But those thoughts weren’t important right now, not with this female staring at him from the other side of the desk.
“What will upset the Wolf?” he asked, having an uneasy feeling that he already knew the answer.
“Meg made a cut.”
Vlad’s hands closed into fists, but he stayed seated.
“We planned it for this morning,” Merri Lee said hurriedly. “A kind of experiment.”
Let her talk. “Something upset Meg?”
“No. See, that was the whole point. Making a controlled cut when nothing was pushing her.”
A thousand cuts. Supposedly that’s all a cassandra sangue could make before the cut that would kill her or drive her insane. And it wasn’t just the cuts made with a razor. Any injury that broke skin counted as part of that number. Most of those girls wouldn’t see their thirty-fifth birthday, and here was Meg cutting without a reason.
Addiction was its own reason. That would explain why Meg had chosen a time when Simon Wolfgard and Henry Beargard were away from the Courtyard. But that didn’t explain Merri Lee coming to see him.
He needed to sound calm, reasonable. Merri Lee was a member of Meg’s human pack, and the two girls had shown an ability to work together to interpret prophecy. “Was the experiment successful?”
Merri Lee nodded. “It was different from the last time I assisted. After the initial . . . discomfort . . . Meg began speaking. Lots of images. I think she heard some things too, but the sounds were part of the images. I wrote them down.” She handed him a sheet of paper.
Vlad studied the long list. “What does that mean?” He pointed to a P in parentheses after some of the words.
“It’s a pause,” Merri Lee said. “That was different from the last time. This time Meg paused, like a rest in music, so I thought each group of words made up a picture.” She handed him index cards.
He took them reluctantly. “What was the question you asked?”
“We asked what the residents of the Lakeside Courtyard should watch for during the next fortnight.”
“Residents? Not just the terra indigene?”
She hesitated. “No. We said residents, not just the Others. So what Meg saw applies to everyone who lives in the Courtyard.”
Which meant everyone included Meg and Merri Lee.
Vlad looked at the “stories” on the index cards and felt chilled.
Help Wanted: NWLNA
Trail Fire (blaze/inferno?). Path Compass/Compass Path?
Pregnant girl on dirt road. Silver razor. Blood. “Don’t! It’s not too late!”
Girl crying. Silver razor. Broken deer beside highway (roadkill).
Brown bear eating jewels.
Vegetable garden. Paws digging, hands planting.
For Sale signs.
Some of the “stories” meant nothing to him. But if he was interpreting others correctly, all of the terra indigene would need to act swiftly.
Vlad studied Merri Lee. Some of the “stories” meant nothing to him, but they did mean something to her.
“Which ones do you understand?” He placed the index cards on the edge of the desk where she could reach them.
She hesitated, then pointed to “Help Wanted: NWLNA.” “Above the door of the Liaison’s Office are the letters HLDNA, which stand for ‘Human Law Does Not Apply.’ NWLNA stands for ‘No Wolf Lover Need Apply.’” She swallowed hard and wouldn’t meet his eyes. “In the past week, quite a few employment ads in the Lakeside News have those letters at the end, and I’ve seen a couple of those signs in shop windows.”