Okay, at least it’s proof.
She still couldn’t make out the other two killers’ faces. When they finished with the man, they pulled him away from the hearth and discarded his body in the corner. Edgar stood, smiling in evil glee and stretching as he pulled his robe on.
Anger surged within her. She rushed him, screaming, and tried to hit him. Except for a flicker across his expression, her efforts proved useless.
Meanwhile, the other two men dragged the screaming, struggling woman over to the hearth as the little girl plaintively cried for her. The second attacker, who turned out to be Lenny, repeated with her what Edgar had done to her husband as Lina screamed and cried, helpless to stop it, helpless to look away.
When it came time for them to kill the little girl, Lina felt like her sanity would come unglued. She recognized the older man who raised the knife, even though in real life she had never seen him before.
He was the man from her earlier vision, the man she saw in the street. Only he looked a little younger and a lot thinner.
Lina tried placing herself between him and the little girl, and his hands plunged through her without effect. But when he raised the goblet to his lips to drink, Lina screamed at him, swatting at the goblet.
To her shock and his, the goblet flew from his hands, blood spraying from it in a ruby arc, splattering the wall while the goblet bounced off an old-fashioned floor radio and hit the hardwood floor with a clang.
Lina froze, as did the three men.
Edgar and Lenny proved to be as spineless and self-centered in the past as they were when she knew them. “We need to leave. Now,” Edgar said.
“But the ritual!” the third man complained. She detected a slight accent in his voice, but wasn’t sure what.
“Forget it!” Lenny said. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway! She was just a child. We needed the son. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to fool the dragons or the wolves like we do. Let’s get out of here!”
They gathered up their stuff, including the spell book from Yellowstone. They cleared out, leaving a sobbing Lina kneeling over the girl’s body. The child looked so much like Kael.
“I’ll figure it out,” she promised the little girl. “I will, I swear.” She reached out, even knowing she couldn’t touch the child, to close her eyes.
To Lina’s shock, she could feel her. When she lifted her hand, she realized it was now covered with the girl’s blood. Lina started to scream when Jan shifted in his sleep next to her, accidentally bumping her with his elbow and startling her awake.
As she tried to calm her racing pulse, she looked at her hand.
Clean.
With tears drying on her face and her heartbeat slowing, she settled between her men tried to go back to sleep.
The next morning, Lina stumbled downstairs while her men still slept. Zack was already in the kitchen, the delicious aroma of coffee brewing making her sigh with relief. She plopped down at the table without a word while Zack poured her a mug, fixed it the way she loved, and slid it in front of her.
“Thank you,” she said with a content sigh. She wrapped her fingers around the warm mug and lifted it to her lips for a sip.
“Of course, sugar.” He joined her at the table with a mug of his own. “Anything wrong?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“What’s got you frowning, girl?”
“This seems so unreal.” She looked at him. “How does your mom handle all of this?”
“All of what?”
“All the prophecy crap?”
He laughed. “Honey, she doesn’t know.”
“But before Edgar attacked us at my house last year, you said you came from a long line!”
He nodded. “I did. Just because we’re a long line, doesn’t mean she knows anything about it. I’m the one with the memories, not her.” He tapped his temple with one finger. “Now, you have your memories, too. The boys up there still don’t remember shit, but you know as well as I do they are the spitting image of what they used to look like.”
“How is your mom, anyway?” Soon after Lina had met her men, Zack’s mom had gotten a promotion and taken a transfer to Los Angeles, a dream job for her.
“She’s fine, Little Miss Avoiding-the-Subject.” He arched an eyebrow at her.
Lina felt heat flood her face. She suddenly found her coffee mug very interesting.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“You so cannot lie to me, Lina. Spill it.”
She didn’t want to think about the nightmare. Her stomach flipped at the memory. “I saw…something bad last night.”
“Bad how? Missed a Best Buy sale bad, or ran over a blind kid with a Seeing Eye dog bad?”
“Bad.” She sipped her coffee, not wanting to revisit the scene, even in her mind. She looked at her hand. Clean, not a trace of blood. “I saw Kael’s family get killed.”
His mouth gaped. “Holy shit,” he whispered.
She started to cry. Somehow, he made it around the table before she could blink. He cradled her in his arms as she let out her grief on his shoulder. “I couldn’t stop it,” she moaned. “I saw it all, heard it…I couldn’t change it!”
That’s where the three dragon shifters found her moments later when the sound of her anguished wails reached them all. Jan and Rick nearly collided with Kael as they all tried to race into the kitchen at the same time.
When Zack finally got her calmed down, he said, “Okay, sweetie. I know you don’t want to talk about this, but you need to go back and tell us everything.”
“It was just a bad dream though, right?” she asked them all more for her own comfort than anything.
“Maybe,” Jan said, “but maybe not.”
Kael patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Lina. We need to hear it.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath and related what happened. As she got to the point where she knocked the goblet from the third man’s hand, Zack stopped her. “They said he didn’t need to fool the dragons or the wolves?”
“I think so. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that’s what Lenny said.” She didn’t want to think about the gory scene.
She didn’t want to rehear the screams and cries.
The sound of the knife plunging into their bodies.
The sound of their guts being ripped out.
At least the third killer hadn’t gotten that far, his ritual interrupted. He certainly hadn’t aged well, if she could believe her other vision of him.
“Would you recognize the third man if you saw him again?” Kael asked.
“Absolutely,” she said. “He looked like he was in his fifties or sixties. He had mostly grey hair and brown eyes. But…” She did the math in her head. “Wouldn’t he be dead by now? That happened eighty years ago.”
“Not if he’s a shifter,” Kael said. “And I’d bet money on that. And the fact that you saw him in another vision lends credence to that theory.”
“Could you tell if the third man was the same person who killed Bertholde?” Rick asked.
“No. In that vision, I never saw his face.” She went quiet, a thought hitting her. “Hey, wait a minute. My vision at Yellowstone was blue. Like I was looking through a filter. And so was the vision last night about the tablet. And about the third guy.”
“So?” Jan asked.
“When I was with Baba Yaga looking at the past, and again with my nightmare, they looked normal.” She stood up, disengaging herself from Zack’s protective embrace. “If something’s already happened, I’m just seeing it. But if it hasn’t happened yet…” She went quiet, thinking.