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  She had just straightened when the ground under her seemed to vibrate, almost making her lose balance. She had to struggle not to fall. Once she was standing still again, and she could look at the small pyramid again, she saw it was growing.

  Actually, she realized, it would have been more correct to say it was rising, as if something was pushing it up from below, and the rock around was making way to allow its passage.

  Instinctively she took some steps backwards, afraid of what was going to happen.

  The pyramid kept getting larger, until its base was some meters wide. Then it kept rising but stopped growing, and it became clear that it was not a pyramid at all, but an obelisk.

  She backed some more, slowly and carefully, always keeping her eyes on the thing that kept coming up, becoming taller and taller. It seems to her that it was touching the sky when it finally stopped, towering over her in all of its magnificence.

  It was a black, smooth obelisk, with regular and unmarked walls. Only at the base, right in front of her, there was something that could have been a door, or even just the representation of a door, engraved into the material the thing was made of, whatever it was. She was tempted to approach it and try to enter, fighting with the desire to see what was in there and the fear of knowing it.

  Her inner struggle didn't last long. Something else took the decision for her.

  Something dense and black started flowing in the square she had acknowledged as a passage, as if the obelisk had started bleeding. Then she heard a chilling noise, like huge nails scratching a gigantic blackboard, and a crack started forming onto the smooth black wall, starting from the alleged door and darting upwards like a branched lightning bolt going from the ground up instead of coming down from the sky.

  Moving by instinct more than anything else, Amanda turned and started running, so she couldn't see the crack reaching the top of the obelisk, which exploded silently in a myriad of shards, some as large as a grown man, others small as specks of dust, all bursting upwards like the squirt of a fountain. But she saw them fall all around her; none, miraculously, hitting her.

  A huge slab, large and thin, penetrated the ground right in front of her, blocking her way. She stood, seeing her reflection in the polished surface. She was about to walk around it and restart her desperate run when the reflection of something else stopped her.

  She turned, unsure, almost inadvertently leaning her shoulders on the shard which had stopped her, that didn't even shiver under her weight.

  The scene she had seen in the impromptu black mirror she was now leaning against was now happening in front of her eyes, and could no longer be ascribed to a weird trick of the light.

  Wherever the shards of the obelisk touched the ground, they seemed to penetrate the rock as if it were liquid, and immediately, from that same spot, a gray slab of stone rose, something it was difficult not to see for what it was... from a rain of shards, a field of tombstones was being born.

  Trembling, Amanda left her temporary support and advanced toward one of the stones, forgetting the dangerous fragments still raining around her – which anyway seemed to avoid her on purpose, if something like that was even possible. She knelt to see whether the stone bore a name and she found it. It was hers.

  Under it, two dates were clearly sculpted.

  The first was her birth date. The second was the 26th of Trianar of 2009. According to that tombstone, the date of her death was two days from now.

  A chilled shiver ran down her spine as she moved to examine another stone. She was almost sure she would find her name on that one too, but she was wrong. The name was different, she wasn't even sure she had ever heard it, and so was the birth date. The date of death wasn't, it was exactly the same.

  She examined one stone after another, reading names and dates. Many of the names were new to her, others weren't: she saw that of Kate, the seer she was friend with, that of Shim, those of many of her colleagues and acquaintances, people she knew were alive.

  And each of them had the same date of death.

  Exhausted, she fell sitting against one of the tombstones, panting.

  And panting she jumped to a sitting position in her bed.

  Sweat was running in flows down her forehead and cheeks, her hair was glued to her head and a cold feeling clenched her back as if she had slept on ice.

  The blankets where lying in a crumpled heap, half at the foot of the bed, half on the floor, looking like some thick fluid slowly leaking from the former to the latter.

  She had goose bumps and all of the hairs on her body were standing up and shivering, as if electrically charged.

  She was able to slow down her breathing to a more regular pace, and very slowly she climbed down the bed, almost afraid her legs wouldn't be able to sustain her. She took some unsure steps to reach the kitchen, where she filled a glass of water and drank it in little sips, fighting against the urge to gulp it all at once because she thought she would choke if she tried.

  She was slowly starting to get together and calm down, still the scenes of the dream were clear in her mind, too vivid for it to have been a simple dream. She could almost still feel the rough stone of the tombstones under her fingertips, her ears still ringed with the noise the obelisk had made before starting to self-destruct, and she was still shivering.

  And there was something else, an indefinable sensation, like the awareness of being observed.

  She turned, almost believing there really was someone behind her, in her own house. The room was empty, but that wasn't enough to set her free of the feeling of that stranger gaze she felt upon her. She almost thought she perceived it physically, like a magnetic force slightly pushing against her, and attracting her at the same time.

