Glamorous - A Grace Bishop Novel - Chapter 15
© Denise Bossarte
So much for a breather, Grace
moaned, mentally preparing herself for the next round of testing. Her ability
with ghosts came without effort. She had no trouble seeing ghosts and having
conversations with them as if they were living people. But her “reading”
ability was trickier.
“Reading” wasn’t always guaranteed to be successful, or clear,
and depended on how she tried to do it. “Reading” a person by touch was the
best, most reliable, way to use her ability. She could also read objects, but
they rarely reveal much about the owner or their most recent use. Sometimes she
could get a strong clear image from the object, and other times it was only a
vague impression.
She hoped whatever the test Eli had for her, her ability would
prove strong enough to convince him she was special in having two abilities.
“I am ready for the next test,” she offered, again working to
maintain the fiction she was the one directing the events of the morning.
Eli ignored her acknowledgment, motioning for someone to
approach the table. One of the people Grace had seen seated around the table
when she arrived walked up and laid a cloth wrapped object in front of her.
“What do you want me to find out from this?” Grace inquired,
gesturing to the object without unfolding the cloth covering.
“I offer no suggestions. Tell me what you ‘read,’” Eli ordered.
Grace took a deep breath, looking over the indistinct form under
the cloth. Here goes nothing! she
encouraged herself, and she lifted the folds away until they revealed a knife.
She stared at the knife for a while, taking in all its features.
“Knife” didn’t do it justice. It was a dagger with a blade and cross guard.
Something you would expect to see in a museum.
Grace’s heart sank. The older the object, the more difficult it
was to read impressions from it. Objects lost those impressions over time like
water draining out of a poorly stoppered bathtub. This was feeling like a
set-up. Eli must know readings were challenging on older objects and gave her
something she would have difficulty reading.
She raised her eyes to glare at him, gritting her teeth not to
say anything. He sat back, waiting for her to do whatever she wanted to do
next.
Grace knew she needed to channel the frustration, use it as
energy to get a reading. As she reached out to touch the dagger, she noticed
something else. There was a definite rusty tint to the blade. It looked like
Eli had given her a bloodied and used dagger, and he was expecting her to tell
him how it got that way.
Pushing on with it, Grace picked the dagger up with her right
hand. She visualized a dark material sliding away from her fingers and palm and
up her arm, leaving her hand in direct contact with the hilt. At once, she
heard a high pitched, almost human scream, and felt a wave of intense pain
sweep over her body. The pain was overwhelming, and she doubled over, the
dagger falling out of her rigid hand and back onto the table with a clatter.
Grace clutched herself, crouching over to rest her head on the
table, willing for the pain to recede. Instead, her stomach revolted at the
combination of the reading’s sound and pain. Before she knew it, she found
herself on her feet rushing to the bathroom she had noted in the corner of the
room.
Grace heard Anthony’s taunting laughter follow her into the
bathroom. But it didn’t affect her as she was too intent on making it into a
stall and to a toilet. Dropping to her knees, she swept up her hair from her
face before a bought of intense and repeated vomiting began. Finally, she had
emptied her stomach and only gastric juice was coming up.
Feeling shaky, she flushed
the toilet and grabbed a handful of tissue from the roll of toilet paper to
scrub her face and lips. Tossing the used paper into the toilet, she spit in
after it a few times to clear out her mouth. Still a bit weak, she flushed one
more time and turned to make her way out of the stall, using the walls to keep
herself upright.
She crept to the sink,
splashing cold water on her face, and leaned on her elbows while examining her
pale, drawn face.
Shit, shit, shit!
Death was always the worst thing to read. She had read a number
objects of people who were dead, but this was the first time she read something
that involved a murder.
“Get it together, Gracie,”
she heard Danny’s voice in her head. “We
can’t let the bastard win!” Although he wasn’t there with her, she could
still imagine what he would say if he was. He would be right.
They had designed to keep her unsettled and off her game by
everything they threw at her today. From the moment she arrived, they worked to
take her out of her comfort zone and to set her up to fail. She managed to get
through the test with Gabriella and appeared to have found an ally there. She
would NOT let them defeat her on this test.
Grace met the eyes of her reflection in the mirror. She began to
walk through the list of things she promised herself to focus on this morning,
defeat definitely not being one of them.
Intuition. What did her intuition tell her about this reading?
Mentally getting a tight hold on her stomach, she replayed the
reading in her head, reliving the sound of the scream, but with effort blocking
the intensity of the pain. What had she missed on the first viewing? What
smells, visual information, or sensations other than pain?
