Talking Bones Page 4

  “I haven’t had that experience.”

  “Yet. If you keep pushing people in the wrong way, you’ll find it pretty fast.”

  “Do you find that these people have abilities?”

  “You can’t expect that nobody has any,” she stated, “but you can expect that some of them will. It’s often people you have no idea about, and honesty, they often don’t know about their abilities either. They found that life went their way smoothly, and they haven’t had too many problems. The girlfriend left before he broke up with her, saving him the drama, or the parents died suddenly, leaving him a ton of money. There are all kinds of ways that energy manifests and not necessarily by their conscious hand. But life has moved in their direction, in the way they wanted and at the rate they wanted. It’s all a little too complacent for me to want to get close to them.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that, sometimes people can cause things to happen, even though they don’t really realize what they’re doing.”

  “Okay, now that definitely sounds far too esoteric.”

  “The human will has an enormous capacity,” she noted, slowly looking at him. “And, in your case, you have an edge of danger that is always around you.”

  He shook his head.

  She nodded. “Don’t argue. Like I said, some of us can see what you don’t want us to see.”

  “You also said you weren’t looking.”

  “No, I wasn’t, but I am now,” she snapped, glaring at him. “And I really don’t want anything to do with whatever is going on in your world.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She replied, “You’re involved in some kind of a business deal. It’s huge, and it’s got the capacity to set your life on the path where you want it to go, but there’s no guarantee it’ll go through. And you have a traitor in your world. Somebody close to you.”

  He stared, his jaw slowly dropping.

  She nodded. “Now I don’t have any more time for this. Please leave.”

  *

  Gage stared at Skylar in shock. That he had been dismissed was undeniable. Something that he had never experienced before. And, almost on cue, causing him to wonder whether or not she too had the ability to make things happen, another crowd of tourists walked in. She was all smiles, and it felt like the atmosphere in the room had immediately warmed yet again. He watched as she chatted cheerfully with several of them, as if nothing had happened.

  Whereas, his whole world had shifted.

  He didn’t like it; he didn’t like anybody knowing anything about him. She was right about that, and he was also involved in a business deal that did scare him because it was something he wasn’t terribly comfortable with. The figures involved had him nervous, but the whole thing did have the ability to set up his life exactly as he wanted. Then he could get out of this business and live someplace where he really wanted to be.

  He would still do investments of course. It was just that this one deal was particularly big and could change his world. This feeling in the pit in his stomach had been there right from the beginning, the thought that something about it was wrong or tainted somehow. That she could sense it, that she sensed a traitor somewhere in the midst of it, was enough to make the hairs on the back of Gage’s neck stand straight up. The fact that she had dismissed him, without giving him any more information, was equally hard.

  Noting he was getting odd looks from the other tourists, and she was trying to cover it up, he turned on his heel and headed outside onto the main street. Out here, he found a bench and collapsed on it. He was more thunderstruck than anything else. When his brother phoned a few minutes later, Gage wasn’t at all surprised. He answered, adding strength to his voice. “What?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” he asked, striving for calm.

  “Does she know anything?”

  “Yeah. How about too damn much in too many areas,” he snapped.

  There was silence on the other end. “Is she the real thing?”

  “I think so,” he stated, still feeling shaky. “And she recognized me for what I can do or not do as well.”

  “Wow,” Terrence replied, “I can’t even do that.”

  Such a note of humor filled his brother’s voice that Gage closed his eyes and relaxed a little more.

  “Boy, she’s really got you rattled, doesn’t she?”

  “She does,” he murmured, “and I’m not even sure why.” Of course he couldn’t tell his brother very much about what she had said about this deal because his brother was in it with him—though Terrence had come to it kicking and screaming, not wanting to sell the business, whining that he’d make more if Gage stayed on board. So, if this deal was all going south, Terrence would lose his share of the sale, which was the only logic for selling that seemed to get Terrence on board.

  They also really needed Jonesy to come home so everybody could focus back on the business at hand.

  “I’m sorry, bro, that sounds like a really shit deal for you right now.”

  “Wouldn’t be so bad if Jonesy hadn’t decided to take off.”

  “Could she tell if he was dead?”

  “I didn’t ask her, but I kept using the past tense when talking about him, and she brought that up to me.”

  “Wow, so you think he’s dead then?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t know what to think.”

  “Easy, take it easy. Maybe it’s time to hit one of those outdoor pubs and just have a drink or something. It’s happy hour right now.”

  “I’ll head back to the hotel,” he replied.

  “And you’re staying in the same hotel room that Uncle was in, right?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Have you checked the room?”

  “Of course I have,” he replied a little curtly, “but I haven’t found anything.”

  “Maybe get her to take a walk through the room.”

  “I don’t think she’s too interested in talking to me right now.”

  “Well, be there with breakfast tomorrow morning then,” he suggested.

