Lake Silence

CHAPTER 28

Vicki

Firesday, Juin 16

I answered the phone at the same moment a column of smoke flowed through the kitchen’s screen door and shifted into a very angry attorney. Okay, partially shifted, which raised all kinds of questions about anatomy that I was sure the Sanguinati would never answer.

“Vicki? Vicki!” Ineke’s voice blasted out of the receiver and sounded stressed.

“Uh.” I’m not at my best first thing in the morning, and under the circumstances that was the sum total of my vocabulary.

“Something is happening. Grimshaw just peeled out of here like a maniac.”

I heard the siren. It was getting closer. Then I heard a jingle and looked past Ilya Sanguinati. Aggie stood on the other side of the screen door. I thought I’d seen her on the porch a few minutes ago, but she was gone by the time I walked across the kitchen.

A gust of wind rattled the house. I started adding things up and wished I had my little calculator handy because there was a lot to add.

The siren sounded so loud now, I pictured Grimshaw driving right through the front of the house like one of the cops had done in a recent TV show.

A car door slammed. Then another door slammed. Then someone— or something—growled as it headed toward the kitchen.

“Vicki!”

“Ms. DeVine!”

Add one Crow, one angry attorney, one police officer, one bookstore-owning friend, a second gust of wind that might be an opinion, and one Panther that entered the kitchen just ahead of the two men.

“I’ll call you back.” I hung up on Ineke and considered the variety of upset males filling up my kitchen and staring at my face. Oh crap. Crappity crap crap.

“What happened?” Officer Grimshaw asked at the same time Julian said, “You need a doctor.”

“I don’t need a doctor, and nothing happened,” I replied.

Ilya Sanguinati hissed. Cougar growled. Julian made a huffing sound that might have been an angry laugh.

Grimshaw said nothing. Somehow that made him the scariest one of all.

“Nothing happened?” Julian said. “What? You walked into a door? Do you know how many times police officers hear that excuse?”

Double crappity crap crap.

Aggie had eased into the kitchen and worked her way around all the male bodies until she stood next to me. She took my hand—gently. That told me who had blabbed to Ilya and Cougar, but who had said what to Julian and Grimshaw that had them tearing up here right on the Others’ heels?

Suddenly feeling tired and achy, I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. Then I sighed. “I had a very weird, very scary dream, and when I tried to get away from the gauze-headed monster, I fell out of bed and scraped my head on the bedside table. It’s embarrassing, and it’s nothing to fuss about.”

“You have a blackberry toe!” Aggie said, pointing at my left foot.

We all looked at my big toe, most of which was a solid purple-black.

“Huh. I thought that was a shadow.” I hadn’t turned on the bathroom light when I’d taken a shower, figuring the dim morning light was sufficient—and a lot less upsetting when I could look at my face and pretend I was seeing shadows and not bruises.

“You need to see a doctor,” Grimshaw insisted.

“I agree,” Ilya Sanguinati said.

“No.” I was firm about that, despite my ribs starting to clamp around my lungs in response to male voices that were too loud to be safe. But I was firm until . . . whomp.

I’d always thought my thighs were chunky, but I couldn’t see me under Cougar’s paw. It was a big paw. And when he wrinkled his lips and showed me his teeth, I noticed that they were a perfect set of cat teeth—not a misplaced human tooth among them.

I should have been intimidated. Gods, I should have been terrified. Maybe I would have been if Cougar had growled at me. But he was one of the boys here at The Jumble, and while it wouldn’t be smart to trust him not to mistake me for lunch if I was actively bleeding, the paw on my thigh felt oddly comforting, like it was his way of telling me it was safe to stop and think.

“All right. I’ll go to the doctor’s—but I don’t want to ride in the police car.” I sounded like a whiny six-year-old, but I didn’t care. I’d had enough of riding in cop cars, and I could feel the anxiety attack starting again, just waiting for the final push.

Focused on my breathing in an effort to avoid the meltdown, I almost missed the significant looks between Grimshaw and Ilya Sanguinati.

“Fine,” Grimshaw said. “Julian can drive you.”

“Happy to,” Julian said.

