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“You know I didn’t want to come here, don’t you?” Molly asked Alice as she sat on the earth in front of the pit fire.
“Here.” Alice flung a suede-fringed jacket at her. “You left so quickly you forgot your coat. It’s getting cold.” She waved a hand over the fire and the flames picked up in intensity.
“Is that rain I can smell in the air?” Molly asked.
“We’ll get rain, but not yet.”
Molly slipped her arms into the jacket and tugged it around her. “What’s going on?” She didn’t need to qualify her question. Alice would know Molly was here because of Saul and all the strangeness. Not to mention the unexpected tug of friendship she felt toward him.
“You need to get your thoughts right, Molly, and you need to do it soon. Or you’re going to be rained on from above in a very different manner.”
“Thoughts on what?”
“On how you feel about him.”
The air stilled, and the flames of the fire dwindled to low, translucent curls that indicated trouble. Molly had seen the flames do this too often in the five weeks she’d been home.
Alice lifted her face to the night sky, but she wasn’t counting stars.
“What is it?” Molly asked.
“The great-grandfathers.”
Molly’s skin prickled as though she’d been zapped by the tail end of a lightning strike. “They’re coming?” she whispered. “Or are they here?” It no longer felt like a joke, it was too scary. “Is this why you contacted us at the start of last summer?” The grandmothers had told the cousins to rethink their decision about disregarding their gifts, and start nurturing.
This resulted in the start of the three-way telephone calls between Molly in Colorado, Lauren in California and Pepper in Arizona. There’d been some wine involved—always a necessity when they were forced to discuss Calamity Valley and the curse.
“We can’t stop what’s going to happen unless those involved are around and acknowledging the issue sent them,” Alice said.
“So there is a problem.” Why hadn’t they listened instead of rolling eyeballs and swilling wine? “Can the great-grandmothers stop the great-grandfathers?”
“They’re trying.”
If what they’d been told since they were knee-high to a grasshopper was true, the cousins were in trouble. “Trying?” she said. “That’s not near enough good news. Tell them to try harder.”
“Thought you didn’t believe.”
“I’m covering all angles.” Molly looked up at the sky, expecting to see the ghostly faces of the great-grandfathers materializing through the ink-black night, spitting tobacco and retribution down on Calamity Valley.
She’d left the valley as soon as she was able to, but that didn’t mean she didn’t hold a lot of respect for the towns. Or for the grandmothers. Or her darling mother. Plus, Molly wanted children. Not now, she was only twenty-seven and she had a lot on her plate, but in the future. When she was thirty-something. When she’d organized her life. When...
“He followed you again.”
Molly looked away from the orangey-glow of the fire and into her grandmother’s dark-green perceptive eyes. She resisted the urge to turn.
“Looks like he can’t come out of protection mode as easily as he thought he could.”
Molly inched closer to Alice. “We had a little moment this evening,” she said in a lowered tone. “It was... an unusual moment. Alice...” She paused. “Do you make things happen?” She was amazed at her boldness. She’d never questioned Alice or her cousin’s grandmothers before tonight. Hadn’t ever expected to have a need to do so. “Have you been pushing us together for the past six years?”
Alice smiled, then patted Molly’s hand. “I don’t push, I guide. I can only do that if I get the message that guidance is needed.”
Molly lowered her voice even more in case the man in question had stepped closer and might hear their conversation. “Alice,” she pleaded. “What about Saul? What about Colorado and the coincidences? He found my daypack—he’s the man who handed it in to the police.”
“Well, well,” Alice said. “Fancy that.” She smiled her slow, patient, not-telling smile.
“We missed each other by three hours. We missed each other by minutes at the airport six years ago too,” she rushed on. “We were both there the same day. We both thought about going to Arizona then changed our minds and he came to Texas and I went to Colorado, and it scares me, Alice.”
“And Saul Solomon?”
“I think it scares him, too. He’s getting suspicious. Do I need to bring him to meet you?”
“He already called in. The first night, after he’d followed you home to make sure you got there safely. He knows about me.”
Had Molly really only met Saul and let him into her life four days ago? It felt like weeks, or months. Like years. How could any of this have happened so fast?
“He’ll walk you home tonight,” Alice said, “not knowing that you know he’s looking after you—and then he’ll consider coming back to chat to me.”
“With the same questions as mine,” Molly concluded. “Except I reckon he’ll be a lot more concerned about what you might say, than with his need to ask you what’s going on.”
Alice chuckled. “You’ve got more of the gift that you’re prepared to accept, Molly.”
Molly shook her head. “It’s a natural intuition. Just like Momma’s.”
“Is it?” Alice asked.
Molly didn’t want the gift. If she had it, she’d now be looking at the future vision of Saul breaking her heart, and at the sorry picture of her face, which wouldn’t hide her emotions as she watched him walk away from her and from everything she had to stay for.
“It might be up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Alice said.
Molly sat straighter as another thought struck her. How much and how many of her thoughts could Alice read? She glanced at her grandmother, but felt nothing untoward. Alice wouldn’t look for such personal things. She’d block them.
“You’re not going to tell me if you’ve put all this into play,” Molly said. “Are you?”
“Doesn’t look like I am,” Alice said, and pushed a fallen log back into the fire. “I can’t teach you what you have, Molly. You’ve got to learn it yourself. Some people resist so hard, even a grand wizard would have trouble pulling them in.”
“Are there really grand wizards?”
“No.” Alice showed a flash of amusement. “It’s a turn of phrase. You need to hear the words and dig deeper for the meaning.”
“I wish you’d quit with the cryptic stuff.”
“It’s the only way to learn. Finding yourself while you figure out the words and their real meaning. You’re lucky to have the messages in the first place.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.” But it’s not as if I want this gift. “Why me and not Lauren and Pepper?”
“It’s not their turn.”
Molly shuddered. Momma had said the same thing. Was that just intuition? Or had something from Alice rubbed off on her daughter after all?
“I’m not going to tell Lauren and Peper you said that.” They’d freak out.
“Don’t just listen to what I say, Molly. Don’t just listen to the words and wait for it all to happen.”
“Are you saying we can change fate?”
“I reckon we’ll find out.”
A powerful sensation hit Molly in the chest, almost suffocating her. Her mind went fuzzy but somehow she had all this clarity inside her. A bit like déjà vu but more of an internal perception than simply familiarity with something she shouldn’t be familiar with.
She blinked, focusing on that act and not the happenings inside her. “We?” she asked. “You mean, you and me are going to find out? As in—weird stuff?”
Alice nodded. “Don’t be frightened.”
“I’m terrified.”
Alice’s hand covered Molly’s. Its coolness tempered the fever of fear inside her. She turned her hand palm up, and held Alice’s hand, curling her fingers around the thinned skin on Alice’s fingers and feeling the strength her grandmother still had.
