Trying to ignore the prickling, Meg frowned at the back of the van. Not enough information and far too many blanks. Who was this delivery service anyway?
Giving up on the van, she turned toward the package, sliding her eyes to get another look at the man. Big. Rough-looking. No name stitched on the shirt pocket. No company logo or identification on the jacket.
“There’s no company name on this label,” she said. The box was tall enough that she could see the label but not read it easily. Another black mark for this delivery service that their driver didn’t think to tilt it for her. “Who sent this?”
He shrugged. “Couldn’t say.”
“It should be on your paperwork.” Her voice turned sharp. There was something about the look in his eyes that reminded her of the Walking Names when one of the girls dared to ask a question that wasn’t about a lesson. “Who is it for?”
“For one of them. What difference does it make?”
Something ugly in his voice now. But he was more frightening when he tried to go back to friendly, as if she couldn’t hear the ugliness under the words.
“Sorry,” he said. “Had a couple of rough deliveries earlier. Complaints about things I can’t fix. You know?”
That was possible, although she suspected he deserved the complaints. Setting her pen and clipboard on the counter, she reached for the box, intending to turn it in the hopes she could at least make out which complex it should go to. If she couldn’t read that much, she would refuse the delivery and write a memo to Simon and Vlad in case someone was looking for the package.
The man moved fast, clamping one hand on her wrist.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he said, smiling when she couldn’t break his grip. “We’ll get something to eat and get acquainted.”
“No.” She twisted, trying to break free. “Let go of my wrist!”
“Whatcha gonna do? Bite my hand off?”
Simon exploded out of the sorting room. He didn’t bother with the hand. His lunge took him over the counter far enough that his teeth just missed the man’s face.
The man let her go and scrambled back toward the door. “You fucking bitch! I was just asking you out for a meal. You didn’t have to sic your fucking dog on me!”
The “dog” snarled so savagely, the man bolted out of the office and scrambled into the van, his movements so violent the driver’s-side tires actually lifted off the pavement for a moment. But there wasn’t time to wonder about that, because Simon used his body to shove her into the sorting room.
He rose on his hind legs and shifted, but he didn’t revert back to human completely before he grabbed her, and his fury, like the look of him when he was a queer blend of human and Wolf, was a chilling heat against her skin.
“Where is it?” He pulled her close and began sniffing her. “Where is it?”
She tried pushing him away, disturbed by the sensation of fur covering a human chest. “Where is what?” When he bent to sniff at her waist and hips, she squealed and struggled to get away.
“Where is the cut, Meg?” he snarled.
“I didn’t cut!” She began fighting him. He was something out of nightmares now, and he terrified her. “Stop it, Simon! Let me go!”
She pulled away from him, smacking against the counter as a hand that wasn’t quite a hand yanked on her sweater. She heard the sound of material ripping at the seams. And she heard his harsh breathing as he stared at the upper part of her left arm.
“I didn’t cut,” she said, trying not to cry. “I was in the back room with you, and then I was trying to deal with that deliveryman.”
“But you knew he was bad,” Simon argued. “You knew.”
“Not because I cut myself! Not because of a prophecy. Did you hear me describing a vision?”
“You don’t have to say the words out loud!”
She didn’t understand why he was so angry about the possibility of a cut. It was, after all, her choice now. But she realized there were things he didn’t understand about the cassandra sangue, and judging by the way he kept looking at the scars, he knew they weren’t right. He knew that much.
“Most people hear only about the euphoria, the ecstasy that blood prophets feel from a cut.”
He cocked his head to show he was listening.
“And there is euphoria. There is ecstasy that is similar to prolonged sexual pleasure. But first, Mr. Wolfgard, there is pain. When the skin is first cut, in those moments before the prophet begins to speak, there is a lot of pain.”
He didn’t like that. She could judge how much he didn’t like that by the red flickering in his amber eyes.
“Do you know how a girl like me is punished?” She raised her right hand and traced the diagonal scars on her left arm. “She is strapped to the chair, as always. Then she is gagged. And then the Controller sits in his chair while one of the Walking Names takes the razor and slices across old visions, old prophecies, and makes something terrible and new. All those images jumbled together with no reference point, no anchor. And because she is gagged, the girl can’t speak. The words need to be heard, Mr. Wolfgard. When a prophecy isn’t spoken, isn’t shared, there is no euphoria. There is only pain.”
He took a step closer to her, his eyes still on her arm. He raised a hand, but the fingers still ended in Wolf claws that hovered over her fragile skin.
“Why did they punish you?”
More than once. He could count the number of times she had tried to defy the Controller and Walking Names. One section of her arm was a crosshatch of scars. What she had seen and endured could have driven her insane. Instead, the images had come together in a pattern that had shown her how to escape.
“I lied,” she said. “There was a man. A very bad man. He was a favorite client of the Controller who ran the compound where I was kept. This man did bad things to little girls. He traveled a lot for his business and he had found two girls he liked in different cities. One prophecy told him he could take one of the girls without anyone knowing. But if he took the other girl, he would be found and caught and he would die. He paid for another prophecy that would tell him which girl he could take and avoid being caught.”
“You gave him the wrong images, the wrong place, led him to the wrong choice.”
She nodded. “Before he could hurt the girl, the police found him and caught him—and killed him.” She tried to cover the scars with her hand, but there were too many of them. “The Controller received a lot of money from this client, so he was very angry when the man died. I was strapped to the chair and punished several times because the client died.” She swallowed a feeling of sickness. “The pain is terrible. I have no images that could convey to you how terrible it is. So I wouldn’t have cut myself and kept silent, Mr. Wolfgard. Not without a good reason.”
He looked less angry, but she didn’t think he was convinced yet.
“If you didn’t cut, how did you know the deliveryman was bad?”
Now she allowed herself a little of her own anger. “I pay attention, and he didn’t behave like the other deliverymen who come here!” Because the feeling worried her enough that she wanted someone else to know about it, she added, “And that awful prickling started under my skin as soon as he walked into the office.”
Simon cocked his head again. “Prickling?”
“I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s maddening! It used to be I felt this prickling only just before I was going to be cut. Now I feel it every day, and I want to cut and cut and cut to make it stop!”
He studied her. “Maybe this is natural for your kind when you’re not caged. Maybe this prickling is your body’s way of warning you that something is wrong. If I hear a rattling near a game trail, I don’t have to get bitten to confirm there’s a snake there. Maybe now that you’re living outside the compound, your instincts are waking up. To a Wolf, that’s a good thing.”