She kept brushing her fingers over the cards, picking up a card when touching it turned a prickle into a painful buzz. Keeping her eyes closed, she set the prophecy cards facedown on the counter. One card. Two. Three.

Meg opened her eyes, turned the cards over, and stared at the answer to her question.

The first card was one she thought of as an Elemental card: tornado, hurricane, avalanche, earthquake. The second card was one of the creatures Jester insisted wasn’t make-believe. The third card was the hooded figure holding a scythe.

Meg returned the cards to the drawer, then brushed her hand over all the cards again. “What will happen to Lakeside?”

No prickles of any kind. That couldn’t be right. Something was bound to happen in Lakeside.

She closed her eyes and brushed her hand over the cards again, repeating the question over and over.

Nothing. Then the faintest prickle.

She moved the cards around, using both hands now to locate the source of that prickle.

Found it!

She opened her eyes, looked at the card, and frowned. The only thing on the card was a large question mark. How was that an answer?

Future undecided.

She returned the card and closed the drawer.

She wasn’t going to discuss this with Simon or Vlad or any of her human friends. After all, turning over a few cards wasn’t prophecy.

But what if she cut herself and saw the same image? She would waste skin on a question that had been answered, which would upset Simon and the rest of her friends. And since anyone she asked to listen to the prophecy would argue about the need to make this cut, she would have to swallow the words and endure the agony of not speaking so that the cut wouldn’t be completely wasted.

Future undecided.

For one uncomfortable moment, she wondered if the answer was more about her than about the city. If she couldn’t avoid the lure of the razor, how much of a future would she, or any other cassandra sangue, have?

She picked up her supply notebook and went into the front room, where she would have Nathan’s snoozing company while she checked the list of things the humans—and the Others when they were in human form—would need over the next few months.

Undecided or not, Lakeside would have a future, and so would she. She wasn’t going to believe otherwise.

•••

<Ruthie smells nervous,> Henry observed.

<Might have something to do with the four of us standing between her and the door,> Tess replied.

<And it’s a small room,> Vlad added. <But the rooms above our social center didn’t need to be large for the way they had been used.>

Simon, Henry noticed, said nothing.

“The human pups need schooling,” Henry began.