Free With Her Last Breath by Cait London Page B

sensually against her skin. She enjoyed the sunset before she settled in for a relaxing night of labeling her specialty lotions and ordering supplies for her soaps.
    Mary Lou Ingeborg, Iowa farm girl, was in her past, and she had become Celeste Moonstar, Blanchefleur’s resident psychic. Her specialty ran to tarot cards, because they never lied to her. She might lie to clients, giving false hope and dreams because they wanted them so, and there was really nothing she could do to change what would come.
    She shrugged lightly and smiled. She couldn’t change the future, or their lives. So long as her clients were happy, her bills were paid. She carefully worded her assessments of their futures and problems so that they fell into a quasi-zone of how the clients wished to translate them.
    But when the police called on her in murder cases, she saw awful things, the darkness that lived in humans, the need to hurt and kill. The sensations of the victims as they met death made her ill, and it sometimes took weeks for her to recover.
    The wind chimes tinkled musically, and that wave of restlessness stirred in her again. On the end of her chain, the goddess turned slowly, her slender nude body silvery in the light, and then in shadows as dark as death.
    Celeste bent to run her hand over the fur of her cats, treating each one equally, and each sat, twitching its tail, watching her.
    Did they feel it? That strange unsettling of the air?
    The cats on the porch strolled in separate directions. One sprawled on the boards, another leaped to the wooden swing, and the third sat by the troll, hunched and clasping his knees, his ugly cement face grinning at her.
    “You feel it, too, don’t you?” Celeste asked her cats quietly, and time flew back to when Mary Lou had been an odd little child, bothered by the cold, squeezing feeling inside her that hadn’t stopped until her grandfather died.
    There had been others who’d died, too, always after that same sense of waiting. Then, with increasing certainty, Mary Lou’s senses began to whisper to her. She tried to ignore the foreboding that came before a death, but learned she could not.
    Out on the street, the new woman’s pickup appeared, gleaming white as a ghost. Celeste smiled. Everyone knew of the new woman renting the apartment above Alessandros Restaurant. When one of the Alessandro bachelors took a woman under his wing, gossip flew like wildfire.
    When the pickup came closer, Celeste saw three heads in the cab. The woman drove, the companion-dog she wasnever without sat in the middle, and Nick Alessandro filled the rest of the space.
    Celeste lifted her hand to wave. At fifty, she wasn’t too old to appreciate a good-looking man with soulful eyes and a body—well, a very nice body that stopped women’s thoughts as he ran by.
    But today Nick wasn’t jogging into town or driving his own old beloved pickup. He was riding in the new woman’s passenger seat, and it was just possible that he was interested in her, a male staking his intentions.
    Nick Alessandro. Beneath that easygoing surface was a dark guilt he couldn’t escape.
    Celeste smiled at her musing, half trusting her senses, and the Iowa farm girl half disdaining to believe. She lifted her face to the wind rattling the leaves of the tall trees, coursing down the streets, bending the daffodils into yellow waves—
    Just then, when the pickup drove by Celeste, the woman and the dog turned at exactly the same time to look at her. The woman’s face was shaded by the cab and her ball cap, and everything within Celeste froze. It was the same feeling she’d had when she’d locked her shop’s door last night.
    This woman had taken a terrible journey, and that struggle would end in Blanchefleur. Whoever the woman was, she brought death.
    Shaken, Celeste hurried into her house to lay her tarot cards, her hands trembling. She laid them again, changing the pattern, and again, fearing to believe.
    The death card could mean a change