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By Root 601 0

sometimes good, sometimes bad. She talked about her family, which was large and mostly elsewhere. She did not ask him what he did for a living or about his family, and he did not volunteer. He told her he had been a graduate student for many years, and perhaps she thought he still was one. She joked with him as if she had known nun all his life, and he liked that. She made him feel comfortable. He thought she was pretty and funny and smart, and he wanted to know her better. He was attracted to her as he had not been attracted to a woman hi a very long time. It was a dangerous way for him to feel.

At one point she said to him, “I suppose you think I’m pretty forward, inviting myself to spend the evening with you.”

He shook his head at once. “I don’t think that at all.”

“Do you think I might be easy?” She paused. “You know.”

He stared at her, astonished by the question, unable to reply.

“Good Heavens, you’re blushing, John!” She laughed and poked him gently in the ribs. “Relax, I’m teasing. I’m not like that.” She grinned. “But I’m curious, and I’m not shy. I don’t know you, but I think I’d like to. So I’m taking a chance. I believe in taking chances. I think that if you don’t take chances, you miss out.”

He thought of his own life, and he nodded slowly. “I guess I agree with that.”

The sun had dropped below the horizon, and darkness had fallen over the park. The band had begun playing, easing into a slow, sweet waltz that brought the older couples out onto the dance floor beneath the colored lamps that had been strung about the pavilion. Out hi the grass, small children danced with each other, mimicking the adults, taking large, deliberate steps. John Ross and Josie Jackson watched them in silence, smiling, letting their thoughts drift on the music’s soft swell.

After a time, he asked her if she would like to take a walk. They climbed to their feet and strolled off into the darkened trees. Josie took his free arm, and moved close to him, matching his halting pace. They walked from the pavilion toward the toboggan slide, then down through the trees toward the river. The music trailed after them, soft and inviting. The night was brilliant with stars, but thick with summer heat, the air compressed and heavy beneath the pinpricked sky. It was dark and silent within the old hardwoods, and the river was a gleaming, silver-tipped ribbon below them.

They stopped on a rise within a stand of elm to stare down at it, still listening to the strains of the distant music, to the jumbled sounds of conversation and laughter, to the buzz of the locusts far back in the woods. On the river, a scattering of boats bobbed at anchor, and from farther out in the dark, over on the far bank of the Rock River, car lights crawled down private drives like the eyes of nocturnal hunters.

“I like being with you, John,” Josie told him quietly. She • squeezed his arm for emphasis.

He closed his eyes against the ache her words generated within him. “I like being with you, too.”

There was a long silence, and then she leaned over and kissed him softly on the cheek. When he turned to look at her, she kissed him on the mouth. He put caution aside and kissed her back.

She broke the embrace, and he saw the bright wonder in her eyes. “Maybe, just this once,” she whispered, “I’m going to be a little more forward than I thought.”

It took a moment for the import of the words to register, and then another for the familiar chill to run through him as the memories began to scream in the silence of his mind.

When he sleeps the night after O’olish Amaneh has given him the black walnut staff with its strange rune markings and terrible secret, he dreams for the first time of the future the Lady had prophesied. It is not a dream of the sort that he has experienced before. The dream is not fragmented and surreal as dreams usually are. It is not composed of people and places from his life, not formed of events turned upside down by the workings of his subconscious. The dream is filled with the sounds, tastes, smells, sights, and feelings of life, and he knows in