Nathalie sighed. “What was the mental nudge about?”
Kian raked his fingers through his hair. “Somehow, we all got to talking about starting construction on the new lots because Sari and her people might be forced to move into the village.”
Nathalie smiled. “That’s probably something that you subconsciously worry about. It doesn’t sound like Mark.”
“What about me?” Kalugal asked. “It was none of my business to suggest that the two parts of the clan form a federation or some other arrangement. Maybe as an outsider, I see things more clearly, but I shouldn’t have said anything, and I usually refrain from butting into other people’s business.” He glanced at Kian. “Maybe the ghost is right, though, and you should give it some thought? There is safety in numbers, and you and Sari could still lead your people independently while cooperating on some things.”
Kian had a feeling that Kalugal had jumped on the ghost idea to excuse his curious interest in unifying the clan. What was he hoping to achieve by that?
The guy was a master manipulator, so there must be something in it for him.
Nathalie shook her head. “Whoever you heard, it wasn’t Mark. He never talked to me about important stuff. He would give me advice about what to wear, and we would chitchat about trivial things like who was in love with whom, and why it worked. The only time he had a real message for me to deliver was when he asked me to tell Amanda that he’d forgiven her, and that she shouldn’t torment herself over loving Dalhu. He said that he tried to get into Amanda’s head and failed, and he even tried Syssi but couldn’t make her hear him. That’s another reason why I don’t think it was him.” She smiled. “Perhaps some other entity is trying to communicate with you.”
Syssi threw her arms in the air. “Who else could it be?” She turned to Kian. “How did the voice sound? Was he good-natured or angry?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was my subconscious talking, so I wasn’t paying attention to nuances. I still think that it was my own inner voice.” He cast Syssi a sidelong glance. “I know that your intuitions are often foretelling, but I frankly don’t think that we are dealing with a ghost. Perhaps Kalugal is right and the prodding we both felt came from the Fates.”
Kalugal shook his head. “Upon further reflection, I take it back. The voice was male, and it was pushy. Not angry, not good-natured, but urging.”
“Yeah.” Kian tapped his fingers on the table. “That’s my impression as well.”
“We need to talk to Mark. Everything else is guesswork.” Syssi turned to Nathalie. “Is there a way you can summon him?”
Nathalie cringed. “I used to be able to do that. But I’m out of practice.”
“Could you at least give it a try?” Syssi pleaded. “This is important.”
“I’ll do it tonight. I need to mentally prepare for it.”
“Thank you.”
Kian didn’t like that Syssi was pressuring Nathalie into doing something that she was obviously reluctant to do, especially since he was convinced that the voice he’d heard had been his own, and Kalugal’s was made up. But since that was such atypical behavior for Syssi, she must be convinced that it was needed.
Bottom line, Kian trusted his wife’s intuition much more than his own, and he was itching to call Sari and ask her if everything was okay. Perhaps he would do it later from the privacy of his home.
If Kalugal was indeed pretending to believe in the ghost idea, he was probably laughing on the inside and thinking that Kian was gullible and was allowing himself to get influenced by supposed ghosts and his wife’s premonitions.
While he didn’t dismiss those things, Kian was careful not to base his decisions on them. Prepping the lots had been a good business decision that in the long run would save the clan a lot of money, and the voice in his head had most likely been his own.
34
Edna
“I need to escort Jacki and Kalugal back to the house.” Rufsur offered Edna a hand up. “If you want, you can come with me, or you can go home, and I’ll join you later.”
“I’ll come with you.”
His handsome face lit up with a big smile. “I hoped you would say that.” He leaned to whisper in her ear, “I want to spend every moment I can with you.”
As Rufsur wrapped his arm around her waist, Edna wondered why he felt the need to accompany his boss home. Did he fear a sudden mental attack by the mysterious ghost?
She stifled a chuckle.
Edna hadn’t mentioned the voice in her own head, and after what Nathalie had said, she was glad about it. Kalugal and Kian’s experience could have been easily explained as their own inner musings, but she had a harder time dismissing hers as her alter ego.
Why would her own inner voice sound male? And what about that ‘you said it, girl’? Her subconscious was a cheerleader? That wasn’t the way Edna talked.
Could it have been Robbie’s ghost?
After his death, she’d prayed to hear from him in her dreams, and she had, but those dreams had been manufactured from her memories of him. In some of them, they’d built a life together, and in others, she’d found out over and over again about his death.
It had taken many years until the dreams had stopped tormenting her, but even before that, Edna had never heard him talking in her head while she was awake.
Besides, she would have recognized his accent and speech pattern. The voice in her head had sounded American.
Robbie, if this is you in my head, tell me something that only you would know.
Her answer was a resounding silence.
Yeah, that was what she’d expected. Evidently, her inner voice was a male, who was also a romantic and an optimist. Edna wondered what Vanessa would make of it. Perhaps she had a masculine side with feminine undertones that needed to express itself?
Edna suppressed a snort. Given the way she usually dressed, that would probably be Vanessa’s conclusion. Her business suits were made for women, but they were shapeless, and the colors she picked were dark and conservative. She also didn’t try to soften the look with makeup or a nice hairdo to make it more feminine.
Nevertheless, Edna had never felt masculine and had never wanted to be perceived as a man. Her goal had been to take gender out of the equation. Even in today’s world, female professionals had to work twice as hard as their male colleagues to prove themselves.
Still, even as a young woman, Edna had never been a girly girl. She’d had no interest in pretty dresses or other frivolities that girls her age had obsessed about. But she’d been all woman with Robbie, and she’d loved that he was hard while she was soft, that he was tall while she was smaller, and all the other ways in which his masculinity contrasted with her femininity.
Gender equality was a goal worth fighting for, and the clan had been striving for it since its very beginning, but blurring the distinctions between men and women was not the same as equality. It was forcing both genders to give up on their individualism and conform to the same ill-fitting mold.
It was a bit hypocritical of her to oppose something that she did herself, but there was a difference between choosing to appear genderless for professional reasons and giving up her gender identity altogether.