Mrs. Franklin had already turned away, but Tommy still faced her. Before he could take a step, Amelia’s hand shot out as if of its own volition and clamped onto his wrist with a desperate, viselike grip.
Tommy looked at her. “Miz Amelia?”
“Don’t leave her,” she said, her voice hoarse and low.
Tommy glanced at Jonas, who had half-risen from his perch.
“Don’t leave her,” she repeated. “Not tonight. Something’s wrong.”
Something in Amelia’s face must have convinced him. He shot a worried look at his mother, then nodded at Amelia and gently disengaged her hand from his arm. “I won’t. I’ll take her home right now, and I’ll stay with her.”
Jonas sat back down as they left. “What was that?”
Amelia frowned. “I don’t know. I never felt anything like it before.” The sun fell below the roofline and cast them into shadow. She shivered. “Let’s go inside.”
* * *
Tommy knocked at the door the next day, his eyes tired and his voice awed. “You saved her,” he said, looking at Amelia. “We’d just got home and she’d gone to start dinner. I heard her fall. She was on the floor when I got to her, gaspin’ and holdin’ her chest. I ran for the doctor, and he said it was her heart. Gave her somethin’—put it under her tongue. It brought her around after a few minutes. Doc says she’d probably have died if I hadn’t been there.” He took Amelia’s hand in a crushing grip. “She would have laid there on the floor alone. You saved her.”
When he’d gone, Jonas looked at her, his expression odd. “She touched you yesterday, and you knew something was going to happen. What did you see?”
Amelia shook her head. “I didn’t see anything, not exactly. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“But you knew something would,” he said, thoughtful.
When she came to the table for dinner that night, her cards and crystal were sitting in its center.
“What are these doing here?” She looked at him.
“I thought you might like to practice. I’ve had them in the cabinet since you got hurt. Sabine has had someone working out of your room,” he told her. “A sort of substitute.”
“A substitute,” she said in a flat tone. “I should have realized. Have I lost my place?”
“I don’t think so. She’s not a patch on you. But she brought her own props. Although she calls them ‘gateways.’ She claims different tools connect to different levels of the spirit realm,” he said with disdain. “Makes these grand pronouncements in the most awful fake accent—”
As Jonas went on, describing the manifold deficiencies of her successor, Amelia brooded. Too many things were slipping from her grip. She needed to get back to work. That would start to set things right. She leaned forward across the table to touch the crystal with one finger, then pushed it away and slid the cards out of their wrapping. She held the deck and stroked her thumb over the slick back of the top card, only partly listening to Jonas.
“—the most obvious old fraud you could imagine,” he continued with relish. “Terribly dramatic.”
Amelia idly shuffled the deck and drew without looking. She glanced down: the Tower, signifying misery, adversity, calamity. Appropriate enough to their circumstances. Perhaps more to come if she couldn’t get her place back. She shuffled and drew again: the Tower. With a prickle of unease, Amelia shuffled a third time, carefully averting her gaze from the telltale markings on the cards. When she drew, the Tower appeared once more. Her heartbeat was suddenly noticeable in her chest. Jonas had gone silent, looking down at the card in her hand. He knew their meanings as well as she did.
“That was… odd,” he said finally, subdued.
Amelia avoided his eyes. She stood to stack the cards and put them away.
“Do it again.”
“I don’t—”
“Please,” he said with uncommon gravity.
She met his eyes and sighed. “Fine.” She shuffled slowly, the deck warm in her hands, and drew the card. The desolate gray crenellations of the Tower stared up at her, lightning kissing the spire at the top, desperate figures falling from its heights. Neither of them spoke.
After a frozen moment, she put the cards away. “I’m going to bed.”
The first dream came hours later.
She stood on an open plain, the night pressing in on her with a palpable weight. The tower loomed before her, its top a roaring inferno. A man leapt from its heights, screaming. She turned away before he hit the ground. Behind her, it was midday. She watched as a woman followed a yellow cat into a field of riotously colored flowers and was swallowed up, vanishing as though she’d never been. Another woman rose up in her place, pale and armless, like an ancient statue. With a banshee shriek, she turned to Amelia, her eyes imploring, before drying up like a husk and crumbling to dust. A third stood behind her, this one weeping from eyes as black as night. Amelia leaned forward to brush away the tears, and the woman snapped out of existence with a hollow pop. Amelia looked down at her hands—her palms were streaked with blood. She gasped and scrubbed them against her dress, a rough gray thing with black smudges at the hem. The flowers faded, and a man dressed in the robes of a monk bloomed in their place. He stood mute and unhearing as yet another woman circled him, pleading. Amelia blinked, and they were gone. A scraping, scratching noise behind her, and she turned again. Her breath caught in her throat. An impression of limbs, withered and gnarled, sinews standing out against leathered hide. Fur and scales and long, matted hair trailed on the ground. A knob at one end for a head, and when it raised itself toward her, it had no face, only an open pit lined with glistening fangs. She whirled to run, fell, looked down her body. The creature’s hands were around her ankles. She howled, an animal sound, raw with terror. The hands moved up her body, gripped her shoulders.…
Amelia woke with a gasp. The sheets were twined around her legs, damp with sweat despite the cool night air. A dim outline leaned over her in the moonlight—Jonas, both hands pressing her shoulders into the mattress.
“You were screaming,” Jonas told her, concern heavy in his voice. He released her and leaned back. “I had to shake you hard to wake you up.”
“I’ve never had a dream that vivid.” She took a deep breath and brushed sticky strands of hair off her face. Her hands were trembling.
“Do you want to talk it through? Do you think… was it—”
“No!” She shuddered and softened her tone. “No, I— It was just a nightmare. I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
With a doubtful look, but without comment, he left.
In the light of the next day, it was possible to believe it had been only a dream. There’d been the excitement with Tommy’s mother. And the strange coincidence with the Tower card the night before. She was worried about her job, about Jonas. It had influenced her, caused her mind to create that thing. Everyone had bad dreams sometimes. It meant nothing.
But it came again the next night. And the next. And each night thereafter.
The details changed. Once Jonas was the man falling, trailing fire as she screamed his name. Once the lurching monster had her own face, distorted but recognizable. Each time Jonas woke her. Each time she refused to talk about it.