by Lilly Black
"Yours is the King of Staves," she said to Liana before even turning it over to reveal that it was, indeed, the King of Staves. "Positive masculine energy."
"You, however, need the King of Cups. Freedom of desire," she said as she gazed eerily at June, the light blush on her cheeks betraying Madam Levinia's accuracy as she turned over the card.
"Hmmm...that's strange," Levinia said when she saw that it was actually the Queen of Cups.
"Somethin' you're not telling us, Junie-bug?" Dani asked with a wink, making her friends giggle, but June scowled as Madam Levinia reached into the deck and pulled out another card. It was the King. Without a word, she moved on to Olivia.
"You seek the King of Pentacles," she said. "Ultimate fulfillment."
"Oooh..." Dani said, teasing her friend until she looked up to find that Madam Levinia's eyes were now fixed on her.
"And you, my dear," she said, turning her card face up, "you deserve the honesty and transparency of the King of Swords. You've suffered long enough."
As the heady scent of incense wafted through the air, even the skeptical Olivia was silenced by Levinia's words and insights, though somewhere in the back of her mind she was certain there was a trick to it. June and Liana looked nervous, but Dani was still excited as the old woman pulled a sealed bottle and what looked like four thimbles down from the book shelf. The bottle was glass with red jewels inlaid in the aged and fading gold paint on the outside, and the thimbles were tiny cups in different colors. She poured a drop from the bottle into each cup, doled them out to the women, and bade them drink.
Olivia's cup was white, Dani's red, June's black, and Liana's a pale grey. As the women looked at each other, uncertain about drinking some odd, clear liquid that a strange gypsy crone had placed before them, she laughed and turned the bottle up, waterfalling its contents into her mouth to show them there was nothing to fear.
"Well...bottoms up," Dani said first, holding her thimble aloft before drinking it. It tasted like water, and when she didn't even make a face, the others followed.
"Good. Good," Levinia said as she collected the cups and set them aside, then she instructed them to hold hands. "Now you must speak the name of the man you desire so the spell may be cast upon him." She looked first at Liana.
"Aiden LaCroix!" she said enthusiastically. He was her favorite Greyhawks hockey player. He was a puck bunny's dream - 6 feet tall, chocolate brown hair, dark brown eyes that almost looked black, and he'd never lost a tooth or a chance to score on the ice. He'd been her ideal since the first moment she saw him at a game in New York on vacation, and what made him even more enticing was the fact that he was well-known for avoiding the hockey groupies. He was so gorgeous, he could have been walking around with a supermodel on his arm, but he didn't seem like that kind of guy. Liana liked that. She also liked a challenge, and when Levinia's eyes started to move on to June, she drew them back with an important condition.
"I don't want a love spell, though," she said. "Just bring us together somehow so he'll have to get to know me. I'll do the rest."
"Yeah! Same for all of us!" Dani blurted out, and Levinia smiled, her teeth crooked and yellow as she nodded to accept their stipulation.
"And what about you?" she asked June. "What man would you like to fall into your lap?"
"Uhhh...I don't know..." she hesitated, but Liana smacked her leg and gave her an impatient look. "Okay. Jobe Stricklan."
"The TV preacher?" Dani demanded, and Olivia rolled her eyes because of course, she picked Jobe Stricklan! Her batshit crazy husband probably didn't let her watch much else, and if you had to fuck a televangelist, it may as well be the only one out there who was semi-attractive and less than a hundred-years-old.
But damn, he was skeevy!
"There's one more thing," June added, "we're both married, so however this works, it can't be cheating. I would never commit adultery." Levinia gave her an irritated look then moved on to Olivia.
"And what about you?" she asked.
"Ummm..." Olivia began, biting her lip and looking down at her hands. "Maybe Kai Rivers...or...."
"Or what? Hers is Aleksander Hellström," Dani barked. "Next!"
"Wait!" Olivia called out because she wasn't finished. Even though she didn't believe in magic, she felt guilty for even playing along at this point, and she had to do something to assuage that guilt so when she told Reid the story - because they told each other everything - she wouldn't have to see that faint, insecure look in his eyes that still reared its head even after fifteen years of proving that she wasn't really out of his league. "I'm okay with Alek Hellström, but it has to be a situation where it won't negatively affect my marriage."
