Rook

likely to get are the palm-reading efforts of Dr. Crisp, and he deals only with a person’s past. So when I started receiving warnings from random people, I was dubious.
    The first prediction came during a lunch break—one of those rare occasions when I didn’t have a meeting and wasn’t obliged to eat at my desk. It’s a little eerie to look back at that. It was the last day that all I had to worry about was running a major government agency and coordinating covert operations that deal with the supernatural. It was the last day that I woke from an untroubled night’s sleep.
    I’d decided, since it was such a nice afternoon, to go out into the city and get myself some lunch at a little pub I knew. Every so often, it’s pleasant to walk around with the normal people. Of course, one can’t help scanning the passersby looking for any little tells that give them away as special. The training we receive is so rigorous that even Checquy desk jockeys are always on the lookout for an ultra-perfect manicure that suggests self-sharpening retractable claws or a cleverly tailored suit that conceals skin made of cheese graters. Checquy statistics indicate that 15 percent of all men in hats are concealing horns. But going out for lunch is still an enjoyable thing to do.
    So I was strolling down the street, savoring the sun on my face and with no more thoughts in my head than what kind of sandwich I wanted. The footpath was full of people, and while I was careful not to bump into the normals around me, I rather liked the sense of being lost in the crowd. I was just coming up to the Ivy and Crown when I heard something that caught my attention.
    “Ruck.”
    I looked around and spotted a homeless gentleman squatting against a wall. He had a hat in front of him with some coins in it, and he was staring at me intently.
    “Are you talking to me?” I asked. He brought up a hand and pointed a dirty fingernail at me.
    “You,” he said. “Your memories will be taken. They’ll be licked out of you, everything that makes you who you are. Gone forever. You’ll flee to a park, and there, in the rain, someone new will open the eyes that used to be yours.” He spoke in a voice that cracked, and I stared at him in horror.“They’ll open your eyes, your black eyes, and see corpses all around them. Corpses wearing gloves.”
    “I—I beg your pardon?” I asked.
    “You heard me,” he said, lowering his hand.
    “I’m not giving you any money,” I said faintly.
    “Fine,” he said. At this point, I realized that, unlike most painfully awkward interviews I take part in, I was able to walk away from this one. So I turned aside from the homeless crazy person, though I didn’t fully turn my back on him, and walked into the pub.
    Now, London is a big city with the requisite number of homeless crazy people. And I’ll freely concede that I am not an expert on their behavior. But a few things struck me as kind of… off about this guy. Like the fact that he didn’t ask for money (not that I would have given him any). And that he singled me out of the crowd. But since his body didn’t explode into ravens, and he didn’t call down a hailstorm, I put it down as an upsetting encounter with someone outside of the Checquy and resolved not to go out to lunch again for a while.
    Then I had a roast lamb sandwich, which quieted my mind significantly.
    But the incident still nagged at me.
    The next day, Gestalt and I had to go to the Estate in our capacity as governors of the school. We don’t give speeches on graduation days, that’s strictly the role of the Lord and Lady of the Checquy, but we are obliged to go up four times a year to make sure the students are being taught and that the entire campus hasn’t been reduced to a big smoking crater. It’s tedious and a waste of a day, and being forced to spend several hours in a car with one of Gestalt’s bodies has always been kind of a drag. Generally it’ll put the body to sleep and then go on conducting business elsewhere with the other three.
    This time, I got the female body, Eliza, as company. She’s everything I’m not: tall, blond, exquisite, with large breasts. I realized abruptly that I hadn’t actually seen Eliza for months and was secretly pleased to see that she’d put on a bit of weight. I was even more pleased when she stretched her long legs up on the seat with a sigh, closed her eyes, and left me to read through my reports.
    I was reviewing enrollment records for