“This isn’t good,” he said as he turned on his heel again, pacing toward me now.
“It’s a stupid mark, Ramsey,” I said dumbly, shaking my head. “What the hell could it possibly matter anyway? Abram thinks it’s the source of his powers. I mean, he’s wrong, but that doesn’t mean it actually has anything to do with what happened to him.”
“Except it does,” Ramsey explained as he ran his fingers through his hair. “Haven’t you learned by now that everything means something, Charisse?” He swallowed hard and settled his gaze on me. “I’ve seen that mark once before, just once. On the day I saw it, I almost died. I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So, you think this is a curse?”
“I think it’s a promise.” He turned to pace away from me. “What you’re looking at, the mark that has been stamped on Abram’s chest...it’s a stamp of ownership.”
“Ownership?” I asked, bile rising in my throat. “Are you saying that someone bought and sold Abram like he was cattle and then branded him like an animal?”
Ramsey sighed loudly, throwing his hands out to the side as he pivoted again. “That, or he gave himself the mark willingly.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Who knows, Charisse.” Ramsey shrugged. “Maybe he thought it would suppress whatever magical nature that sent him running away in the first place. Maybe he made a deal with some supernatural being. Either way, we’re in deep shit. The mark on his chest comes from an organization called the Tellers. They’re a group of powerful mystics, oracles, and the like. You’ve heard of the Illuminati?” Ramsey stopped rambling, and I realized that he wanted me to answer him.
I balked. “They’re the Illuminati?”
I’d grown up hearing stories about the all-powerful organization that had built and destroyed political parties, and even countries, for generations. Only the most powerful people knew of their true existence. Even fewer knew of the power that they could wield or the real extent of their influence.
“No,” Ramsey said, stopping in front of me.
When it looked like he was done stalking around the room, he sat on the couch beside me and rested his elbows on his knees.
“Oh,” I said with a sigh of relief.
Ramsey quickly disabused me of that relief, however. “They’re the organization that destroyed the Illuminati and built themselves on the ashes that were left smouldering. You have to understand, Charisse, when people have access not only to magic but also to the future itself, they’re often tempted to use those abilities to shape the world the way they see fit. Not only are they tempted, but they do it.”
Great. Here we go again. More layers. More bad guys. More problems. I wanted to scream and throw my hands in the air and rage about how unfair everything was. Every time I thought I had a handle on the monsters we were up against, I was thrown for a loop by another big bad guy showing up.
“The Tellers see themselves as benevolent forces,” Ramsey continued through my unspoken objections. “There are even those who speak of them as though they’re heroes, meant to be worshipped. They shape the world the way they want. They tell the stories the way they see fit. Even The Brothers leave them alone for the most part. They get what they want. Apparently, what they want is Abram.”
“Well, they can’t have him,” I snapped before I could stop myself. I stared down at my hands as I dug my short, painted nails into my palms and tried to block out the pain. “Especially now, especially since the real Abram is trapped in there somewhere just waiting for me to get him out. These Tellers will just have to learn to live with disappointment, like I have for the past year.”
Even as I said the words, though, I knew I was about to find out it was impossible.
“Don’t you get it?” Ramsey asked, scooting forward on the couch to turn toward me. He had a way of talking with his hands that my old friend Lulu would love. “That’s not the way this works. The Tellers know the future, which means they very likely knew that Abram was going to end up here. For all we know, they orchestrated everything to get him to be in that room waiting for you. Hell, they’re probably aware of the conversation we’re having right now and are counting the ways that it could play out.”
“They can fuck themselves, then.” I snorted. “If they’re listening to this conversation, or if they already have from some future vision, I want them to know they can fuck themselves and I’ll die before I let someone I love be owned.” My heartrate picked up and I felt like I was starting to hyperventilate.
“Charisse—”
His voice broke through the waves that had started crashing in my head, and brought me back to earth. I took a few deep breaths before I was able to answer him.
“I won’t have that, Ramsey,” I said finally. “Not for one minute. I’m not fighting as hard as I am just to let some self-righteous douchebags who think they know better than everyone else treat people like they don’t matter. I haven’t given everything I love up for this. I would never—”
A picture fell from inside the living room and thudded hard to the floor. Glass shattered across the apartment’s beige carpet.
“Damnit,” I muttered. I hated not being able to control my emotions.
Sometimes, the magic inside me came rushing out at times like this, and it sucked that it happened and actually destroyed something.
I stood and crossed the room to the picture’s remains. Tucked behind the broken frame was an aged paper, probably at least a decade old, and if not, certainly as yellowed as I’d expect an old piece of paper to be.
With a sigh, I knelt down and took a closer look. I lifted the page and unfolded it to reveal the neatly scrawled words, unable to control the shiver that ran down my spine as I read the words to myself.
We’re not self-righteous, and if you want to stand a chance at getting out of this alive, might I suggest going for coffee? You might find you’ll get more than the caffeine out of it.
Your Friend, Darla
“Is-is this for me?” I asked, holding the letter out toward Ramsey with a raised eyebrow and a shaking hand.
