Scrying Game
Witching Hour: Psychics
Chapter One
I had the dream again.
The dream where the barrel of a gun takes up most of my vision. Two hands crowd the remainder of the space, the fingers laced together. The painted red fingernail polish is fresh. The hands shake like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. But at this range, it won’t matter. I’m done for.
Her pointer finger wavers near the trigger.
My heart is hammering fast. So fast.
The red fingernails are now all I can see. Everything else is a blur. Her finger slips across behind the trigger guard, across the trigger. She squeezes and…
BAM!
I woke covered in sweat with my heart going just as fast as it was in the dream. Every single time, I wake up. I’m still alive. I’m still alive because it was just a vision—that’s how visions work.
At least until they’re the real thing. Because the way my visions work—they always become a reality. Always. Unless I do something to stop it.
But there’s no running from this one. No hiding. There’s just the knowing—the knowing that one day I will be staring down the barrel of that gun.
*****
It was still dark outside the Holiday Inn Express. As dark as it could be—the lights in the parking lot were bright as ever, shining through the crack between the shades. I just couldn’t get it to close before bed.
The red lights on the hotel’s alarm were also too bright. They read 5:00 a.m.
The elevator outside my room dinged again.
The way these places were set up, I wondered if they were really meant for sleep at all.
I stripped the bedding and showered before the continental breakfast buffet opened. Then I took a box of Fruit Loops and some watery yet scaldingly hot coffee, and I got on the road.
Six more hours of driving and I failed to get that dream off my mind. I shouldn’t have been surprised by it. The closer I got to my hometown of Mossy Pointe, Florida, the closer I came to confronting my past.
Since I was seven years old, just a child, I’d dealt with visions. That vision and others. Many others.
It was the only one I ever had at night, as a dream. The others come in different ways. Usually, when I’m mid-stride, doing something important. I’ll go rigid. My eyes glaze over milky white. And I’m locked like that, rooted to the spot, until the vision plays out.
With some gas, a Coke, and another snack, I put another hour of interstate behind me. The world had evolved into something familiar—pine trees as far as the eye could see. Even the billboards on the side of the road hadn’t changed in twenty plus years. They still advertised for local restaurants and for Jesus.
My old Honda Civic made the the turn off the interstate on autopilot, as if the tires just knew where to go. Highway 83 was more of the same.
The same old man in the same old Ford pickup sold the same old Tupelo honey. He had fresh boiled peanuts and homemade preserves lining the bed of his truck. He waved at me from his lawn chair underneath a big yellow umbrella.
He’d wave to anyone, whether he knew them or not. He knew me, Willow Brown. Or he did when I was younger. I doubted Mr. Thomas’s eyesight was as stellar as it used to be—back when he could spot anyone coming to and from the interstate and tell their mommas about it.
There wasn’t much to do in Mossy Pointe. Not much trouble to get into. And when I was here, that’s where I liked to be, with the trouble. Or that’s what my mother thought.
The town itself was hardly worth mentioning on a map. Some called it a speed trap. It was just a mile and a half of highway where its official designation changed to Main Street and the speed limited dropped to twenty-five.
My Aunt Cora’s house was at the end of it, at 2002 Main Street Mossy Pointe, FL. It was a purplish blue house, or bluish purple, depending on the angle of the sun—a Victorian with a turret above the sitting room, the parlor.
In the parlor window, there was an unlit neon sign with a palm on it. The palm matched the sign in the frontyard outside that read Psychic Readings, Palmistry, and Tarot Cards.
The whole town knew what a lit sign meant—that the psychic was available for readings. I’d grown up in this house with Aunt Cora doing her readings daily.
She’d taken us in—me, my mother, and my little sister Nora, after my father had died. He’d left us with his massive medical bills.
We stayed here until I was a senior in high school when Momma paid those bills and got on her feet. She found a new job in Richmond, Virginia.
My mother always wanted to leave this place. She used to say people get rooted here, and they can never dig themselves out. She did though. She dug all three of us out.
After college, Nora had taken a page out of Momma’s book. She took off for the west coast, to Seattle. A few years later, Momma followed her there, living in a retirement community down the street from Nora and my nieces and nephew.
Since leaving, we hardly ever talked about Mossy Pointe. Or about Aunt Cora. Cora was my father’s aunt, not my mother’s. We didn’t even attend her funeral.
So, it came as quite a shock that she’d left this place to me in her will.
The tires crunched over a gravely driveway. In the trunk, there were a few bags and a suitcase. I brought just enough with me for a few weeks, a month tops. My home was still in Virginia, in a little town called Creel Creek.
I had a job ahead of me. I had to survey the house, take what I wanted—if anything—and put the thing up for sale. I could only hope someone would be dumb enough to buy it. From what I remembered, the house needed a lot of work. And my memory was twenty plus years old.
Seeing it, my worst fears were realized. My memory was near perfect. Time hadn’t been kind to the old house.
I let out a big sigh and dropped my things on the porch. From my purse, I dug out the key the lawyer sent me and opened the door wide.
Even though it was bright outside, the inside of the house was dark and drab. I flipped on the first couple of interior lights, scooped up my bags, and was just about to go in when a shadow scampered across the hallway from the parlor into the den.
My heart stuttered inside my chest as my mind processed this new information. It was just a cat. A large and fluffy cat, gray with black markings.
I could deal with a cat.
What I couldn’t deal with was the voice from the other end of the hall.
“Close the door, you’re letting out the air conditioning.”
At first, I thought the cat had spoken to me. But that wasn’t right.
Regardless, I heeded the command. Then a very human face with a very human body followed that voice into the foyer.
That wasn’t right. Not right at all.
Christine Zane Thomas 