"Tall order," Levinia said with a cackle.
"Oh! Amina Vašilić!" Olivia shouted out as it dawned on her how to make this whole thing okay with Reid. Amina Vašilić was a Bosnian-born actress whom Reid considered the most beautiful woman on the planet (next to his wife of course), so as long as Reid got her in exchange, Olivia was free to indulge in this silly fantasy. "It has to be a situation where Reid also gets to be with Amina Vašilić."
"Are you finished?" Levinia asked impatiently.
"Yes, ma'am," she said, giggling as June looked at her with wide-eyed surprise, and the gypsy turned her attention to Dani.
"Jax Bonham," she said resolutely. "And no monkey paw bullshit! I don't want to fall in love with him then I die of cancer or he gets hit by a train on our wedding day." Then she paused. She wasn't finished, but she needed to choose her next words carefully because she wanted to cover Olivia's husband without covering her own ex or June's husband, whom she doubted June truly loved anyway. "None of us dies, and the men we love can't die either, you feel me?"
"And our children," Olivia added. "None of our children can die."
"Enough!" Levinia snapped, holding her hands up in the air before calmly and softly adding, "You must leave room for the magic to work its will."
Satisfied with their caveats, the women fell silent, and Levinia reached for Liana's hand with her left and Dani's with her right. Dani took Olivia's, Olivia took June's, and June completed the chain. Then the old gypsy began chanting in an unfamiliar tongue, her eyes closed tight, her body swaying, and as she grew louder, the music seemed to fade until they could barely hear it at all. The reek of the incense filled their nostrils, its thick, grey smoke creeping over the table top like morning mist in a valley, enveloping and drawing their attention to the crystal ball in the center. Olivia's eyes were caught by images of fire and blood and death, but when she squinted to focus on the ethereal wisps, they became nothing but reflections of candles and smoke.
Liana watched the old woman herself, and though she continued to sway, her eyes closed toward the ceiling, she looked back at Liana at the same time, eyes open, her cataract replaced by a tiny, black pupil, her face young and beautiful, her hair no longer the silver wires of the crone but full and black as coal, cascading over her shoulders. She winked at Liana, then the image was gone.
Each of the women saw something she could not explain. To Dani, Levinia seemed to soften like a kind grandmother while June saw a vision of a Christlike figure that she took as a warning, but as their brains tried to process the last illusion, the next was already begging their attention, leaving them all utterly disoriented when the same violent wind that drove them into the shop in the first place began to kick up. The candles blew out, leaving only threads of sunlight from the storefront illuminating the small room through cracks in the billowing velvet curtains, and the old woman's hair flew in long, grey strands, striking their flesh like the tendrils of a whip as the currents grew stronger and stronger until its sound was all they could hear above Levinia's incantation. The needle of the victrola was forced across the record, the tarot cards blew off the stack one by one, and lastly the Kings flew off the table and vanished from sight before the wind abruptly died. The curtains fell into their static position, blocking out the light, and in the dark room, they could
hear the sound of cards and other small items hitting the floor.
"The words are spoke. The magic set free. The spell is cast. So mote it be!" Madam Levinia cried, her words devolving into cackling laughter, and then there was only darkness.
When Olivia woke up, it was already dusk. Disoriented, she looked around the hotel room, and the red, glowing numbers on the digital clock caught her eye. It was 7:45 PM. She didn't even remember lying down for a nap. In fact, she didn't remember anything after Madam Levinia's spell - not paying the old woman, not leaving her shop, not riding back to the hotel. She stood up and realized that she was still dressed in the clothes she had worn to brunch, and she walked out into the living room of the suite to find June and Liana already there, looking just as confused as she was. Then Dani appeared in the doorway to her room rubbing her temples.
"What the hell happened?" Dani asked, thinking she was the only one with a large chunk of her afternoon missing. She wasn't. None of them remembered a single thing from the same point in time.
