Jennifer Rardin [Jaz Parks series book 2] Another One Bites The Dust

realistic red spatters, I’d guess from a .22, along with the sloganPAINTBALL IS FOR SISSIES . “You’re obviously very confused about the English language.”

 I did a number on the sides of his knee that made him yelp and he settled right down. “Come on,” I said, waving my hand at Cassandra as if I was moving her through a construction zone. “You know I’m going to weasel this information out of you sooner or later, so you might as well cough it up right now.”

 She sighed, her shoulders slumping as she surrendered to my well-developed powers of persistence. Laying her hands on her legs so all twelve of her rings showed clearly, she worried at her skirt as she spoke. “I have had a vision”—she swallowed—“of my own death.”

 Wow. No matter how you look at it, that just sucks.

 “Are, uh”—Cole rose to his elbows—“are your visions always right?”

 “Very nearly.”

 “What did you see?” I asked.

 Cassandra began chipping away at the red polish on her fingernails. “I was in the show tent, alone, with the dragon.”

 “With Lung?” I clarified.

 Her shrug said,either way . “I had just given him a reading that put him into a murderous rage. He . . .” She shook her head, trying to dispel the vision, but it wouldn’t go. “I could feel the fire of his breath shriveling my skin.” The tears welled up and spilled over. The pillow went back to her face, muffling her next words. “I can feel it even now.”

 Aw, man, Jaz, you gotta fix this. And I mean now!Poor Cassandra was just about to go out of her mind. Without even thinking, I said, “Not gonna happen.”

 “Wh-what?”

 “I won’t allow it. It’s that simple. I will not let Lung kill you.”

 “How are you going to prevent it?” she cried.

 She would have to ask. I decided to take it slow. If I talked it out logically, maybe it would make sense to both of us. “Well . . . I’m going to start off by keeping two things clearly in mind. Number one, your visions are sometimes off. And number two, if he does try to kill you, he’ll be in for a nasty surprise. Because, having been forewarned, I am already forearmed.”So there .

 The tears picked up. Soon Cassandra was sobbing big-time. Cole and I shared an anxious look. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “Did you misunderstand me? I’m not going to let him kill you.”

 Cole rustled up a box of tissues, sat down beside her, and put them in her flailing hands. After a while she slowed down, blew her nose a few times, and squeegeed the tears from her face. “I am so sorry. I just didn’t expect you to believe me.”

 “Why not?”

 “So many people don’t. Vayl, for instance . . .” She trailed off, aware he probably didn’t want her to share. Despite the hot water it had already thrown me into, I made a mental note to prod him on the issue of his sons again. He must really be hounding her to pinpoint their present locations for him, like she was some sort of human GPS. And instead of telling him to quit obsessing, she’d clumped that worry with her current stress, with the result that she was positioned to keep Kleenex in business well into the next century.

 “I am an old woman, you know,” she said pitifully.

 I leaned over and patted her hand. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Even now you don’t look a day over seven hundred.”

 Her smile trembled, but it held. “I spent the first years of my life in Seffrenem.”

 “Never heard of it.”

 “It’s a lost city, buried deep beneath the desert now. But once it was a center for art, trade, and religion. All the gods lived there, each within his or her own temple. And I was the oracle for the greatest of them all, Seffor. People would travel for months to kneel at my feet, hear my prophecies. They brought me gifts of rare jewels, foods, and furs. They treated me like a goddess. And with such visions as I had, is it any wonder I began to think of myself as divine?”

 I had no answer to that. I knew what I’d thought of myself after hearing the immense, booming voice of Raoul, and it wasn’t anything nearly that elevated.

 “How the gods must have laughed,” Cassandra said bitterly. “They knew what lay in store for me. Perhaps they had orchestrated the entire tragedy.” She paused, mulling over her past while Cole and I tried not to bounce up and down in our seats and yell, “What tragedy? What tragedy?”

 Finally she continued. “One morning I woke to a vision of such horror I was nearly struck dumb. I saw my husband thrown from his horse, Faida, and killed under her hooves. I told him what I’d seen, but he just laughed. He had trained Faida from a filly. She was a fine, obedient animal, not at all skittish. He told me my pregnancy had me on edge. It was my third, and had lasted into the fourth month, twice as long as the first two.”

 She swallowed painfully, as if she had a knife at her throat. “He died that afternoon. They never saw the snake that bit Faida, causing her to rear in panic, to throw him, to crush his skull with her flying hooves. All the men who were with him could tell me was that Faida had died shortly afterward. I lost the baby the next day.”

 She looked at us with pain-drenched eyes. “It’s been the same for me ever since. I can’t save the people closest to me, because they never believe my visions.”

 Cole and I shared a moment of stunned silence. There was no way to grasp the scope of a life that long. But the love. And the pain. I could connect to that. And I was always awed by the survivors.

 “People only hear what they want to hear,” I said finally. “One of the more idiotic traits of humans, but one that has its perks. For instance, when someone says, ‘Don’t be stupid, there’s no way you can come up with a cure for AIDS.’ That’s an excellent time to develop situational deafness.”