Velvet Haven

Hottie.”
    Mairi pressed her eyes shut. She purposely hadn’t allowed herself to think of Bran or his amazingly skilled mouth. “Don’t sweat it. We were just talking.”
    She thought she heard Rowan snort. “Convo interruptus. It was damn bad timing on my part, wasn’t it? I can’t tell you how bad I feel.”
    Mairi laughed. “Seriously, don’t.”
    “Never know where that conversation could have led you.” Rowan yawned, then followed with a deep sigh. “I really appreciate you letting me crash at your place tonight, Mairi. I owe you.”
    “You don’t owe me anything. That’s what friends are for, right?”
    She glanced back to see Rowan nod. “Better than friends. We’re family.”
    Mairi swallowed hard and dropped her gaze to the road. She’d never been one for praying, but she’d begun the night Rowan had told her of her tumor. Every night since she’d prayed and bartered with God to save her best friend. They were family. Mairi’s mother was gone, and her dad, well, who the hell knew where he was?
    “I saw you in the vision tonight.”
    “Yeah?” she replied, mindlessly rubbing her wrist. It still tingled from when Bran had closed his fingers around it.
    “Uh-huh. It was strange because I never see you in my visions. It’s always people I don’t know, in a place that’s mystical and . . . different. I don’t think it’s Earth.”
    Mairi was afraid to ask exactly where Rowan was transported during her visions. She didn’t think she could bear it if it was heaven.
    “I think it’s the afterworld, you know? It’s so beautiful and green. Lush. Peaceful. But you were there, standing in a wooded grove. I saw you with Mr. Hottie. What’s his name?” she asked sleepily.
    “Bran?”
    “Yeah. You were together. I couldn’t figure it out, how you were there in the afterlife.”
    “Maybe it was because we were in the club and you were thinking about me?”
    Rowan shrugged, her head lolling to the side. “He was protecting you from something, but I don’t know what.”
    “It was just an aura, Rowan. It wasn’t real.”
    “So they tell me. Mairi?”
    “Hmm?”
    “Do you know that in the Druid religion, the name Bran means raven? The Celts believed that the raven ruled the Otherworld.”
    “Really?” Rowan was a walking encyclopedia of pagan knowledge. How she remembered it all baffled Mairi. For as long as Mairi had known Rowan she’d been into the occult.
    Mairi smiled to herself, remembering the day they had met in the library at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. They’d been eight and Rowan had been reading a book, her little legs swinging back and forth, too short to touch the ground. She’d looked up and her green eyes had been glowing.
    “I’ve been waiting for you,” she’d said as if she’d known all along that they were fated to meet.
    They’d been the best of friends ever since. Rowan had been a ward of the school, abandoned on the steps at age five by her mother. Mairi had used the school as a sanctuary from her abusive, alcoholic father.
    “In my vision, Bran was standing beside you, and he had . . . wings. Black wings, like a raven.”
    “What the hell?” Mairi slammed on the brakes as a black shape appeared in the middle of the road. The car came to a lurching halt. Through the swishing wiper blades and the steady stream of rain, Mairi squinted and saw some kind of animal lying in the middle of her lane.
    “What happened?”
    “Something’s on the road.”
    “Oh,” she heard Rowan mumble. Glancing in the mirror, she saw her friend draw the blanket up around her shoulders. Her head rested against the window and her breathing was slow and deep. The drugs were finally working.
    Glancing back out the windshield, Mairi saw that the shape was that of a large bird. She couldn’t drive over it, nor could she leave it there. She’d always had a soft spot for animals, and the way the black feathers blew in the wind reminded her of the feather that had skimmed down her arm outside Velvet Haven.
    She thought back to Rowan’s bizarre vision. For a fleeting second she believed her friend, before hard logic smashed the thought. Tumors could provoke all kinds of crazy ideations and visions that didn’t make any sense. Still, though, there was no denying that something strange was in the air. Unbuckling her seat belt, Mairi reached for a towel that she’d swiped from St. Mike’s and opened the door. She ran to the bird and bent down on the cold, wet road. She