  Letting instinct lead her steps, she slowly moved to the window and pulled the curtains apart, looking into the darkness outside. For a split second, the anguish she had experienced at the beginning of the dream was upon her again, but it soon dissipated. The darkness was just darkness, the normal dark of the night, unable to do any harm.

  At first she didn't see anything out of place, then she lowered her gaze to the road and found herself looking into two bright green dots which seemed to be pointing at her somehow. It took some time before she could focus what was around them and realize they were the eyes of a black cat.

  In that precise moment, the cat turned and disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER 6

  Even though her icy expression let nothing slip, Grace was furious.

  That inept detective had decided to retain her – obviously only for the purpose of annoying her, since it was far too clear that he had no way to accuse her of anything – and she had been forced to spend the rest of the day and the whole night in jail.

  Her lawyer – her former lawyer by now – had been nowhere to be found until the following morning, when he had finally showed up, muttering excuses she hadn't even listened to, and eventually had done what she paid him for and set her free.

  With a demon for each hair, Grace had, in this order, fired the lawyer, heavily insulted detective Delmenar and reached her clinic, where she had barricaded in her office doing researches for the rest of the day, even forgetting to have lunch.

  The goal of her search was, mostly, the infamous new clinic at which, according to that idiot of an elf, Lyana had been intentioned to get a new job. The detective had refused to show her the contract draft he said he had found in the personal things of the fairy, thus forcing her to find out by herself even the name and address of this unexpected competitor.

  But obviously that hadn't been the hardest part. What she needed to know was quite different. Most of all she wanted to understand how it was possible that something popped out of nowhere, which she didn't even think could exist till yesterday, had been able to steal all of her clients in such a short time-span.

  Her attempt had lead to mixed results. On one hand, she had gathered a lot of information. On the other, they weren't at all what she needed. At least,
though, they would be useful to get to those.

  Night had come already when she got into action.

  As a rare exception, she was completely dressed in black. It was something she avoided, usually, because in many cultures that was a color associated to mourn and death, and since she was a publicly know necromancer she thought it might make her look like a stereotype. She still used dark colors when it was the case, but preferred blue, green or dark red, and she used white as much as possible. For this reason, black clothes in her wardrobe where scarce, and almost none of them could have been used for what she had in mind. Thus she had chosen an old jogging suit, which didn't really fit her and was as far as possible from her usual clothes. Which was fine, since she had no intention of being noticeable, not to mention being easily recognized.

  The streets in the historical center where much narrower than in the rest of the city, and they had a strange feeling, a mixture of old and new. Almost all of the buildings of Tejarak, in time, had been demolished, rebuilt, demolished again and again recreated until they had become what they were today. But in that area there were still remnants of the past – such as the royal palace and some less famous and glorious, but equally well preserved, places – near more modern buildings, risen on the ruins of others that had been destroyed by time and carelessness. Of the former, just a few still looked like they once had; others had been restored, at times with the intention of recreating their original look – with the effect of transforming them into weird monuments to themselves – more often to adapt them to new functions and uses, using the parts that could still be exploited and changing or replacing those who didn't fit the new role the building had to take.

  The clinic ended up being an interesting hybrid of the two options. The front of an hold building had been artfully restored, maybe making it very similar to how it had been originally, and at the same time changed slightly, hiding new features in the old appearance so that they were functional but not conspicuous. Only getting closer it was possible to see how, for instance, the windows where quite up to date, very far from the ones that must have been at the sides of the door in the past. Even the door itself just looked old, perfectly integrated in the wall, but for sure it had to be a hard reinforced door, well protected against thieves. On the contrary, the stone arch over it was almost for sure part of the original building. On it Grace could see a writing, mostly cancelled by time, in some language she wasn't able to read or even identify.

  If she could have, she would have found out that it was a quite unusual sentence: "We honor thee great divine creature... we honor thee great winged king of the sky... we honor thee dragon who protects Anthuar", but, even if she had known, that would have been of no interest for her. Her examination of the place didn't really had the purpose of appreciating its architecture. What she wanted to know was how difficult it would have been to get inside.

  She was a world famous surgeon, not a petty burglar. She wouldn't have known how to pick a lock for the life of her, neither she could imagine why she should have had to. The other reason why she was famous gave her means that no thief, as clever as they could be, possessed, and that luckily – or better thanks to a careful policy adopted by those who, like her, knew the arts of necromancy – weren't known to the public at large. People already mistrusted necromancers due to their ability to control dead and talk to them. If they had known every smallest detail of their powers, they would have had many more reasons not to trust them. Which was a good reason enough to keep the secret.

  It wasn't that necromancy could allow to enter any place undisturbed, that wasn't its purpose after all. Still it allowed to tap on some peculiar abilities that, under the proper conditions, made it quite easy to go past a locked door. The trick was understanding whether those who had made – and most of all those who had locked – that door had taken any precaution against such an occurrence.

