Re: Blacked

"The drought had lasted forty-seven days by now. Thirty-one more before the rain returns..."

Cassandra counted them off on her left hand each morning, a habit she could not shake, though she knew the number even before she started to count. That's one of many downsides of being a seer: You had to do things that you already knew the result of.

At that moment, an old woman's voice sounded from downstairs:

"I'll go with Sir Graham today. The pizza is on the table. And remember, I want to see two dozen Fortune Charms by the time I return."

"Yessss, Mom..." Cassandra answered emotionlessly.

Her mother called herself Eleni the Oracle, but having not even a penny of talent in divination. Eleni, who read palms and fabricated visions from the wrinkles of **** customers. Eleni, who could smell rain three days before it came, but claimed the power came from the gods, not from the ache in her own bones. She made a living by selling charms that never worked.

Cassandra had been eight when she understood the difference between her mother's performances and the thing that woke her at night, the thing that pressed images behind her eyes until she saw a neighbor's barn burning three days before the sparks caught. She tried to warn the poor guy in an anonymous letter. The man was puzzled at first, but still decided to buy a new electronic pump just in case. Then the pump short-circuited and caused the very fire that it should stop.

Cassandra had learned that she must not speak of what she saw ever again. It brought nothing but trouble.