The Price Guide to the Occult(32)

“What is it?” Catriona asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Shut up!” Nor commanded, and listened harder. She swore someone, from quite a distance away, had started to scream.

Nor lurched awake, throwing her hands out in front of her as if to halt some disaster. The pale sky told her it was early morning. The cold January air seeped through the thin windowpanes. Her pillow lay on the floor on the other side of the room. Bijou inched his way back out from under the dresser, and Nor breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Her throat felt raw.

As if, she realized with a start, I’d been screaming.

The sound of footsteps pounding on the stairs sent Bijou back under Nor’s dresser. Judd burst into the room wielding a large metal bat. Antiquity was close behind, ears pinned flat to her head, hackles raised in alarm.

“What in God’s great green pastures was all that hollering for, girlie?” Judd thundered, dropping the bat to the floor. It landed with a clatter that sent Nor’s pulse racing once more. Nor told herself that even though the dream had felt real, that didn’t mean it was real. She’d had plenty of realistic dreams before — dreams in which she could fly or run on water. In one dream, all of her teeth had fallen out. She looked down at her nails. They were not painted red. Her skin was not covered in green spiraling tattoos.

“It was just a nightmare,” Nor insisted, her words turning into a little purple cloud.

Judd pulled her pipe out of the breast pocket of her pajamas and stuck it between her teeth. “That’s it?” she said, shaking her head. “All that noise over a bad dream?”

Nor just nodded, distracted by the purple cloud floating up to the skylight and plastering itself to the glass.

“Well, you’re awake now,” Judd said. “Apothia’s got breakfast on the table if you’re hungry.” She paused and picked up the metal bat before leaving the room. Nor was suddenly worried that Judd could see her lie splattered against the window. But of course she couldn’t.

Nor hugged her knees to her chest. It wasn’t just a nightmare, she thought. But what the hell was it? Fern couldn’t possibly be anywhere near them. Last time Nor had checked, her mother was on a national book tour. She’d read online that at one of her mother’s New England events, several people had been hospitalized after waiting in line for over four hours in the middle of a snowstorm. Losing a few toes to frostbite was apparently a small price to pay for a chance to meet Fern Blackburn.

When Nor got downstairs, Judd was at the front door, speaking to an unfamiliar woman wearing a Pendleton scarf and an older man in a sweat-stained Stetson. “Sorry about this, Judd,” the woman was saying. “You know I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t think it was absolutely necessary.”

The woman in the scarf turned, and two young men came into view behind her. It was Pike and Sena Crowe Coldwater. Nor recognized them from that night on the beach. They were carrying someone — an unconscious woman whose brunette hair was wet with blood.

Judd grunted and motioned them inside urgently. “Apothia!” she barked over her shoulder.

Without hesitation, Apothia grabbed hold of the tablecloth on the dining room table and sent the remnants of their breakfast crashing to the ground. Plates and coffee mugs shattered against the floor. A piece of buttered toast slid slowly down a wall along with splatters of orange juice and smears of jam.

The two young men laid the unconscious woman gently across the table. Judd rolled up her sleeves, her brow furrowed in concentration.

“We found her on the steps of the Witching Hour,” Pike said. “Looks like she either stumbled into something, or —”

“More like something stumbled into her,” the older man finished.

“This wound here is a nasty one,” Judd muttered, examining a laceration across the back of the woman’s head.

“I had my best people working on her,” the woman in the scarf said, “but for the life of them, they could not get any results. I’m telling you, these injuries did not come from anything natural.” She looked at Judd’s hands, placed on either side of the wound. “How’s her pain?”

“Whatever it was that got to her, Dauphine,” Judd answered, “was meant to hurt. That I’m sure of.”

Apothia brushed the woman’s hair away from her face. It was Wintersweet.

Nor’s palms began to sweat. She edged closer to the table, stepping on broken china and cold toast. Blood from the head wound stained Judd’s hands. Familiar and gruesome lesions circled Wintersweet’s neck.

As if made by barbed wire, Nor thought, or a thorny vine. Was it possible that the dream hadn’t been a dream at all?

I don’t want this, Nor thought, backing away from the table. If it was a premonition, why did it have to be this one? And why now? It wasn’t fair. She wasn’t even safe in her dreams.

“Standing there gaping is about as useful as a handkerchief with holes in it, girlie,” Judd rumbled. “Get her out,” she muttered to Apothia. “It’s too damned crowded in here anyway.”

Apothia put a hand on Nor’s shoulder. “Let your grandmother work,” she murmured.

Nor nodded dumbly and let Apothia steer her toward the back door.

She shoved her feet into the felt boots Apothia kept near the door and grabbed one of Judd’s thick alpaca wool sweaters. Just before closing the door behind her, she saw Judd pull one of her hands away from the back of Wintersweet’s head and hold it out to the woman she’d called Dauphine. Dauphine calmly pulled long silver quills from out of Judd’s palm. As they emerged, they dissipated into thin air.