Marked In Flesh (The Others #4) - Anne Bishop Page 0,82

of them are worth the prickles.>

• • •

Meg crumpled that day’s issue of the Lakeside News and threw it into a corner of the sorting room. Then she retrieved it and smoothed it out before placing it in the wire bin she used for the recycled newspapers.

How had Merri Lee put it? Same news, different day: Governor Patrick Hannigan still urging city governments to show common sense instead of giving in to the sensationalism being thrown about by the Humans First and Last movement, and Agent Greg O’Sullivan saying the Investigative Task Force was still investigating the cause of the dead fish that continued to wash up around Toland.

Those articles made her hands tingle while she read them, but the article that quoted Nicholas Scratch . . .

Humans were powerful. Humans were right. Humans deserved all the riches the world could offer. People shouldn’t have to be grateful for handouts that were doled out according to the whims of animals.

Her skin burned so much as she read the article she couldn’t touch the newspaper anymore.

Too soon to cut, she thought as she went into the bathroom to wash her hands. And no point cutting now that the burning has gone away.

Returning to the sorting room, Meg set the decks of prophecy cards on the table and opened each box. She hesitated a moment, then retrieved the discarded cards from the cityscape box—the cards that identified Thaisia’s larger human cities. She even included the two sets of the more fantastical images. Last, she spread out the sheets of paper that held Hope’s sketches of the cards that should be included in this new Trailblazer deck everyone expected her to create somehow.

Hope’s sketches showed a mix of cards. Some were scenes that might be taken as a whole or be relevant because of one image, and some were images of things. Was that mix already in the decks? She hadn’t really given the cards a proper look the last time she’d touched them.

Meg wasn’t sure how long she’d been staring at the decks, feeling overwhelmed even before she began looking at images, when she realized she wasn’t alone. She looked up at the big man standing on the other side of the table.

“Henry?”

“You sighed. I wondered what was wrong.”

“You heard me sigh?” She looked toward the open window. She and her friends hadn’t considered that anyone might overhear them when they talked in this room, especially since they usually spoke quietly to avoid Nathan eavesdropping from the front room.

“I was working outside and heard you. Jake heard you from his perch on the wall. And Nathan heard you. It was a loud sigh.”

She hadn’t thought her sigh had been that loud, but all the Others had excellent hearing, so it could have sounded loud to them.

“Reading the newspaper bothers me,” she admitted.

“This is recent?”

She nodded. “Every time I read about the HFL movement or something Nicholas Scratch said, my skin prickles or burns. I’m trying not to cut. I really am.”

“That Nicholas Scratch and the HFL humans are trouble. You don’t need to cut to tell us what we already know.” Henry gestured to the decks of cards. “And those?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing with these cards. I don’t know how to combine images from these decks to make one that will be useful to cassandra sangue. What if I leave out something that another girl needs but isn’t significant to me?”

Henry pursed his lips. The scar on the right side of his face still looked raw and painful, a daily reminder of the HFL’s agenda where the Others were concerned.

“Why do you need to know right away?” he finally asked.

“So that other girls can use the cards instead of cutting.” Other girls. Was she that addicted to cutting that she didn’t want an alternative? No. Cutting would kill her in the end. She could—would—learn how to use the cards for her own sake as well as that of other blood prophets.

“First you learn the nature of a thing,” Henry said. “We have a teaching story among the Beargard. A young bear is hungry. He goes to the river looking for fish. He waits by the river for days and days until he is weak with hunger, but there are no fish. Why?” Henry looked at her expectantly.

“I don’t know this story. I don’t know why there are no fish.”

“He arrived too soon. If he had learned the nature of the fish that spawned in that river, he would have looked