Wake Unto Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

in a circle around the edge of the wheel. The other images from her dream were quickly fading, along with the things her mother had said. She grabbed her art journal and sketched the tarot cards her mother had shown her. The clearest of them was the Knight of Cups.
    “I knew you were out there somewhere,” Caitlyn whispered to the knight, as with a few flicks of her pencil she crowned his helmet with wings.
    “Caitlyn!” her father hollered from the hallway. “Come on! It’s time to go.”
    She stuffed the art journal into her backpack, a smile tugging at her lips. Thanks to her mom, she finally felt ready to leave.
    It was time to meet her fate.

CHAPTER Three
     
    JANUARY 21, SOUTHWEST FRANCE
     
    Caitlyn stared at the back of the driver’s fat pink neck, white hairs sticking out of it like bristles on a pig. He smelled of wool and tobacco, the scents strong in the overheated Mercedes. He hadn’t said a word to her since meeting her at noon outside baggage claim at the Bordeaux airport, his communications limited to grunts and gestures of his head. He was like a henchman in a James Bond movie, and she had a disquieting sense that he was delivering her to her doom.
    She’d slept only in fits and starts on the four flights it had taken her to get from Oregon to the French city of Bordeaux, and her brain was fuzzy with lack of sleep, time confusion, and the high tension of leaving everything and everyone she’d ever known. Whatever comfort she’d gotten from her dream of her mother had long since worn off, erased by the torture of airplane seats, layovers, and long confused treks through airports to change planes. She was nauseated with a sour stomach, and had developed an annoying nervous twitch in one eyelid. She could feel it fluttering like a moth against her eyeball.
    She’d never been chauffeured anywhere before, and had never been in a Mercedes. When she first got in, she’d felt like a celebrity, glancing around the airport parking lot, hoping someone would notice: Caitlyn Monahan of Spring Creek, Oregon, was being chauffeured in a Mercedes! But no one had spared her a look, and the small thrill of leather seats and a uniformed driver had been quickly forgotten as she’d taken her first real look at France, leaving the airport.
    So far it was as gray, rainy, and dreary as Oregon had been thirtytwo hours earlier. Bordeaux was near the southwest coast, and three hundred miles from Paris. Her driver had taken a highway around the outskirts of Bordeaux and then headed east into the countryside, passing through denuded winter vineyards, gently rolling farmland, and low wooded hills. The Fortune School was well over an hour’s drive away, above the Dordogne River in an ancient region known as the Périgord Noir—called noir , black, because of the dark forests of pine and evergreen oak trees. Her travel book had pointed out the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux and Les Eyzies that were over fifteen thousand years old, and painted by some of the world’s first artists. The Gauls had been here, too, and the Romans, as had the English, fighting with the French during the Hundred Years’ War.
    Despite those promises of a rich and dramatic history, the area was as rural as Spring Creek. She was five thousand miles away from home, and cave paintings or no, she was still surrounded by farms and dreary winter weather.
    Brilliant.
    Maybe coming here was the wrong thing for an unhappy girl with a possible mental disorder. That was what her parents had secretly feared, Caitlyn knew: that her bad dreams and depressed moods meant that she was on the verge of a breakdown. They could never understand that it was staying locked in the stale embrace of home that truly threatened to push her into the pit of despair.
    Caitlyn remembered Joy’s sad face and her long hug good-bye, and she felt her throat tighten. For a brief instant she wanted to ask the driver to turn the car around and take her back to the airport: