Telling himself to be satisfied with that, Simon walked into Vlad’s apartment. When he saw who else was in the room, he knew this wasn’t just about yesterday’s attacks but something more . . . and worse.
* * *
Meg opened the door to the summer room beneath her apartment and waited for Nathan to go in. She hoped all the cuts on his face and forelegs would heal without scarring. It was upsetting enough to think of Henry, as man or Grizzly, with one scar along his right cheek. She didn’t want Nathan to look in the mirror every day and be reminded of human betrayal.
What did the Others think about her scars? Did the old scars matter to any of them except the few who understood what the number of scars meant to her life-span? What about humans? Was it difficult for them to look at her scars? She didn’t have any on her face, but the shorts and short-sleeve tops that were practical to wear in the summer revealed some of the scars on her arms and legs.
None of the humans who were her friends had said anything. Not to her anyway. What about the deliverymen? By wearing summer clothes, was she advertising that she was a cassandra sangue? With the plight of the girls who had been released and abandoned, and the mounting number of deaths caused by their inability to cope with the outside world, more people would understand the significance of evenly spaced scars. Wouldn’t they?
Although, now that she thought about it, the blood prophets weren’t being mentioned on the news or in the newspapers anymore. Now the news was about the foods that would be added to next month’s ration books and the shortages that were being predicted—and the accusations that the Others were to blame for the decrease in available food and the increase in prices. That didn’t have much effect on her. Except for pizza, she bought all her food from the Market Square stores, which were supplied by terra indigene farms, but Merri Lee and Ruth had said a couple of times that they were glad they were allowed to shop in the Market Square and even more relieved that they would receive a share of the food grown in the Courtyard.
“Arroo?” Nathan queried softly.
How long had she been standing there, holding the door open?
“Busy brain,” she said, entering the room. Picking up the book she’d left on the table, she chose the new lounge chair that faced the Green Complex’s courtyard. Merri Lee and Michael Debany had given her two lounge chairs as a housewarming present. Ruth Stuart and Karl Kowalski had given her a small round table and two chairs that provided her with a place to eat or work on a project.
Someone, probably Vlad or Tess, had done a little rearranging in order to move the Wolf beds into the summer room.
After a confirming sniff to determine which bed was his, Nathan lay down, put his head on his paws, and dozed off.
Meg didn’t know where her human friends were today. In mourning, certainly. Were they at the MacDonalds’ house, helping Lawrence’s parents and Theral do whatever was done at a time like this?
She had seen videos, and sometimes live demonstrations, of girls being abused or even killed, but she didn’t have many training images of men being killed. Instead, there were images that, put together with another image, would mean a kind of death. A wrecked car and a sympathy card. A gun and a cremation urn. Not that the Controller or Walking Names had told the girls what those combinations of images meant, but eventually she and Jean had figured it out.
Did the blood prophets who were floundering see that kind of combination of images as they made their final, fatal cut?
Meg shook her head as if that would dislodge the thoughts. When she realized she was rubbing her arms to relieve that pins-and-needles feeling, she also realized Nathan was awake and watching her.
“It’s all right. The prickling is going away,” she told him, which was true.
“Arroo.”