  Having made sure no one was around, Grace started to move her hands around the sides of the door, not touching it, following an odd and convoluted path to the lock. She didn't find anything that could alarm her, so she moved her hands closer, brushing the cold metal masked as wood, and she felt incredibly stupid when it moved under her slightest touch, showing that the door not only wasn't magically locked, it wasn't locked at all.

  She didn't waste time wondering why it had to be open, since it was obvious than no one was inside, judging by the darkness and the silence, and pushed it as much as needed to enter, then repositioned the door like she had found it.

  The inside was deep in darkness. Only the light coming through the windows slightly lit the room, allowing her to see two flights of stairs at the end of it – one going upstairs and the other to the basement – and a corridor. There was nothing that looked like the usual furniture of a medical study; not a reception desk, not a single chair on which patients could wait. The only furniture, actually, was some kind of bookshelf along the wall to the right of the door. It didn't look like it could hide any kind of secret document, but she had to start somewhere, so she took a light crystal from a pocket – trying to keep it shielded so that it only gave the minimum light needed to see, but didn't draw attention in case someone happened to walk in the road outside – and started examining the contents of the shelves. Very scarce contents indeed. Apparently, there were only a few trinkets, one or two magazines of some months ago and a few books of no importance. She even tried to open and check some of the latter, in case there might be some document hidden between the pages, but to no avail.

  She only had to decide whether to check the other room first, or the upper floor, or the basement.

  Logic told her that an archive, or even better something you did not want just anyone who came in to see, should have been in the basement. Granted, it was true that that same logic required a clinic to have an anteroom, someone who cared for the reception of the patients and some furniture... according to such thoughts, the lower floor should have been the last place to go, since it was quite obvious that nothing was normal and logic in there.

  So she decided to go upstairs before trying to go down. She went through the corridor, noticing it was almost certainly part of the original building. Along its walls there were several niches, most of them empty, but some still containing statues which had to be quite ancient, maybe even possess some historical value, if not a monetary one. At the end, the corridor parted in two ways, going left and right, and at the same time going straight under a stone archway to which a modern-style door – looking entirely out of place – had been added. She chose to proceed that way and reached another empty room, only containing a couple of chairs and a small desk. The squalor of that place didn't cease to surprise her.

  She went back and chose not to explore the other two branches of the corridor, walking back all the way to the entrance.

  She was examining the stairs and trying to decide her next move when she heard a noise from behind and realized that the door was being opened.

  Immediately she pocketed the crystal to shield its light and flattened against the nearest wall. She crawled along it until she reached a corner and slipped in the empty space between the wall and the bookshelf. It wasn't the best hiding place she could have thought of, but since it was the only one, it was for sure the best choice.

  CHAPTER 7

  Amanda had been unable to fall asleep again after the dream. From a rational point of view she thought that it was absurd to be so scared, yet she had a lingering feeling which was beyond the images she had seen, and which almost prevented her from closing her eyes without sending shivers down her spine.

  The actual presence of the cat outside her window for sure hadn't helped.

  She couldn't help noticing the strict similarity between the eyes of the feline watching her from the street and the two green lights that had been in her dream. So she had dreamed the cat, albeit she hadn't seen it. It had been it to lead her away from that awful darkness clenching her. She had to understand if that had been good or bad, th
ough.

  There were but a few doubts left on the fact that the dream hadn't been normal at all. Maybe it had been an attempt from someone – who could this someone be was yet to be seen – to send her a message of some kind. If that was the case, she couldn't really say it had been clear. She could see no actual, or even metaphorical meaning in the scenes she had seen and the sensations she had felt, if not very marginally. The only thing which meaning was quite obvious where the tombstones. Did they mean that in two days her and a lot of other people would be dead? Or was it a more general warning? Anyway, it foretold something bad, there were no doubts about that. The hardest part was understanding whether she should believe what she had seen, whether to consider it a warning or a threat, or even just an attempt to scare her – quite successful by the way. But why? Why scare her? Or anyway why warn her that something was about to happen but give her no hint about how to try and stop it from happening, or even try to help her understand whether it could be stopped at all?

  Those thoughts had been with her for the whole night and the following day, even while she was trying to go through her lesson at the university, which as a consequence had been quite garbled and frequently interrupted.

  In the end she had excused herself with her students and promised them she would explain again the same subject in the next lesson, all the time hoping that there would be a next lesson.

  In the short route home, she had grown even more nervous. The evening shadows had started to darken the city streets, and the light globes left dark corners from which she half expected to see something hostile and monstrous to leap at her at any moment.

  Eventually, looking like a terminal paranoid, she reached the building where she lived, and she was about to let go a sigh she had held all the time, but it stuck in her throat. The cat was there, waiting for her, sitting in front of the door.