EAST EVIL OAF. “Off to a false start,” she said. “Evil isn’t the key word.”

A quiet but growing urgency in Calida’s manner. A puzzling continued intensification of the fragrance of roses until an odor of floral rot seemed to underlie their perfume…A quickening of the pulse-and-flitter of the many candle flames, so that the table swam with silverfish of light and phantom moths beat their soundless, insubstantial wings against the walls…Bibi began to feel that she was slowly—then more rapidly—succumbing to a fever not born of physical illness, a fever of unreason as dangerous as any infection.

On the table, FOIL A TEASE made no sense, and it left one letter unused.

VIA LEAST FOE was likewise without clear meaning.

Suddenly Bibi saw what the diviner did not, and reached out to spell TO SAVE A LIFE.

“That’s it,” Calida loudly declared, with no slightest note of uncertainty. “Kid, you’re a natural for this, intuitive. The client never sees the message. They sit like toads, waiting for me to feed them flies.”

Bibi said, “Let me get this straight. So I was spared from cancer to save my life. I sort of already knew that.”

“No, girl, that’s not what it says. You can read the words, but I can read the words and their intended meaning. You were spared from cancer so that you could save the life of someone else.”

Bibi didn’t at once buy into that interpretation. Save from what, when, where, why? She wasn’t an adventurer, not a superhero—she hated tights and capes—not a woman of action unless the action was on the written page.

“Who?” she asked. “Save who?”

“That’s what we ask next.”

Not quite ready to pose the question, the diviner picked up her glass and quickly swallowed the remaining wine.

Bibi realized now that the chardonnay was either to help Calida cope with the pain of the needle piercing her thumb or to boost her courage, or perhaps both.

Stirring her right hand in the silver bowl full of tiles, the diviner said, “I bleed for answers. I can’t be—”

Before the woman could finish, Bibi’s smartphone, lying on the table, issued a call tone that imitated the antique ring of a rotary-dial telephone. She glanced at the screen and said, “There’s no caller ID. Ignore it.”

Failure to take the call clearly alarmed Calida. “No! If you don’t answer it, we won’t know if it’s them.”

“Them who?”

“The wrong people!” Her candle-glitter stare no longer seemed to be that of a diviner confident that she had her foot on the throat of whatever supernatural entity she had been consulting. “Answer it, for God’s sake.”

Further disquieted, Bibi took the call. “Hello?”

A man said, “Top agent?”

“Huh? Who is this?”

“What does that mean—top agent?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why play dumb? It’s the license plate on your car.”

“Oh. Not my car. My mother’s. Who is this?”

The caller hung up.

“Some guy,” Bibi told Calida. “I drove Mom’s car home. He wants to know what the vanity plate means.”

Calida’s worried frown folded some of the youth out of her face. “Doesn’t sound like one of them.”

“Whether it’s one of them or not, he must have seen me when I drove home. Or he’s in the parking lot right now. Everything’s sort of sliding, isn’t it?”

“Sliding? What do you mean?”

“Downhill, over the edge, into chaos,” Bibi said, and wondered why her usual self-possession seemed to be failing her.

Well, she hadn’t prepared herself for a world with these sudden new and strange dimensions. She had prepared herself to write stories for The Antioch Review, for Granta, for Prairie Schooner, to publish a first novel with Random House. She didn’t possess the emotional and psychological flexibility to deal easily with sudden inexplicable cancer cures and the supernatural consequences that followed them.