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“Not if you avoid sleep,” Valerian says. “There’s—”
“She’ll refuse to live on vampire blood,” Nostradamus says, and I nod emphatically. “But even in the rare futures where the choice is not hers, things end just as tragically.”
Wait a second. He saw futures where someone force-fed me vampire blood? Who’d be—
“I hate seers,” Valerian growls. “I assume you’re going to tell us what to do?”
“I can show you a path.” Nostradamus snatches another sashimi piece and eats it with an impressed look. “Take her and her friends with you to Necronia.”
“And?” Valerian prompts.
“What’s Necronia?” I ask.
Nostradamus rises to his feet. “Valerian will explain shortly.”
Valerian jumps up too, his muscles bunching tight. “Wait, that’s it?”
Shreds of tighty-whities fly everywhere as the werewolf morphs back into a shaggy beast and places himself between Valerian and Nostradamus.
Nostradamus lays a hand on the snarling wolf’s head, scratching him behind the ear. “He’s upset. It’s understandable.”
Valerian sits back down, all but vibrating with tension. “Why won’t you tell us what we need to do in exact detail? Why this charade?”
“Well, for one thing, if you know the future, you can change it,” Nostradamus says.
I blink. “We can?”
“Sure. For example, what if I told you ‘don’t get dessert after I leave?’”
“If you said not to, we wouldn’t,” Valerian says.
“It’s not that simple, though,” Nostradamus says. “You’ll see.” He turns to leave.
“Wait!” I call. “Can you at least give us a few tips?”
“Sure,” the seer says over his shoulder. “Take Chester with you—or another powerful probability manipulator. If the other side recruits one of his or my kind, he’d be a good counterbalance.”
The other side? Does he mean the Nutcracker?
“Wouldn’t Chester make it impossible for you to know our future?” Valerian asks.
“I don’t know your future exactly anyway,” Nostradamus says. “I’m here to offer you a path that doesn’t lead to certain doom for you and everyone—but that doesn’t mean I can guarantee a positive outcome.”
Ugh. No wonder everyone dislikes seers.
A robot rolls over to the table with my new serving of sashimi. I take it on autopilot and put it on the table.
“Farewell,” Nostradamus says. “Oh, last but not least, if you hear the Fate Motif, play the detective.” With that, he strolls out of the restaurant, his werewolf on his tail.
I face Valerian. “What just happened?”
He scrubs a hand over his face. “I think we’ve officially gotten in over our heads. The Earth Councils have been trying to locate Nostradamus without any success—and he just waltzes in here, spouting prophecies like it’s nothing.”
“Uh-huh. Why are the Councils looking for him? Why did he keep hinting at some kind of apocalypse? What the puck is a Fate Motif? And what’s Necronia?”
“First things first,” Valerian says. “What do we do about the pucking dessert?”
I frown at him. “Didn’t Nostradamus say not to get it?”
My appetite is history, and I bet the same is true for Valerian. Still, I summon VR and scan the menu. Today’s only options for dessert are chef’s choice of kibble with freeze-dried innards or a glazed cheburashka ear. No, thanks. The first option will no doubt taste like gourmet dog food, and the second sounds as appetizing as a baby koala ear would on Earth.
Valerian gestures in his own VR and wrinkles his nose. “Nostradamus’s exact words were ‘don’t get dessert after I leave.’”
I dismiss the VR interface. “But he prefaced that with ‘what if I told you.’”
“Right. That implies that merely saying the phrase ‘don’t get dessert after I leave’ could, by itself, alter our future somehow. But that makes no sense. The only way it could be true is if we ordered the dessert out of spite.”
“Which you won’t do, right?”
He narrows his eyes. “I’m not the spiteful one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Where do I start? You threw away the bracelet I gave you. Ignored—”
“You spied on me?”
Valerian doesn’t reply. He’s staring at the restaurant entrance.
Following his gaze, I gape at the dozen new arrivals—Cognizant of various types. Some are naked, some are only wearing underwear, and the rest have on a mix of nightgowns and pajamas.
All of them are armed with objects found in a typical kitchen: a few people with knives, a large female elf with a colander, a male dwarf gripping a spatula, a gargoyle with skewers, a dryad with scissors, and so on.
But it’s not their clothing or weapons that make my insides freeze-dry like the dessert we’ll probably never get the chance to order. Nor is it the lack of emotion on their faces.
It’s their eyes.
There’s a magma-like fire in all of them—the same exact peculiarity that Mom displayed when she killed my twin.
“Cast an illusion!” I whisper harshly as all fiery eyes lock in on us.
Valerian shakes his head. “Their condition makes it hard to fool more than one, and to stop them, I’d need to fool all of them—or more precisely, the one controlling them. The one who sees through their eyes. If I had a team of illusionists to help me, that would be a different story.”
