Natural Evil (Elder Races #4.5)(10)

She offered him a piece of potato. He just looked at it. She dropped it back into the stew and held out a piece of meat. He took it carefully from her fingers and worked to swallow it.

“I’m not surprised about Rodriguez,” she continued. “I could tell he was walking some kind of line earlier. He made each ethical decision as he came to it. Should he pull the gun and shoot you? How much did it matter that I was a witness? Could—or would—he really go so far as to kill me too? I don’t think it was a coincidence he pulled me over just after I found you. I think he was looking for you. Maybe he’s the one who tried to kill you. But that doesn’t feel right.” She didn’t think Rodriguez would have left the dog alive beside the highway. The sheriff looked like the kind of man who also knew the impact of a well-placed bullet.

She sounded out another idea. “Maybe somebody was supposed to kill you and f**ked up. Someone dumb and mean might be capable of that. Then Rodriguez was sent to make sure the job got done properly, only I found you first. That sounds plausible. But what are you doing in Nevada and why would somebody want to kill you? Logic won’t tell me those things. Only you can and you won’t talk. Won’t, not can’t, because you could tell me telepathically if you wanted to.”

She held out another sliver of meat. He closed his eyes. He looked utterly exhausted, the skin around his eyes sunken. Emotion twisted in her gut. She closed the container and wiped her fingers on a napkin. “Okay,” she said gently. “You get a free pass tonight. I won’t push.”

He was a dual-natured creature, one of the Elder Races. It was probably patronizing and even insulting to pet him as if he were a mundane dog. She struggled, but then gave in to the impulse and stroked his well-shaped head again. He responded with a deep sigh and seemed to relax a bit, as if her touch comforted him.

She supposed he could always tell her to stop. That would be one way to force him into speech. She could pet him into talking. Stroking his soft ear, she looked across the floor, at her legs crossed at the ankles, and the long length of his body.

“Precious, you are one big son of a bitch,” she said with a ghost of a chuckle. “I’m sorry you don’t feel like you can even tell me your name.”

She was tired of hearing the sound of her own voice. It was a strain to talk so much after having been silent for days on the road. She fell quiet and listened to the wind.

That was when the strange voice came into her head.

Telepathy was a funny thing. Even though it was an entirely mental experience, the mind attributed different voices with the same kind of characteristics as it would physical ones.

The voice Claudia heard was deep and male, with a touch of an accent.

My name is Luis.

She paused in petting him, as she absorbed that. Hearing his name, even though she had already known he was Wyr, seemed to cause some kind of intangible but very important shift.

“Thank you, Luis,” she said quietly. “You’re going to be all right. I’ll take care of you. I promise.”

Luis felt a deep resonance at the words. What she said was something he might say to someone else. But there was something wrong about those words being spoken to him, something somehow backward. The cotton in his head kept him from fully connecting to why that was, and he fell asleep trying to figure it out.

Claudia felt restless and her mind kept churning over recent events. To give her hands something to do, she fetched the Tarot deck in the wooden box, along with the paperback she had bought that explained the Elder Races Tarot. She flipped through the paperback desultorily, but she had already read about the Major and Minor Arcana, and at the moment she wasn’t really interested in reading the rest.

Instead, she opened the antique, painted box and pulled out the hand painted deck. As she did so, she thought back to the strange way she had acquired it.

A couple months ago in January, while she was wintering in New York, a slender woman had stopped her in the street. The city was still recovering from a major blizzard in late December. The streets were heaped with great mounds of dirty snow, and leftover Christmas and Masque decorations dotted shop windows.

She and the woman had been walking past each other, just two bundled-up pedestrians among hundreds of thousands in the frigid, snowbound city, when the woman turned suddenly and took hold of Claudia’s arm.

She didn’t think the other woman realized how dangerous that was. Claudia spun but managed to check her instinct for violence. She got an impression of dark, gold-tipped corkscrew curls, a warm, brown complexion in a thin, intelligent face, and hazel eyes behind wire-rim glasses that widened at her fast reaction.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “You’re probably going to think I’m crazy, but…” Claudia tensed as the woman reached in her dark leather purse, but all she pulled out was the Tarot box. She thrust it into Claudia’s hands. “These want to come to you. I don’t understand why. I’ve had them for years.”

“What are you talking about?” Claudia asked. She turned the box over in her hands, opened it up and saw the deck inside.

“The cards,” the woman said. She gave Claudia a smile that seemed embarrassed. “They’re opinionated.”

“Are you telling me these are magic?” Claudia asked. If they were, she couldn’t sense it. Torn between fascination and caution, she nearly shoved the deck back into the strange woman’s hands and walked away.