"I think that old bat dosed us," Liana said.
"That's not possible," Olivia protested.
"Please," Dani scoffed. "You mean to tell me you didn't feel like you were trippin' balls in that place?"
"No, I did, but it's only been about five hours. We'd still be tripping."
"Maybe it was the mimosas," June offered. "There was alcohol in those, wasn't there?"
"A tiny bit of champagne. There's no way mimosas could've caused this," Olivia argued as her phone pinged. She grabbed it from the table. It was a text from Reid.
Did you lose your sat phone? he asked, and while the other women continued to ponder the loss of the past five hours, Olivia called her husband.
"It's somewhere in my luggage," she said of the satellite phone after greeting him. The whole family had sat phones because cell coverage wasn't always a given on their mountaintop. "Why?"
"I've been trying to call you for the past five hours, and when I couldn't reach you on either phone, I looked them up to see where you were."
"And?"
"And the cell phone was traveling while the sat phone stayed in one place, then when I checked again, it was the opposite. It kind of freaked me out." It was freaking Olivia out too as she looked through her missed calls to see that he had tried her ten times. She hadn't heard it ring once, but she didn't want to worry him.
"That's weird. I must have turned my ringer off on the cell. I'll check the limo for the sat. Why were you trying to get a hold of me? Is everything okay?"
"I had to come to Charleston this afternoon. Liza lost Mom again."
"Oh, babe, I'm sorry," she said. Reid's mother had Alzheimer's and had been living with his sister for about two years, and six months ago, she had begun sneaking out and wandering around town.
"It's okay. We found her, but I'm going to go ahead and spend the night down here so Liza can have a break. Are your friends okay with me leaving Rey and Savannah in charge of the kids?" he asked, and Olivia walked into the other room.
"Probably not, but what June doesn't know won't hurt her," she said with a laugh. "Did you make sure Savannah knew Sally and Bella are still banned?" Sally and Bella were Savannah's best friends and worst enemies, and Olivia was sick of the drama, sentencing Savannah to a weekend without them so she didn't have to deal with the phone calls while she was away. Of course, Savannah was convinced that meant Sally and Bella would spend their weekend talking shit about her, which her mother informed her was all the more reason to find new, more loyal friends.
"I made her promise," Reid said. "Besides, I don't necessarily consider this a good thing as a father, but she seems very content to hang out with Rey."
"Are you sure it was a good idea leaving them alone? He seemed like a player."
"Nah, he's a good kid. Plus I told him you'd feed him to Evil if he touched our daughter."
Olivia laughed. "Then take your time, and give your mom a hug for me, okay? We probably won't be back home until tomorrow afternoon."
"I'll make sure I'm back before you. I love you, baby."
"I love you, too," she said.
As soon as they hung up, Olivia called the chauffeur to see if her satellite phone was in the car, hoping he would know more about what happened after they left Madam Levinia's, and did he ever! Olivia had brought him the phone when they got back to the hotel and asked him to keep it handy, telling him she was going to need it later, and before that, they had shopped for more than two hours, filling up the trunk of the limo with bags they said they'd sort out later.
"Did you notice anything off about us?" she asked, and he hesitated for a second before speaking.
"You all seemed pretty drunk, ma'am," he admitted bashfully.
"Really? We were only drinking mimosas at lunch."
"Well, I don't know how many you had, but they put some kind of liquor in them at the Cafe Concourse. My mother got smashed there on just three at my sister's bridal shower," he explained with a laugh.
"Oh," Olivia said, relieved.
"Will you be needing the car again this evening?"
"We'll be leaving for dinner in about an hour, I guess, but I don't know where we're going to go after nine on a Sunday night," she said, thinking out loud.
"This is my hometown. When you're ready, just let me know what sounds good, and I'll find it for you."
"That would be fantastic. Thank you!"
She hung up and explained to her friends that they'd all been drinking hard liquor at lunch, and though Olivia couldn't figure out how she didn't taste it in the mimosas, it still seemed like the best explanation, especially considering the fact that they finished their afternoon shopping as planned. And, of course, whether it accounted for everyone's complete lack of memory or not, it was much easier to digest than the wild ideas that had been going through all of their minds since they woke.
