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Edie shook her head. “Oh, no. I’m a big believer in luck.”
“Maybe Edie should do a drawing for Lily,” Liv suggested. “She could use some new founts of information, don’t you think?”
Lily fidgeted. Edie’s tale had been as harrowing as any of the others, what with her and Kev’s struggle against the mind control freaks, but the psychic part was hard to for her to swallow. She was pragmatic by nature. “Please don’t take this personally,” she said to Edie. “But I just don’t know how useful that could be for me. I don’t really believe in that psychic stuff. I’m very sorry.”
Edie patted Lily’s knee. “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m not hurt.”
“You’re not?”
Edie licked all the frosting off her fingers before she answered.
“Think of it this way,” she said. “If you were watching a sunset, and you were with somebody who had been blind since birth, and this person said to you, I’m sorry, but I just don’t really believe in pink, or orange, or scarlet, or purple, or violet, would you take it personally?”
Lily pondered that. “I don’t know. Are you saying that I’m blind?”
“Not at all,” Edie said. “But if you’re not tuned to that frequency, how could you be expected to believe that it exists? What’s real for me is still real, whether other people believe in it or not. It used to be so painful when people didn’t believe me. But not anymore.”
“That’s just because you’re finally getting regularly laid,” Tam pointed out, wisely. “Changes your attitude about so many things.”
Edie snorted with laughter, spraying cookie crumbs.
Lily watched the women giggling, thinking about the sunset. Imagining what it would be like to have never seen it. How these events might be changing her. If love might be able to change her, too. How it would feel, to really let it unfold. What she might see, hear, or believe.
She didn’t want to be so defensive, so suspicious and cynical. She was never going to get out of this maze if she insisted on blocking out the light. Sveti was watching her, her eyes so wise. A smile was forming on the younger girl’s face, transforming it from wanly pretty to beautiful. Lily smiled back. The idea matured into a resolution.
She turned to Edie. “Will you do a reading on me?” she blurted, interrupting what they were saying. “Or, um, a drawing, I should say?”
Edie and Tam looked at her blankly. Edie collected herself. “Ah, of course. I’d be happy to. You have to promise me something, though.”
Lily braced herself. “And that is?”
Edie looked like she was choosing her words. “Sometimes I see things people don’t want to face. I can’t control what comes out of my pencil. I’m just warning you. That you might not like…whatever it is.”
Lily let out a sigh of relief. That was doable. “No problem,” she said. “I’ve had practice lately dealing with dislikeable things. A bad psychic reading, hey, what’s that compared to being shot at?”
“You have a point,” Edie said, but she still looked uncertain.
“Don’t worry,” Lily assured her. “I won’t blame you.”
“OK, then.” Edie rose gracefully to her feet. “I’ll go get my big sketchbook. This one’s too small. Cramps my style.”
“So you, um, need the sketchbook?” Lily asked. “To see things?”
“Not exactly,” Edie said. “Before our adventures, the episodes only occurred when I was drawing. Afterwards, it was coming at me all the time.” She smiled a secret smile. “Kev helped me, though. We found ways to damp it down. But I still find having a pencil helps me focus better.” She gave Lily a wink. “Want to be my latest experiment?”
“I’m game,” Lily said.
Tam looked at her with renewed respect as Edie left the room. “You’re a braver woman than I,” she said.
“You?” Lily let out a crack of laughter. “Who’s braver than you? Get real. You’re an ass-kicking bombshell commando. Please.”
“But I’ve never let Edie draw for me,” Tam said softly. “I don’t want to see the monsters of my past. I prefer that they stay buried.”
The sun had sunk behind the haze of clouds on the horizon and leached the room of color, but for the firelight. “Anything,” she said, her voice tight. “I’ll look under any rock I can think of to help me beat this.”
“Don’t scare her,” Sveti chided Tam. “I think it is good thing.”
“Me, too,” Liv said, snuggling her baby closer.
