Omens

Chapter Twenty-eight

If the Romans could have fortified their cities the way the human brain fortifies itself, we’d still be wearing togas. The mind is an amazing piece of biomachinery, really. A serious threat presents itself at the gate and up fly the walls, standing firm in the face of earth-shaking revelations, ideological bullets, and plain old logic.

I retreated from Niles’s apartment, still in a daze. I wandered until I found a coffee shop. Then I holed up in the corner, slurping caffeine until I found the strength to make sense of what I’d just experienced.

By the time I finished my drink, I’d decided the hallucination of Zombie Niles and the raven weren’t important. What mattered was that I’d broken into an apartment and found the body of a man who’d publicly threatened me. I had screwed up. I’d thought I was capable of handling this on my own, and I so clearly was not.

When I left my apartment for my Monday shift, I noticed curtains move across the street. Rosalyn Razvan, watching me. They closed when I glanced up, but I stayed there, looking at the house, considering…

Gabriel Walsh should be at the bottom of my list of potential investigative partners. But under the right conditions and with an insane amount of caution, he might be exactly what I needed. Except I’d already rejected his offer.

While neither my dad nor James had Gabriel’s shark instinct, they’d introduced me to men who did, and I’d learned a few things. If I wanted to work with Gabriel, I had to let him win me over. I couldn’t crawl back or the balance would be forever skewed.

After my shift, as I walked to the psychic’s door, a black blur shot from behind a parked car. The cat. I hadn’t seen it since the night of the raven attack, and I was relieved that it was obviously fine.

“Warning me not to venture into the witch’s lair?” I said as it raced past me.

The cat leapt onto a porch rocking chair. It stretched on the gingham cushion, purring as it got comfortable.

“Okay, not a warning. Unless you’re her familiar lulling me into a false sense of security.”

I swore the cat rolled its eyes.

I laughed. “Fine, I’ll willfully interpret your reappearance as a sign of good fortune, meaning I am indeed making the right choice.”

I gave the cat a pat and rang the bell. The harsh buzz was oddly out of tone with the Victorian surroundings. The tinny voice that followed was even more jarring.

“Hello?”

I looked around and found a speaker hidden in the ivy.

“Hello?” the woman’s voice said again.

“Rosalyn Razvan?”

“Yes.”

“It’s—” I started to say Liv Taylor, then remembered that she knew who I was. “Olivia Taylor-Jones. You wanted to speak to me?”

“Six o’clock.”

“What?”

A metallic whoosh, like a sigh. “I’ll speak to you at six o’clock. It’s by appointment only.”

“I’m not looking to buy a reading. Your card just said you wanted to speak—”

“Six o’clock. No charge.”

The speaker clicked off. I looked at the cat.

“Any more advice?”

The cat started cleaning itself, leaving me to retreat across the road.

Seeing the cat made me decide to take a step I’d been avoiding. I went to the library and I researched “black cats and luck,” as well as every other odd thing that had happened.

I’d wanted to forget these so-called omens. Brush them off and tell myself they meant nothing. Except they did mean something. All my gut-level interpretations of the omens matched the folklore.

In America, we see a black cat and think its bad luck. In other places, particularly Britain, they’re considered good luck. Kill a spider? Bad luck. Stir with a knife? Causes trouble. See a cat wash its ears? A sure sign of rain.

Which only proved that someone had indoctrinated me with this folklore at an early age, and now it was popping back up because I was remembering my past life with Pamela Larsen, the woman who’d put all that nonsense there in the first place.

What bothered me most was the poppy. It turned out they were a death omen. I’d seen a poppy outside the door of a dead man … before I knew he was dead. Maybe there’d been no poppy. Maybe I’d smelled death and manufactured the illusion.

Next I looked up the word “bran.” It was Welsh for raven. So I was guessing that whatever the little girl in my dream said—the line I’d regurgitated at Gunderson’s apartment—was Welsh. I had no idea what it meant. I typed a few variations into online dictionaries, but got nothing. I’m sure my phonetic guesses were nowhere close to the real spellings.

Why was I dreaming of a girl speaking Welsh and how had my dreaming brain known that bran meant raven? Back to Pamela Larsen. Her maiden name was Bowen. Plugging that into a search told me my maternal grandmother’s name was Daere Bowen. That was Welsh, and from the unusual first name, I was guessing she was a recent immigrant. So Pamela may have spoken some Welsh and taught me. Young children were amazingly quick to pick up language.

I did come across something else in my searches. I accidentally typed Walsh instead of Welsh. Not surprising—Gabriel was still on my brain. Turned out the similar spelling wasn’t coincidental. Walsh was a very old Irish name meaning “foreigner.” Quite literally, a Welshman. It meant nothing, of course, but after hours of researching omens and portents, I couldn’t help but see this as a sign that I was on the right path, considering him for the role of investigative partner. Or I was just desperate to believe it.