He stood to join me, adjusted his glasses on his nose, and took his time while he read the proffered letter.
“I think it must be,” he said nervously. “You did just call them self-righteous.”
“Damn.” I flopped on the couch and dropped my head back to stare at the ceiling. “Just when I thought things couldn’t get any creepier.”
I wasn’t sure what to do after that, honestly. I hadn’t planned on getting a letter pre-written for me by some strange mystic and left in my apartment so that I could unveil it with my magical outburst.
Though, given just how screwed up my life had been, maybe I should have expected it. As it stood, with nothing better to go on, I was left without many options. I decided to do what the letter suggested and go out for coffee. Though, because I wasn’t exactly sure of what was happening, I took Huntsman with me.
“You know,” he said as we walked down the busy city sidewalk, “you don’t have to bring me with you everywhere you go. I’m not going to run off.”
I stared at him sideways and scrunched my nose at his asinine statement. “That thought hadn’t occurred to me, but now that you mention it…”
“Your home is too small for guests,” he countered, pushing open the door to the first coffee shop we crossed.
I crossed my arms against the air-conditioned chill as I scanned for an open table, not able to find one through the crowd. “I have a guest room. And a couch. I’d bet it beats living in a bottle.”
Huntsman sighed heavily as he plodded over to a table by the window that I hadn’t noticed during my scan of the shop. He waited for me to take a seat, then sat down across from me at the table. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, and the way he sat in the small metal chair...it was more like he’d sunk into it than actually sat down.
Gone was the strong, confident Huntsman that I’d known from the past. Even the
nutty aroma of strong, freshly brewed coffee didn’t seem enough to energize him, and I suspected drinking a cup wouldn’t do much better. There was nothing I could do to bring him out of this funk, and I didn’t even know where to start.
Magic was stronger than caffeine, and the magic placed on Huntsman was slowing him down in a way that no amount of coffee could help.
I followed his gaze to a couple sitting a few tables away from us. They were smiling, sipping at drinks, nibbling on scones like there was nothing that could destroy their day. They didn’t know about the darkness of this world or the monsters lurking just around the corner. All they knew was the natural light shining through an adorable coffee shop window. They saw the light in the young man’s eyes, the color of the young woman’s bubblegum pink pants, and the sun glinting off the buckle of the tan purse she had slung over the corner of her chair back. They were oblivious to everything around them.
“I wish this day would never end,” the woman said, beaming across the table at her man.
My heart lurched at that. In another lifetime, that was the life Abram and I could have had.
I was wondering if Huntsman was having the same thought, about himself and perhaps a woman he used to have in his life, when he rocked to his feet and approached their table.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked the couple. “Anything you wish.”
I grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward our table, but he didn’t budge. Did he think this was the person we were meeting?
The young woman smiled up at him, but her body coiled back in her chair. “Um, we’re good. Thanks.”
The guy sitting across from her stood. “Do you work here?”
I hooked my arm around Huntsman’s and tried again to guide him back to the table.
“No,” Huntsman said, not moving. “I was simply wondering if you wished for anything.”
“Huntsman,” I whispered sharply through my teeth. “Sit. Down.”
“Do you know him?” the girl asked, leveling her gaze at me. In that moment, I didn’t feel so bad for her discomfort anymore. Obviously I knew him. What kind of question was that?
“Huntsman,” I hissed again, pulling more firmy.
He paused another beat before slowly backing away. He plopped back into his chair at our table and let out a puff of air.
“What was that about?” I growled. “You’re acting strange.”
Huntsman frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess… I guess I thought maybe...they wanted something? I feel as though I need to do something for someone. I need to make their wishes come true.”
I grimaced. Huntsman was changing before my eyes. The man who had come to mean so much to me was disappearing, only to be replaced by a weaker version of himself. A genie. A prisoner. A servant meant to grant someone’s wish.
I was going to lose him, and worse than that, he was going to lose himself. We both knew it, and I wasn’t sure if there was anything either of us could do. Not that he actually wanted to do anything about it.
“Are we sure this is the right place?” he asked finally, leaning forward on the table and leveling me with his glare.
“Not even a little bit,” I said honestly. I lifted the menu as if I planned to pick something, but I couldn’t focus on the words on the page. “The letter said to get coffee. So, here I am, getting coffee. I’d have to imagine that an oracle or a mystic or whatever the person who wrote the letter identifies as would know where I was going to end up.” I shrugged. “My guess is that it would be the same way she’d know exactly where to put the letter.”
“Look at you,” a voice chimed from over us with laughter trickling through the air.
I jerked my head up, and the menu fell from my grasp back to the table. Standing beside us was a short woman with a pink pixie cut and a bright smile, staring down at me. In her hand was a pot of coffee, and on her shirt, a name tag that read Stacey.
“Look at how smart you are,” she cooed. “You figured the whole thing out. We knew you would.”