  “Somebody brought her beignets today,” Gage noted, “so I don’t think she’ll really need breakfast from me tomorrow.”

  “You don’t know that,” Terrence argued. “She needs to eat. It’s just a matter of whether she wants to be fed by your hand or not.”

  He winced. “I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel about it in the morning.”

  “Then go back to the hotel and take a break. Call me when you’re feeling better,” he said. “You’ve got me really worried.”

  “I’ll be fine. “I’ll head to the hotel now.”

  With that, he hung up on his brother and retraced his steps to the hotel. Honestly, he felt a little on the unpleasantly woozy side. Getting up to his room took more out of him than he had expected. By the time he made it inside the room, the door shut and locked, all he felt was relief.

  He walked a few steps to the bed, then collapsed and was out within seconds.

  Chapter 3

  Skylar didn’t know what to think. Today had certainly been odd on the barometer of oddity in her normal day. And she didn’t know what to think about Gage at all. She remembered the old guy, Jonesy, but, other than that, what was she supposed to tell Gage? She didn’t know what Jonesy was up to, and she didn’t know why he wanted that old tarot card set—one that she didn’t have anyway, and, if she did have it, she sure as hell wouldn’t have sold it.

  Things like that weren’t meant to go to the uninitiated. Tarot cards had power, even though everybody liked to joke about it. But that kind of power wasn’t something you should play with or squander. It was serious stuff, and, although she felt like Jonesy wanted to be serious about it, a part of him had a completely different reason for collecting tarot cards. She didn’t know what that was, but now, according to the uncle’s note found in his jacket pocket, this deck had something to do with murders. She didn’t know if she believed any of it, but it was intriguing.

  Tarot cards were not supposed to be used to determine negatives in this world and definitely not to tell people they would die soon. But not everybody followed those rules, and not everybody had the same sense of what was right and what was wrong. That kind of skill in the wrong hands could cause havoc to all kinds of young—and old—unsuspecting minds. Something she didn’t dare have happen.

  When she finally closed her shop for the day and locked the front door and made her way up the stairs to her apartment, she felt an odd heaviness and a really weird foreboding. She looked around and then mentally called to the ghosts down in her shop. Anything weird in the ethers right now?

  And just as she hit the landing on the stairs outside her apartment door, she heard them calling out to her, “Be careful, be careful.”

  She took the hallway to its own balcony, next to the separate balcony to her apartment, and studied her surroundings. There didn’t appear to be anything wrong, and she was desperate to go inside and to just relax. The day had been strange enough without having any kind of danger facing her now. She stepped forward and let herself into her apartment and, after a quick check around that confirmed her place was empty and was safe, she collapsed onto her bed, exhausted, needing a nap before her nightly cemetery visit.

  Moments later, she became aware of somebody else lying on his bed, but something was very unnatural about it. It was a vision of Gage, the man she’d met today, the man who had already unsettled her life more than he should have. She saw him on his bed, his lips bloodless and something very strange hovering all around him. She swore, bounded to her feet, and, grabbing her amulets, she stuffed them in her pockets and raced down the street. Only one hotel had that type of design on the ceilings. When she got to the front desk, she asked what room Gage was in.

  With a smirk, the front guy told her.

  She slipped him a twenty dollar bill and raced up to Gage’s hotel room. She had no key to let herself in, but, using a trick she’d learned a long time ago, she held her hand over the lock, and, with a little help from Thomas, who was nearly always at her side, the door opened, and she slipped inside, racing to him. There was Gage, lying on the bed, his body cold, his face completely bleached of blood, and his lips almost blue. She reached out a hand and placed it over his heart, then stretched out her other hand to Thomas, making an energy chain all the way to those back in her shop, and she poured their collected energy into Gage’s body. She felt it doing something, but it wasn’t enough; the energy wasn’t strong enough.

  She cried out, “Gage, talk to me, get back here, where you belong,” she roared. “Enough is enough. You can’t do this.”

  And she kept pumping energy into him—blind, dark, light—any energy she could grasp from the surroundings went into this poor man, who had no idea what the hell was going on in his world.

  When Thomas cried out, “It worked. It worked,” she looked down to see Gage awake and staring at her in shock.

  She sat back ever-so-slightly, slowly withdrawing her hand, so there wasn’t an abrupt separation of her energy from Gage’s. She stared down at him. “Well, that was interesting.”

  He rolled his head to the side. “You’re in my hotel room.”

  “Yeah,” she confirmed, as she shifted to the side. “Don’t take it the wrong way.” And then she smiled at him. “Glad to have you back in the land of the living.”

  “What happened?” he murmured, sitting up slowly and shaking his head.

  She watched Gage’s huge body shift into its spirit body, almost as if putting on a human suit, and she smiled. “Well, you were one step away from being dead.”

  *

  Gage stared at Skylar, feeling his body slowly warming up, but there was nothing for the shock in his mind at her words. He shuffled up onto his elbows and stared up at her. “Are you serious?”

