“Why are we in the kitchen?” she asked.

“You were thirsty and wanted water. I came with you to help you find it,” Jester replied.

Meg looked at the sink. “I think I can find the faucet by myself.”

“If you’re looking for a faucet instead of a stream, you must be awake now.”

Why would she look for a stream? That didn’t make any sense—and that wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense. “Did Simon hit me with a goose?”

Jester laughed. “He whacked you with a pillow. But some of the pillows are stuffed with down, so I can see how you might confuse the two.”

Meg heard a rumbling voice coming from the living room. She knew that voice, but she asked, “Who else is here?”

“Henry, Tess, and Vlad.”

She sighed. “I guess it was a loud dream.”

“That’s the most entertaining kind, even if we’ll all need a nap because of it.”

He sounded cheerful. She should worry about that. Instead she drank the water and set the glass beside the sink. “I’m going back to bed until it’s daylight.”

“You should pee first. You drank a lot of water, even if you don’t remember doing it.”

Since her bladder suddenly agreed with him, she followed Jester’s advice. And she admitted to herself that it was a wee bit cowardly to sneak back to her bedroom and not say anything to the friends who were still talking in her living room.

• • •

Jester stepped into the living room and gave everyone a gleeful smile. “Now that we’re all awake, Meg has gone back to bed.”

Simon looked out the window. “Why? It’s almost time to get up anyway.”

Jester shrugged. “Human time makes less sense than ours.”

“Nothing we can do right now,” Vlad said. “We’ve been warned that danger is coming, and we know the result when it strikes.”

“But not the danger itself,” Henry rumbled before looking at Simon. “You’ll talk to Meg about spending a few days on Great Island?”

“There are woods on the island,” Simon said.

“But there wouldn’t be a body hidden under leaves,” Tess said. “The Intuits would have a feeling about something like that, and the terra indigene would have found it by now.”

Simon rubbed his forehead. “It might not happen during next week’s full moon. It could happen a month from now.”

“Not likely,” Henry said. “These days, our Meg’s visions are more often about the immediate future.”

“Talk to her, Simon,” Vlad said. “Talk to Blair and Nathan so they’ll be on the lookout for trouble in the evenings. I’ll talk to Grandfather Erebus and Nyx.”

Jester slipped out of Meg’s apartment and stopped at his own place just long enough to remove the jeans he’d pulled on when the commotion started. Then he shifted to his Coyote form and ran to make his own report to the girls at the lake.

• • •

Jimmy left the apartment and walked to the nearest bus stop on Main Street to catch one of the early-morning buses. There were things he needed to find, calls he needed to make, and he couldn’t do that from the apartment. For one thing, there was no phone in the place. You would think the freaks could put in a phone, even if it was a pay phone in the small, piece-of-shit entryway. But no. Either you used a mobile phone, which you paid for, or you had a landline connected at your own expense.

He’d bet his shoes that Sissy and Mama hadn’t paid to have a phone in their places.

Didn’t matter. Despite what he’d told Sandee, he did have a mobile phone, which he would ditch as soon as his plans were made.

More annoying today was the lack of a phone book in the apartment. The last tenants must have taken the thing. Which meant he needed to find a coffee shop or diner that had a phone book he could look at while he had breakfast.

The bus pulled up to the stop, and the people going to work downtown piled in. Some smiled at people already on the bus and sat next to them. Coworkers maybe. Others found an empty pair of seats and claimed both, daring other passengers to ask them to move their daypack or carry sack. Jimmy was big enough and looked rough enough that he didn’t need a daypack to claim extra room. He just looked at a person eyeing the seat. That was usually enough to convince them that standing was good exercise.

The bus pulled away from the stop, and Jimmy began to relax.

He’d spent most of the night thinking it through, considering the plan step by step. Easier to reestablish himself in Toland or Hubbney, but those would be the first places CJ and the other cops would check. So it had to be somewhere new, someplace large enough for him to disappear. Shikago. Yeah, he’d start his new life in Shikago, give himself time to learn how to use his new asset and acquire enough money to grease the necessary palms to travel anywhere he wanted in Thaisia. Then he would set himself up on the West Coast and become a behind-the-scenes big shot.

Asset. Yeah, he liked that word. Made him sound like a businessman. He should invest in a suit and a couple of dress shirts. That would attract better customers than the lowlifes he used to deal with. His asset would help him find the right people, the ones who could pay his fees.

She could, and would, help him with a lot of things once she understood who was in charge.

CHAPTER 22

Thaisday, Messis 23

Jimmy spent the morning selecting the things he would need, always aware that the best chance he had of succeeding was today at the start of the midday break. The cops and the Others wouldn’t expect him to make a move so soon after those men screwed up the theft of a few pounds of meat. They wouldn’t be ready for anyone to do something bold.