Free Shade by Jeri Smith-Ready Page A

little older than her teenage picture, and if she weren’t slightly shorter than my five-foot-two, I would’ve believed she was a model. Her blond hair fell in waves to her waist. I’d never seen curly hair so long, and I wondered if it was a weave. But it moved like real hair, and she wore hardly any makeup—not that she needed it—so she seemed like a genuinely, obscenely, nature-is-so-unfair-ly gorgeous woman.
    Beside me, Zachary stood with his mouth half-open. “Er … ah … ,” he said, like he was having his tonsils checked.
    I stepped forward. “I’m Aura. We talked on the phone? And this ismy new partner, Zachary Moore. Mrs. Richards assigned him to help me.”
    “Lovely.” Like her hair, Dr. Harris’s voice reminded me of liquid gold, warm and soft and heavy. “Call me Eowyn.” She held out her hands, one to each of us. I shook the right one, since it was closer to me.
    Zachary awkwardly shook her left hand with his left. “Eowyn? Like the character from
Lord of the Rings
?”
    Her head pitched back as she laughed. “My parents were huge Tolkien fans.” She did look kind of like the lady from the movies. “It could’ve been worse,” Eowyn said to me. “If I’d been a boy, they would’ve named me Gandalf.”
    I tried to return her smile, but apparently wasn’t successful.
    “Is something wrong?” she asked me, the corners of her deep blue eyes crinkling with concern.
    I shook my head, then nodded. “Nothing to do with the project.”
    “But you
are
the project.” Her smile widened. “By that I mean, you and your partner will pour yourselves into the work, and what comes out will reflect your personalities.” She glanced between us, almost slyly. “Which I sense are very similar. Your stars may be closely aligned.”
    Please don’t let her talk about astrology.
This whole setup was weird enough without Zachary knowing we were born only a minute apart. And if he knew already, I didn’t want him to know I knew he knew.
    “How do we start, then?” Zachary asked.
    “The way every fortunate endeavor begins.” She unfurled her hand to gesture behind us. “With tea.”
    A small, low table was set up in the corner of her office. Two white mugs sat next to a teapot the blue of a twilit sky.
    “Sit,” she said. “I’ll grab an extra mug from the cabinet here.”
    Zachary and I maneuvered around another stack of books, then stopped next to the two oblong cushions, placed on either side of the table.
    “Go on,” he said. “I’ll take the floor.”
    “No, you won’t.” Eowyn glided over with the third mug. “You two will be putting your heads together a lot this year. It won’t kill you to put your butts together now.”
    If I weren’t so numb, I might’ve laughed, or at least blushed. But I just wanted to start this meeting so I could get some answers, then end it so I could be alone again. Faking okay-ness was exhausting me.
    Zachary and I sat with a few inches between our bodies, on a sagging cushion that wanted to tumble us together. Eowyn lowered herself onto the cushion across from us, using a graceful, no-handed move that screamed of daily yoga practice. She placed the plain white mugs in a row on the table. “Choose one.”
    They all looked the same, but clearly this was some kind of test, judging by the gleam in her eye.
    I chose the one on the left, in front of Zachary, and he chose the one that had been in the middle. For some reason it occurred to me that Logan would’ve reached for the one on the right, because it was the farthest away. I rubbed the achy spot on my chest.
    Eowyn poured the tea, and I noticed she was wearing an obsidian ring in an oval setting. “Now watch.”
    Zachary returned my skeptical glance. Was she going to read our tea leaves? What did this have to do with ancient astronomy?
    Slowly a picture began to appear on the side of each mug, broad red strokes on the white background.
    “These are ogham letters, Irish runes. The designs are