Shuffled all of them in, including the cards with the drawings Jester had warned her to keep a secret.

After making a space at the top of the table, Meg closed her eyes and ran her hands lightly over the backs of the cards. Dozens of cards. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of combinations. Wasn’t that always true with prophecy? Thousands of learned images and sounds and smells still came down to the particular images and sounds and smells that answered the question the blood prophet was expected to answer.

She didn’t have a question, didn’t know why she was fiddling with the cards instead of sorting them back into their decks and getting on with her work. She just felt odd today and made a decision to see what she might see.

Three sets of three, she thought as she selected cards based on the severity of the pins-and-needles feeling that stabbed her hands, her legs, her chest. Three sets of three. Subject, action, result.

She opened her eyes and flipped over the first set of three—and realized the prickling along the right side of her jaw increased as each card was revealed.

Bison. Rifle. Tombstone—a thing that still existed in some parts of Thaisia from a time when cremation wasn’t required to conserve space in city burial grounds.

She flipped the next set of cards.

Wolf. Knife. Hooded figure with a scythe.

“No,” she whispered as she turned over the last set.

City skyline. A montage of Elemental forces—tornado, tidal wave, fire. And the last card . . .

Put them in with the nature cards and hope you never see any of them again. That’s what Jester had said. But there was one of those cards representing the result of something that was going to happen.

The prickling along her jaw became a buzz.

“Where?” Meg cried in frustration. “When? How will I know?”

“Arroo?” An idle, conversational query from Nathan, who was snoozing in the front room.

Her right hand buzzed. The index finger burned. Meg turned over the card beneath that finger.

A communication card—drawings of a telephone and a telegraph key.

Breathing hard, Meg looked at the phone on the counter.

“I’ll get a call.”

“Arroo?” No longer an idle query.

“It’s nothing.” Meg raised her voice enough to carry to Nathan. “I’m just talking to myself.”

That would stall him for a minute, maybe two. Then the watch Wolf would come into the sorting room to have a look around.

The prickling faded in her hands, in her jaw.

Meg retrieved a notepad and pen and wrote down the three sets of cards in their proper order, and then added the communication card. She left the pad on the counter, facedown. Then she scooped up all the cards and dumped them in the drawer. She would ask Henry to make her a special box big enough to hold all the decks. A box with a lock. A lock with two keys. She would keep one. Who should hold the other? Simon? No, too easy to find a key if left at Howling Good Reads or his apartment. Henry or Tess?

Grandfather Erebus. Yes, the Sanguinati should hold the other key to the box.

There was no evidence of what anyone had been doing in the sorting room by the time Nathan leaped over the counter and came in to sniff around. A Wolf didn’t need evidence. His growls made it clear that he knew exactly who shouldn’t have been in the sorting room.

He trotted into the back room and returned a minute later in human form, wearing a T-shirt, denim shorts, and sandals—clothes he’d left in a bin in the storage area.

“I need to talk to Simon.” Nathan gave her a hard stare. “Are you expecting any deliveries?”

“No.” A message, yes, but not a delivery.

“Jake will keep watch and give warning if anyone comes in.”

“Okay.”

She waited. Winced when she heard HGR’s back door slam. Then she braced her hands on the counter beneath the sorting room’s open window and shouted, “Henry? Henry, I need to see you.”

Not telling Nathan about the cards was one thing. But someone needed to know. And it had to be someone who could know about the terra indigene prophecy cards that were mixed in with make-believe images.

When Henry walked in, Meg picked up the notepad and hugged it to her chest. “I don’t know what it means, but there’s something you need to see.”

• • •

Gathered in HGR’s office with Henry and Vlad, Simon stared at the paper with Meg’s list of images. “We don’t have any bison in the Courtyard—at least, not on the hoof.” They’d killed the one yearling they kept and had packed every available freezer with bison meat, but there was no reason for Meg to see a vision about that. “And the terra indigene in Talulah Falls wouldn’t use revolvers or rifles to kill the bison we gave them.”

“Rifles,” Henry said. “The bison are killed with rifles.”

“There’s a revolver on the card too.”

“I don’t think Meg saw the revolver. She wrote down ‘rifle’ because that’s what she saw.”

Vlad rubbed his chin. “Selective seeing when there is more than one object on a card? That’s an interesting thought.”

“But not one for immediate concern.” Simon studied the list. “Wolves being attacked with knives? Not a smart thing for a human to do, especially if there is more than one Wolf.”

“Rifle card was already used,” Henry said. “Maybe Meg needed another human weapon. Rifle or knife, the result is the same. She saw death.”