She slowed her breathing and let herself open to the vision one
more time. There was something about the tenor of the scream that kept trying
to get her attention. High pitched, almost inhuman. The “almost inhuman” part
jumped out at her, and then she had it.
She once went with her parents to a working farm. It was in the
fall when they were harvesting the crops and were preparing for winter. Her
parents were often taking her on special “enrichment” trips as they called
them.
For this trip, they wanted her to get a full experience of farm
life. They decided she needed to see the warm fuzzy elements, like plucky
chickens in the barnyard, and the harsh realities of animal slaughtering. She
would never forget the squeals the hogs made that day. That was what she heard
in her reading. A hog being butchered.
She gripped the edge of the sink in both hands.
Bloody bastard,
bloody, bloody bastard, she ranted to
herself. Sneaky, Eli, sneaky, but not
sneaky enough!
With determination, she pushed herself up to standing. Noticing
a small bottle of mouthwash next to the sink, she took a swig, and swished and
gargled with it to get rid of the remaining taste of vomit. She spit hard into
the sink and rinsed it out with a quick turn of the faucet handle. She wiped
her hands on the soft hand towel nearby and then strode through the bathroom
door.
She returned to the table to find Eli still sitting in his usual
nonchalant way. Anthony was standing next to him with a hateful satisfied look
on his face.
“Are you done with the ‘reading,’ Mon Chéri?” Eli asked, as if
she had not rushed from the room to lose her breakfast.
Fighting her embarrassment at her first response to the dagger,
Grace corrected him. “Not yet.”
As Eli raised his eyebrows at her statement, she reached out
once more to touch the dagger. This time, knowing what was coming, she moved past
the scream and blocked the pain to see the scene unfold in her mind.
It was a wooded glen. A man’s hand was holding the dagger as he
cut the throat of a large boar felled by a spear and several arrows in its
flanks. The screams cut off as the blood gushed from its throat, mouth, and
nose.
Grace removed her hand and visualized the dark material sliding
back down her wrist and hand, cutting off her connection to dagger.
“I can’t tell you when it happened, but this dagger was used to
cut the throat of a wild hog. I think it was hunted in a forest. The man
carrying this dagger used it to kill the boar."
Anthony’s face shifted from smug amusement to surprise, and he
turned to face Eli beginning to ask “A boar…?” But he cut his question off
unfinished as Eli raised a single finger in the air to silence him.
“Very intriguing, Mon Chéri, very intriguing indeed. It appears
you were being truthful when you claimed you had more than one ability.”
Eli grew quiet. Grace sensed he was seeing her for the first
time since she arrived and appraising her seriously for the first time.
Ok, I’ve got his attention finally, but is it a good thing or a bad
thing? Grace wasn’t sure, but either way she had
at least established herself as a true Paranorm.
“Does this mean you will answer my questions now?” she asked,
following Gabriella’s advice.
Eli studied her for a few more moments, long enough for Grace to
feel the need to fidget under his stare. All at once he rose from the table.
“Anthony will assist you with the disappearing girls. A good
day, Miss Bishop.” With that, he spun and stalked away before either Anthony or
Grace could respond.
Anthony gathered himself together as he watched Eli walk away,
then faced Grace and asked her gruffly, “How may I be of assistance, Miss Bishop?”
He must hate this, she thought with delight. “How about we start with you calling
me ‘Grace’ instead of ‘Miss Bishop?’”
Anthony did not look pleased by her suggestion, but nodded his
agreement. “Where do you wish to start, Grace?”
Grace considered for a moment how to proceed. She felt exhausted
from the stress of the meeting and the tests of the day. If Eli put Anthony at
her disposal, there was no need to work on getting answers from him today, not
while she was too tired to think straight. Not while they were in his
territory. Better to wait until she was ready to engage with him, and better
yet, to do it in her territory.
“I am meeting with some people at my place on Tuesday to discuss
the case. Can you be there in the evening around 8pm to help us?”
“I don’t have a show that night. Yes, I can.”
“Great. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get my stuff back so I
can leave, now.”
Anthony had the decency to look sheepish as he handed the basket
with Grace’s things over to her. Grace put on her jewelry and gathered up her
keys and cell phone.
“I’ll see you Tuesday, then,” she said in parting.
“Yes, you will,” Anthony responded before hurrying from her
presence, heading in the direction Eli had gone.
Grace strode across the room and back through the recessed door,
waving cheekily at the bouncer as she strode past him and out to her car. She
could hardly wait to get home and update Danny on how the morning had gone and
see what he could find out about “Aperto Rottos.”
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