  She got up and walked around the small room, almost pacing now that whatever this catastrophe was had been averted. “Yes. What I don’t know is why.”

  He looked around his hotel room. “I felt really drained, and I came in, and I just kind of collapsed.”

  “Well, you collapsed all right, but you collapsed too far, too deep.”

  “What does that even mean?” he asked, pushing himself into a sitting position.

  “It means that you almost died, that you were basically in a coma. If you’d been in the hospital, I’m not sure they could have brought you back.”

  “Only you did, even though I wasn’t in the hospital.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to be in the hospital,” she noted. “Not everybody understands how energy works.”

  “But you do.”

  “I’ve had a lifetime of it,” she stated, her gaze going dark, “but don’t get me wrong. An awful lot out there I still don’t know.”

  “How did you know to come to my hotel room?” he asked. “And how did you even get in here?”

  She stared at him for a long moment and then in a flat tone replied, “You can get some of those questions answered but not all of them, so pick the ones you want that are really important. I don’t have time or energy to sit here and argue or deal with your questions. I’m heading back home again. So whatever single question you might have, you better spit it out now.”

  Startled at her refusal to really give much of an explanation, he grappled with the priorities at hand and finally came up with his question. “How did you know I was in trouble?”

  “I saw it in a vision, so I came running.”

  “And that spawns a million more questions.”

  She shrugged. “Too bad.”

  He took a long slow deep breath, uncertain how to get her to cooperate.

  She looked at him and shook her head. “Don’t even start thinking about it.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “How to get me to give you more answers.”

  He threw up his hands. “Is it really so hard to understand that I might want to know how I came close to dying?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that,” she stated. “If that was one of your questions, it would be a complete waste.”

  He tried to breathe carefully again.

  She looked at him and nodded in approval. “Control is really important.”

  “Could you please tell me what happened?”

  “I can’t because I don’t know what happened,” she said, with a toss of her arms. “And I’m heading home now.”

  “Are you always this difficult?”

  “Yeah,” she muttered, “I am. Particularly when people want stuff from me that I can’t give them.”

  “You mean, like answers?”

  “Like answers,” she admitted, nodding. “Is it really so hard to believe that I can’t give you an answer? Maybe you need to go see a doctor and see if you’ve got some kind of a heart problem.”

  “Did it feel like a heart problem to you?”

  “No,” she snapped, “but then again I’m not a doctor.”

  “And you also said the doctors won’t really be much help in my case.”

  “But I could be wrong,” she added, shooting him a cheery smile, as she walked to the hotel room door.

  Desperate to stop her, he asked, “Can I at least buy you dinner as a thank-you?”

  She immediately frowned, and her mouth opened to toss back an angry no immediately.

  He interrupted. “I’m really appreciative, sincerely, and just think, without you, I might not have been here to eat dinner at all.”

  She didn’t like hearing that. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.

  He wasn’t sure what it was about him that set off her prickliness, but definitely something was going on here that he was desperate to get answers for. “Is there any chance somebody did this to me?” he murmured.

  At that, her smile fell away, and she stepped closer. “Is there any reason for somebody to have done this to you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but you’re right about the business deal.”

  She nodded. “I know I am.”

  He winced. “Are you always this sure about yourself?”

  “I don’t tell people what I don’t actually know,” she stated, studying him carefully. “And when I know something, I know it.”

  “Have you ever been wrong?”

  “Wrong? Not necessarily. Have I ever interpreted things imprecisely? Yes,” she admitted. “Nothing is exact in this world.”

  “I get that,” he murmured. “And I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out.”

  “I couldn’t just stand by and let you die,” she snapped briskly.

  “And, for that, I owe you again.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t like people owing me anything. There’s no debt owed to me.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that too,” he added. “I just wish I knew a little more about how this could have happened, so I could avoid it next time.”

  “Well, I certainly hope you find out,” she noted, “because I don’t want to be running here to save your sorry ass all the time either. The front desk guy already has the wrong idea.”

  A note of humor filled her voice, meaning that she wasn’t taking his words the wrong way. And he appreciated the jest, since it did lend a moment of levity to the situation. “You obviously have a very strong skill that I don’t know anything about.”

  She nodded. “It’s also not one that I advertise.”

  “You could probably make millions if you did,” he stated curiously.

  “There’s really no joy in going public.”

  He made a mental note to check deeper into her background. He knew some of her story—thanks to Jonesy and his addiction to collecting bones and tarot cards—in that Skylar had had a problem with her growing reputation in another town and had quietly packed up in the night and left. Jonesy had tracked her down here. “Do you know why Jonesy went to you for those tarot cards?”

  “No,” she replied immediately.

  He hesitated, but he didn’t sense that she was lying. Yet he couldn’t understand how it would be possible that she wouldn’t have understood why Jonesy had come to her, given her skill level. “He must have heard about your abilities.”