Sunday evening was their last night together in Pittsburgh, so the quartet left for dinner dressed to kill. Dani, who had to be at the airport at 9:00 am, brought her suitcases with her so she wouldn't have to bother with a bellman when she rolled out of bed in the morning, and with little room in the trunk due to their shopping spree, the driver put her luggage in the front seat, promising to shuffle the items in the trunk to make it fit while they were at dinner.
"I just hope he doesn't get bored and read my sex diary while he's waiting for us," June said after he dropped them off at a pub that was still serving food.
"I just hope June's sex diary doesn't bore him so much that he reads mine," Olivia sniped, winking at June as if she was kidding.
"Well, since we're all about to meet the men of our dreams according to one magical gypsy, I have to insist that you all continue journaling your sexploits for me," Dani said.
"Shit, girl! If that spell works, I'll video it for you," Liana said enthusiastically while June gave their information to the hostess.
"Don't hold your breath on mine," Olivia said. "Alek Hellström may be in Pittsburgh, but I doubt Amina Vašilić is within a thousand miles of West Virginia."
"That reminds me," Dani said, grabbing her arm as the hostess motioned for them to follow her to a booth near the bar. "What was that Kai Rivers shit?"
"Kai Rivers is still hot," Olivia argued.
"Yeah, but you haven't mentioned him since we were nineteen, and the other day, I stood right on the streets of Pittsburgh and watched Alek Hellström melt your damn panties."
"Maybe I just want it all," Olivia quipped, kissing the air in Dani's direction as they sat down - Olivia and Dani on one side, Liana and June on the other, facing the entrance.
"Madam Levinia did offer her ultimate fulfillment," Liana said with a sly grin.
"Psh!" Dani balked. "I'd bet anything that - even if Reid was standing right there telling her to fuck Alek Hellström or Kai Rivers - Olivia wouldn't have the balls to go through with it."
"Lucky for me, I don't have to worry about that bet because there's no such thing as magic."
"Don't be so sure," June said, her eyes suddenly large as she stared back toward the door. The others followed her gaze to see Aleksander Hellström walking in.
"Well, well, well," Dani said, grinning ear to ear.
"Coincidence," Olivia insisted, but half an hour later it was harder to argue when Alek, who had been surrounded by swooning fans, noticed Olivia sitting at the table not far from his barstool. He got up immediately and walked toward her.
"Olivia," he said with an enthusiastic smile.
"Alek," she replied, swallowing her own excitement as she looked up at him - so tall and fair like a golden god.
"I believe you owe me a drink," he said as a crowd of women watched his every move.
"It seems I have an opportunity to repay my debt and return the favor since it looks like you're the one who needs rescuing this time," she said, indicating the lovesick fans with a quick nod as she inched subtly closer to Dani on the booth bench, hoping he would take a hint and sit.
"May I?" he asked, and she cleared more room, forcing Dani against the wall.
When Alek sat down close to her, Olivia watched the faces of his fans fall, and though she couldn't see Dani's face, she could feel her smirk as the sensation of Alek's bare arm against hers sent electricity coursing through her, settling between her thighs.
The waitress cleared the dishes, they ordered drinks and made small talk, and Olivia wrestled with her conscience, thinking about Reid with his poor, disoriented mother while she sat in a bar with a man who effortlessly conjured erotic visions inside her head. That's why she had almost picked Kai Rivers. Kai was still hot, but he did not do this to her. He was just a fantasy from her teenage years, and Reid would understand that when he heard the story of Madam Levinia's. Reid wasn't going to understand this. While most men would laugh it off if their wife had a crush on a famous actor, most men assumed their wives would never have a chance. Not Reid. He knew what Olivia was capable of, and her confidence was something she couldn't hide. Men were drawn to it, even men like Alek, and because of that, she was glad at least June stayed as a witness to prove that nothing inappropriate happened since Dani and Liana were now too busy mingling and dancing, determined to end their friender-bender with a literal bang.