Ilya shook his head. “My car is on the way. I will escort Victoria to the doctor.” He focused on Aggie for a moment. “But perhaps we can all meet up after the doctor’s visit?”

“At the boardinghouse?” Julian suggested. “I can call Ineke and see if she can provide lunch.”

“Can I say something?” I raised my hand halfway, which was childish or snarky. Hard to tell at that point.

“Of course,” Grimshaw said smoothly as he removed a small notebook and pen from his shirt pocket. “You can describe your dream. Anything that frightened you that much could have relevance to the investigation.”

I stared at him. “How? I’m not an Intuit or a blood prophet.” I was pretty sure asking me to describe the dream was his way of getting back at me for being snarky, but now that he’d tossed that idea out there, I could see that they all wanted details. More embarrassed than ever, I grumbled, “It was just a silly dream. Have you seen any papier-mâché creatures in business suits running around Sproing?”

“The creature could be symbolic, since paper seems to be at the center of your current difficulties,” Julian said, frowning. “And this dream might be trying to tell you that you understand more about what is going on than you realize.”

I wanted to punch Julian for validating the dream, but I would have needed to push Cougar’s paw off my leg in order to stand up, and I didn’t think I’d succeed. So I described in excruciating detail—because three of the four males in the kitchen kept interrupting to ask for more details—the dream that had caused my various bumps and bruises when my sleeping body obeyed my fuzzy brain and tried to run away without having any clue about its current location.

Stupid body. Stupider brain for not posting a sign that said DREAM THREAT—PLEASE IGNORE.

Of course, even surrounded by guns and fangs, the image of the gauze-headed monster made me want to run, so maybe my various parts, while misguided, weren’t all that stupid. After all, running away was a valid choice.

Which meant Julian might be right about my subconscious trying to tell me something important.

“The car is here,” Ilya said.

“You need your purse?” Julian asked.

Of course I needed my purse. “I can get it.”

“You sit.” Julian disappeared, moving as if he were familiar with the main house and knew how to find my suite of rooms.

I was trying to think of how to tell two men who were so obviously trying not to look like they were wondering if Julian and I were friends or friends that I wouldn’t consider thinking of Julian like that. He was human and he was my friend, not a romantic fantasy. The only thing thinking about that in real terms did for me since the divorce was produce anxiety attacks.

Julian returned with my purse. Ilya and Grimshaw made sure the doors were all locked while Julian escorted me to the Sanguinati car.

“Vicki, go and get checked out,” Julian whispered as he opened the car’s back door. “Seeing the doctor has little to do with you right now.”

I studied his face, parsing out what he was trying to tell me when neither of us knew who or what was listening. And that was the point. An alarm had gone out, and while Ilya Sanguinati, Aggie, and Cougar may have been the only terra indigene visible in the kitchen, they weren’t the only ones who had responded and now needed to be appeased.

Ilya joined me a minute later and we drove to the doctor’s office. Someone had called ahead, warning Dr. Wallace that I was being brought in for unspecified injuries. The people in the waiting room looked surprised when I walked in with my attorney—and a few looked put out when we were immediately led to an exam room. But no one so much as muttered about special treatment.

There was tut-tutting from Dr. Wallace about the bruised toe and comments about me being lucky I didn’t hit my eye, which I had figured out for myself. Otherwise, he didn’t have much to say. The wound above my eye was minor and already healing. The area would be sore for a while, and I should be prepared for soreness and secondary bruises that would show up in another day or two. Goody.

He sounded more like a doctor assuring an anxious parent that the child hadn’t seriously damaged herself. I resented the tone but understood the reasoning. After all, Dr. Wallace wasn’t really talking to me.

A few minutes later, we were back in the car and heading for the Xavier boardinghouse.

“You’ll tell everyone that this happened because I had a bad dream, all right?”

Ilya gave me a curious look. “Does it matter?”

When we left the office, the women looked at my face and then looked away, some with sympathy and a couple with recognition. If humans made a mistaken assumption because it was true more often than not . . . “I don’t want anyone to be blamed for something that was no one’s fault.”

A weighted silence. Then Ilya said, “I’ll pass along the message.”