I glared at her, instantly aware that the woman I was looking at was either the person who wrote the letter or had something to do with the Tellers, the group that Ramsey had told me were responsible for the marking on Abram’s body. My body tensed, and I prepared myself that something was about to happen. What, exactly, I didn’t have a clue.
Glancing at her nametag, I smirked. “You’re Darla, I assume?”
“No,” the woman said, pointing at her name tag uselessly. “The name’s Stacey, obviously. Darla was my great-great grandmother.”
“Your what?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat while I tried to figure out exactly what was going on around me. “But the letter—”
“Yeah,” Stacey answered and cut me off, her smile widening. “We’ve been waiting for you for a long time, Charisse Bellamy. Longer than you could ever imagine.”
Chapter 15
It’s weird enough when a stranger knows your name. It’s weirder, though, when they know it because their great-great-grandmother had foreseen this very moment years before you had ever been born.
That’s where I was currently sitting. In a cafe, with Huntsman, while I stared at a woman who knew enough about my life to freak me out.
“We should take a walk,” Stacey, the weirdo who knew those things, said from where she stood next to Huntsman and me. Her eyes brightened and her smile widened impossibly more as she set the coffeepot on the cheap formica table of the coffee shop.
“You’re at work,” I said, trying to buy myself some time from having to be alone with this woman. “You can’t leave when you’re at work.”
It was insane of me to say; I knew that even as she was staring at me with wide eyes. With all that was going on, the idea of Stacey working being the thing that would stop us from continuing this conversation was ridiculous. Still, my mind had to go somewhere, and that was what it decided on.
“Oh yeah,” Stacey said, scrunching up her nose and turning to the front of the coffee shop. “Hey, Carl. I quit, okay?”
Without even breaking stride, she popped off her apron, letting her name tag fall to the floor.
I was completely dumbfounded, feeling like I was stuck in an episode of the Twilight Zone. I mean, I lived with a mage, and magic was normal to me. This, however, was not something I was used to. No one in New York just quit their job when they wanted to take a walk. Money was hard to come by.
A balding man who looked like the world had chewed him up and spit him out stared at Stacey blankly before he shrugged. “Okay.”
Then he turned back to helping customers as though one of his employees hadn’t just quit in the middle of their rush. It didn’t seem he expected anyone to stick around this hole in the wall for long.
I looked around, hoping that a few of the other customers felt the same way I did, and was sort of happy when I saw the astonished looks on a few other occupants’ faces.
Stacey sashayed back to the table, excitement on her face as if today were Christmas. “Well, now that I’ve quit and that’s done,” she said cheekily. “Meet you outside.”
She walked out, not once looking back to see if we were following her. If my eyes were even half as wide as Huntsman’s, I should have been able to see clear to the moon.
“Are we actually going to follow her?” Huntsman asked, glancing from me to outside and back again.
Stacey had already pushed through the coffee shop door to stand on the sidewalk. A sea of yellow cabs whizzed on the street behind her.
I stood, clearing my throat. “We’ve already come this far. We might as well see the damn thing through.”
Huntsman stood and followed me as I walked out of the coffee shop, his footsteps clomping behind me in lazy thuds. Stacey was still standing on the sidewalk, her light pink pixie-cut hair appearing more silvery in the sunlight. She flicked the ash off a cigarette before taking another drag.
I folded my arms across my chest and glared at her. I honestly couldn’t bel
ieve what I’d just seen. “You quit your job just like that?”
“Sounds like you care more than Carl did,” she said, hugging her midsection with one arm while the hand holding her cigarette dropped away from her mouth. “You’re the only reason I was working there in the first place. It’s not my fault you took longer than you should have. Lord knows it wasn’t for the money. This probably won’t come as a surprise, but my family is, like, freaky good at the stock market.” She shrugged again. “Perks of being born into oracles, I suppose.”
“The Tellers?” I corrected her, arching an eyebrow as sort of a dare for the woman to contradict me. I mean, she was the one to call them oracles, and everything Ramsey had told me was that they went by a different name.
Though it wasn’t much in the way of information, and it certainly was nothing compared to what she obviously knew about me, I wanted Stacey to know she wasn’t the only one around here with information about what was going on.
It was all a waste though. If this little challenge affected her at all, she didn’t let on.
She probably already knew that I would know this. Or say that, or whatever. If I thought about it for any amount of time, I’d lose my mind. It was just like running around in circles. Almost like asking whether or not the chicken or the egg came first.
“Yep,” she chimed, grinning a little, then bit her lower lip as her gaze moved over to Huntsman. “You’re kind of a dish, aren’t you?” Her voice was practically flirty, and if she’d been anyone else, I might have called her on it.
“A dish?” Huntsman asked, looking from me to the woman and back again. “A dish of what?”
If we were in any other situation, it would be hilarious to see him struggling to deal with Stacey flirting with him.
“I’d say you’re a dish of whatever you want, sexy,” Stacey purred, her smile widening. “My favorite is whipped cream and strawberries, though.” The hint in her voice was enough to make me want to gag.
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