“A very special guest,” Jo whispered. “I’d hate to ruin the surprise.”
She opened a door to the back seat and let Lucy scramble in first before her.
“Hi there. I’m Jo Levison.” She thrust a hand between the front seats. “And this is my daughter, Lucy.”
“Harriett Osborne.” The woman took Jo’s hand, but didn’t let go. Instead, she turned it over, examined both sides, and traced Jo’s life line with her index finger. “Fascinating,” she said. “How long have you been like this?”
“Been like what?” Lucy asked, craning her neck for a look at her mother’s hand.
“A few years,” Jo said.
“It will get stronger,” Harriett predicted. “You’ll have great power, but it won’t last forever. Don’t wait to make use of it.”
“How do you know all of that?” Jo asked.
Harriett shrugged. “Does it matter? We both know it’s true.”
“Hold on a sec,” Lucy interrupted. As an only child, she’d spent too much time in the company of adults to be properly intimidated by them. “Did you just say your name is Harriett Osborne?”
“I did,” Harriett confirmed. Then she turned back to Jo. “Someday she’ll be one of us, too.”
“The Harriett Osborne?” Lucy asked skeptically. Kids at school whispered about her at recess. One of the boys who lived across the street from Harriett claimed to have seen her dead body, half eaten by cats.
“Will you believe me if I pull up my pant legs and show you all the cat bites on my shins?”
Lucy’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.
“She’s pulling your leg, baby,” Jo assured her. “I think.”
“I am,” Harriett confirmed with a wide, toothy smile that managed to be both attractive and unsettling. “When animals eat a person, they don’t go for the legs first. They generally eat the nose, lips, and anus. Apparently, those are the tastiest bits.”
Nessa grimaced as she checked the rearview mirror to see the child’s reaction. Her own daughters would have been horrified at that age. Jordan and Breanna were wonderful girls, and tough as nails in their own right, but they avoided death like regular humans. Nessa had known early on that neither of them had inherited the gift. Sure enough, they’d found out a couple of years back that it had passed to her niece, Sage, instead. On the morning of her twelfth birthday party, the girl had discovered a woman’s body floating facedown in a pool in suburban Atlanta. The woman’s husband was arrested for murder before Sage had taken her first bite of birthday cake.
Lucy was peering up at her mother. She didn’t appear bothered at all. “Do you think the anus thing would make a good science fair experiment?”
“Where would we get a corpse?” her mom asked.
“Maybe Nessa knows,” Harriett quipped.
In the driver’s seat, Nessa cleared her throat, uncomfortable.
“Do you really know where to get a dead body?” the girl asked.
“Lucy,” Jo laughed nervously, “Harriett was kidding again.”
The woman in the passenger seat smiled slyly and left it at that.
Traffic slowed as they approached Lucy’s elementary school. The sidewalks were filled with parents and children who lived close enough to walk. One of the moms caught sight of Harriett first and stopped dead in her tracks. Several kids plowed into her. Soon an entire line of pedestrians had turned to face the road. When Harriett greeted the crowd with a royal wave, most of the adults seemed embarrassed. The kids went wild and waved back.