Omens

Olivia and Eden

Rose watched the cat cleaning itself in the girl’s apartment window. She’d seen it around before, sneaking and slinking and killing, as cats were wont to do. So the girl had taken it in? Surprising. She didn’t seem the type. No more than Rose herself. Maybe the girl was lonely. She’d noticed that earlier, when she’d offer more tea and the girl would hesitate before sheepishly accepting. Staving off the return to her empty apartment. Rose knew what that was like.

The girl. She shouldn’t call her that. She had a name. Two, in fact, which was the problem. Olivia was too haughty. Pretentious. It suited the daughter of the man who owned the Mills & Jones department stores. And it suited the coolly beautiful girl Rose had seen in society page photographs. But it did not suit the young woman who’d been in her house an hour ago. Cool, yes. Self-possessed, yes. But not haughty, not pretentious enough to be an Olivia. An Olivia was all surface, an empty shell of sophistication. With this girl, the shell was a veneer. One that was slowly beginning to crack.

Eden suited her better. It wasn’t perfect. A little too cute, conjuring up images of idealistic young parents searching naming books to find just the right one for their little treasure. Still better than calling her “the girl.” As long as she remembered not to say it aloud. She couldn’t afford to alienate Eden. Not now.

Speaking of alienating…

Rose looked over at her cell phone and stifled the overwhelming urge to call Gabriel and deliver a verbal smack upside the head. That was the price of having her grandnephew in her life. She must not meddle. A lesson she’d learned when he was fifteen, after his mother left.

A deplorable situation. Her niece had the parenting skills of a … Rose didn’t even know how to finish that sentence. Any creature in nature so incapable of caring for its young would have died out centuries ago.

Rose pushed the phone aside, then swept the last hawthorn petals from the desk. A test for Eden. There were others, but this was the one she’d noticed. The power to innately detect and decipher omens was a strange skill, one that most psychics would deny even existed. And yet Rose had seen it once before—an old woman who could read omens. She’d been accepted and even quite celebrated in the community; Cainsville was an odd sort of place that way.

Rose had been only a child at the time, the woman merely a vague memory now, and she knew no more about her and her power. But when she’d seen signs in Eden, she’d set out the tests and Eden had detected one. Only one, though, meaning it was an ability as yet undeveloped. Rose could help with that, and she would, because it was in her best interests. For a Walsh, that’s what it came down to. Eden Larsen or Olivia Taylor-Jones or whomever the girl was becoming would be useful, and it behooved Rose to take advantage of that.