“I stand upon a beach and the mists close about me. I cannot breath for the fumes, and the noise of the sea beats in my ears. They confront me in this place of death and darkness. But I do not fear them.”
“Who are you?” Krysty whispered.
“I’ll be hung, quartered and dried for the crows!”
“Trader!” Ryan gasped. “How.”
Emma’s face was carved from stone, and her voice didn’t change. “Abe’s here with me. Trusty Armalite cocked and ready at the last. Surrounded by bastard ungodly. Bald fuck with shaved head and pretty crystal.”
“That’s Straub,” J.B. said. “She’s talking about how we left Trader and Abe.”
“Death on every hand. Over, under, around or through.”
“One of Trader’s favorite sayings.” Ryan felt a cold sweat trickling down the small of his back, the hairs prickling at his nape.
“Fog gets thicker.”
“What happened, Emma? Did Trader and Abe pull through after we left them?”
The woman shook her head, her black hair swaying from side to side. “Can’t tell anyone what I can’t see. But you must remember that today is just the tomorrow that you were so worried about yesterday.”
“She’s coming out of it,” Jak said.
“I’m coming out of it,” she agreed, blinking and rubbing her eyes with the sleeve of her black shirt. “What happened? Where was I? I could see a ragged mob encircling me on a shingled beach, among weed-covered boulders. I was old, with a nagging pain in my stomach. It seemed like it might have been my ending, but the seeing stopped before the curtain came down.”
Ryan had been leaning against the window, wiping at the steamed glass, glancing out through the leaded panes. “Raining again,” he said.
Emma stared at him. “There’s something wrong, Ryan. Tell me what it is. Something about me.” She closed her eyes, leaning her forehead in her hands. “The mutie power. When did. You must clear this or it’ll be like a high wall of raw stone topped with razor wire, between us.”
He nodded, realizing that he was already taking for granted her truly remarkable powers in reading his mind. “There’s questions,” he agreed. “Should I ask them now?”
“I’m well enough,” she said, shrugging off Jak’s hand, turning to him. “Truly I’m fine. And, Jak, you mustn’t.”
“What, Emma?”
She sighed. “Nothing, love. Just that you mustn’t think too much of me.”
“Why?”
The young woman touched her index finger to his lips. “Wait, Jak,” she said softly. “There can be good as well as bad, if that’s the way you want the bones to fall.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Somewhere lower down in the mansion they hear a door slamming and a burst of chattering from two of the women servants.
Ryan coughed. “Want this to be you and me, or all of us, Emma? We don’t have secrets between ourselves.”
“Then it might as well be all of us. And it might as well be now.”
There was a general shuffling around as everyone tried to find a more comfortable position, without making it too obvious that this was what they were doing.
When everyone was settled, Ryan sat on the end of the bed, facing Emma.
“Ask what you want, Ryan,” the woman said, running a hand through her cropped hair. “I know what bothers you about me. And you’re right to be bothered. Quite right.”
“Only two things.”
“How long have I had the power of seeing?”
He nodded slowly. “Right. That’s number one. Number two is where have you lived your life?”
“Before I discovered the power or after?”
“Both.”
Her bright eyes were hooded, as though a spider had woven a fine web across them. It seemed once again that a part of her mind had moved someplace else.
“I lived for the first twenty-one years of my life in the northeast, in a small ville called Naven, a bleak and miserable place, with a long beach opening onto the Lantic. Children were told never to go down by the sea as there were tens of thousands of devil crabs there, some of them eight or ten feet across. Horned creatures with spiked tails. Nobody was safe from their ravages. Even the headman of Naven, Guido Smith, fell victim to the curse of the crabs.”