Untamed

and made a mental note to ask her about it sometime.
    Aphrodite had her hand already out when I returned to her room. "Okay, let me check it out." I gave her the card and looked down with her as she held it open to the short note Grandma had written me. Then she held the paper that had the poem right up next to it and we looked from one to the other, comparing the handwriting.
    "That is so damn weird!" Aphrodite said, shaking her head at the utter similarity of the handwriting. "I swear I wrote this poem not five minutes ago, but that's definitely your grandma's writing and not mine." She looked up at me. Her face looked ultra-white in comparison to the awful blood color of her eyes. "You'd better call her."
    "Yeah, I will. First I want to know everything you remember about that vision."
    "Okay with you if I shut my eyes and put the washcloth back on my face while I talk?"
    "Yeah, I'll even put some fresh water on it. Speaking of, drink some more out of that bottle. You look, well, bad ."
    "No wonder. I feel bad ." She gulped down the rest of the Fiji Water while I rinsed out the washcloth again. After I folded it up and gave it back to her, she laid it across her eyes and settled back against her pillows again, absently stroking the purring Maleficent. "I wish I knew what this was all about," she said.
    "I think I do."
    "No shit? You have the poem figured out?"
    "No, I didn't mean that. I meant I think this is all about that bad feeling Stevie Rae and I have been having about Neferet. She's up to something—something more than her usual brand of pain in the butt. I think she graduated to whatever it is that's going on now when Loren was killed."
    "I wouldn't be surprised if you're right, but I have to tell you Neferet had no part of my vision."
    "So explain it to me."
    "Well, it was short and unusually clear for what my visions have been like lately. It was a pretty summer day. I couldn't tell who it was, but there was a woman sitting in the middle of a field or, no, it was more like a pasture or something. I could see a little cliff not far away, and I could hear water from a stream or small river close by. Anyway, the woman was sitting on a big white eyelet quilt. I remember thinking that it wasn't very smart of that woman to have a white quilt out there on the ground like that. It was going to get all grass stained."
    "It didn't." I spoke through lips that felt numb and cold again. "It was cotton, and it washed up easily."
    "So you know what I'm describing?"
    "It's Grandma's quilt."
    "Then it must have been your grandma who was holding the poem. I didn't see her face. I actually didn't see much of her at all. She was sitting cross-legged, and it was like I was standing behind her, peeking over her shoulder. Only, once I saw the poem, everything else went out of the vision and I was totally focused on it."
    "Why did you copy it down?"
    Her shoulders shrugged. "Don't really know. I just had to, that's all. So I wrote it down while I was still in the vision. Then I came out of it, looked up at Darius, told him to get you, and then I think I fainted."
    "That's it?"
    "What more do you want? I copied the whole damn poem."
    "But your visions are usually warnings about majorly bad stuff getting ready to happen. So where's the warning?"
    "There wasn't one. Actually, I didn't have any bad feelings at all. There was just the poem. The field place was really nice—I mean for being all out in nature. Like I said, it was a pretty summer day. Everything seemed fine and dandy until I came out of the vision and my head and my eyes hurt like hell."
    "Well, I have a bad enough feeling about this for both of us," I said, pulling my phone from my purse. I glanced at the time. It was almost 3 A.M . Crap! Grandma would be sound asleep. Also I realized I was going to miss all my classes today except for that very public scene with Erik in Drama class. Great. I sighed heavily. I knew Grandma would understand—I could only hope my professors would, too.
    She answered on the first ring.
    "Oh, Zoeybird! I'm so glad you called."
    "Grandma, I'm sorry to call you so late. I know you're sleeping, and I hate waking you up," I said.
    "No, u-we-tsi-a-ge-ya, I was not asleep. I woke hours ago from a dream of you, and I have been awake and praying ever since."
    Her familiar use of the Cherokee word for "daughter" made me feel loved and safe, and I suddenly wished so bad that her lavender farm wasn't an hour and a half outside Tulsa. I wished that