Page 7 of Death and Divination
The blood on the leaves made me think that the vision was emphasizing the death part, but blood could also mean love. Love that kills? Was the corpse I smelled at the tree line killed by a lover? In mythology, Leander died trying to swim to see his lover.
Mountaintop. Two choices. Moon. The moon and the mountaintop made me think of the shifters—especially the werewolves that were in the middle of a contentious division in their pack right now. There had been skirmishes, but so far, no out-and-out war. I’d tried to divine the future of that conflict but had come up with zeros. Was this vision telling me something about the werewolf pack? Was death coming to Heartbreak Mountain?
The symbols fit. And Marcus? Not only was he a panther shifter, but he was our prosecutor in the town of Accident. He was also my sister Cassie’s ex-boyfriend.
In my divination, Marcus was accusing me of being at fault in something. It had been my fault, he’d said. Did that have to do with the terrible corpse-like smell of decay in the foliage by the trees? The very thought of my being at fault in someone’s death, at my failing to save a life, made the tea curdle in my stomach. But was Marcus accusing me because of his role as our town’s prosecutor? Or did he play a more personal and less symbolic role in this divination?
And did any of this have to do with the man I’d been seeing on the most serious of my calls? The man who hovered on the edge of the scene, watching with an unnerving intensity. I couldn’t help but think the two were somehow connected.
A mysterious man.
Blood on oleanders.
A choice on a mountaintop, of which either way lay death.
A panther shifter accusing me of…something.
And golf balls. I had no idea what the golf balls had to do with any of this. I was half tempted to discount them as a strange tangent of my weird witch-brain, but I’d learned long ago that it was the truly weird stuff that ended up being the key of most mysteries.
The fuzzy pipe cleaner had been a squirrel. What the heck were golf balls?
