The last person Marlene was expecting to see when she arrived home in the evening was Robert King. And yet, there she stood, his eyes staring into hers with a deep permanence hers lacked as they stared back.
The words The Face of Magic had lost most of the glitter they had been charmed to sparkle with, but the picture itself was as clear and concentrated as it ever had been. As Marlene pulled a picture of herself and Dorcas at their first Kinky Kestral outing over top of it, she wondered, so fleetingly that she wouldn’t remember thinking it at all later on, whether the seer she and Dawn had visited that day knew what had been coming, and been unkind enough to keep her ugly, scamming mouth shut.
“Kat?”
She had managed to keep it together for Natalie, but she couldn’t hold it together any longer. Too much had begun to crumble around her, and now that she was back to what little solid ground she knew, she had no choice but to fall apart herself.
“Kat!”
