He was at work today, the kids in school, so there was no one to comment when she left the house and went to her studio. It was bright even on this slightly overcast day, and comfortable; she’d furnished it with some of the excess furniture accumulated after a decade of marriage, using colorful slipcovers to hide fabrics worn by kids and pets and time, and cheerful rugs on the floor and pretty curtains on the windows.

The only indication that it wasn’t just an ordinary place to get away from it all was in the exact center of the main room, and even that might have been just a meditation area, arranged with a thick rug, a low table on which were several partially burned candles, a tabletop fountain made of bamboo and copper, and a small crystal bowl filled with colorful semiprecious stones.

All part of her ritual.

Aylia made herself comfortable at the table, sitting cross-legged before it, automatically making sure the fountain didn’t need more water, lighting the candles, and idly sifting through the stones with her long fingers for a few moments while she listened to the soft splashing, breathed deeply and steadily, and consciously relaxed tense muscles.

That took the most time today, required the most concentration, which didn’t surprise her. Her farseeing had never before shown her something so deeply disturbing, so frightening, and there was a part of her that naturally did not wish to see anything like that again.

Coming toward her out of a strange grayness, moving in an odd halting or limping walk, were people who had been very obviously and very gruesomely killed. One man’s head was oddly shaped, the top of it flattened just above his eyebrows in an utterly unnatural way. Another hugged his middle, where glistening intestines and other organs tried to escape from a gash straight down, from just below his chest to his crotch.

A burn victim lurched toward her, seared flesh dropping from its blackened body with every step. A woman staggered a bit, clutching the handle of a very large knife buried to its hilt in her chest. Another woman made an eerie moaning sound and was carrying her severed arm as though it were an infant, both the limb and her body still bleeding.

Blood was dripping from almost all of them, splashing onto the gray pavement of the street, all the more shocking because it was scarlet surrounded by that eerie grayness . . .

Aylia drew another deep breath. Then another, forcing the images from her mind. She refused to allow fear to rule her, and after a few minutes she felt calm and centered.

After that, Aylia Blackwood-Sayers followed the practice so deeply rooted in her family’s history that no one even knew where it had come from, the means by which Blackwoods for uncounted generations had tapped into their Talents.

Softly, clearly, she began to sing.

—

“DID YOU SEE the crows when we drove past Main Street?” Diana asked her partner.