“On it,” Mike said and ended the call.
The old car pulling the U-Haul was gone and the road was empty. The locals would have read the sky; the tourists wouldn’t be flocking in too heavily midweek. Mike started the engine and pulled away from the curb, did a U-turn. Rain began splatting on his windshield. He turned on the wipers and his light-bar, kept the siren off, and went in the opposite direction.
He thought about that old car, though. There was something about it that he did not like. No, sir, not one little bit.
7
Dianna Agbala selected a deck of tarot cards from the scores lined up like books on her kitchen shelf. She waited for that flash of coldness that told her it was the right deck for the moment, and slid it out and set it on the table.
Her tummy was warm with two cups of coffee and for now, at least, the sky was dark with storm clouds visible through her kitchen windows. She was on the evening shift at the store and adjusted her day accordingly. Sia and Dua Lipa had gotten her through dinner, but now she was shifting her energy and asked Echo to play “Aud Guray” by Deva Premal. Soothing, elegant, miles deep.
The cats were already settled down. They were intuitive and knew when she was going quiet, going inward. Toby Oscar was stretched in a patch of sunlight, and Zoey lay on the top of the fridge. She liked to survey the world like an imperious senior lama.
Dianna’s sensitivity varied in its manifestations. Nothing was ever a lock, and even with all of her experience there were surprises and mysteries everywhere she looked. Being confident in her world was not the same as knowing the complete shape and size of it. No one did, and anyone who said otherwise was running a con game on the tourists.
The music was already doing its work, tugging her gently away from concerns of the moment—the need to check Facebook and Instagram, the desire to check emails to see if her mother or—more dangerously—her ex had written. Her mood softened as she sat down at the table and picked up the boxed cards. Her touch had responded to the traditional Rider-Waite deck. It was so familiar that it made her smile. This was the deck she’d learned on, which was not at all uncommon for people like her. Rider-Waite was first published in 1910 and was a classic. Pamela Colman Smith’s paintings were enduring classics that had been painted using instructions by the mystic A. E. Waite. They looked simple, almost primitive, but there was so much subtlety in terms of hidden symbolism that the cards were highly valued more than a century later. Dianna had worn out at least five decks over the years, and one antique set was in a shadow box on her bedroom wall. The store where Dianna worked even sold sets of coasters with the images of the Magus, Empress, Emperor, and Fool on them.
She settled herself in her chair and took some long, cleansing breaths. Not trying for any deep level of tranquility, but instead a soft and receptive state. When the calm gathered around her like a comfortable bathrobe, Dianna opened the box and slid the cards into her hands. They were so old now, so worn from thousands of readings. Because customers often picked trendier or newer-looking decks, these cards slept for long periods of time. Even during this morning ritual they were not the deck that spoke to her very often.
While she shuffled she disconnected as much of her consciousness as possible, letting noninvolvement permit the right cards to find her and match her need. Then she dealt three cards facedown and set the others aside. Those three represented the past, present, and future. She had no specific question in mind on mornings like this, but the town had been on her mind a lot lately. The Fringe neighborhood was growing very fast and it was very much her kind of crowd—artistic, a bit wild, complex, outside of normal definitions. The first Pinelands Fringe Festival was coming up soon and there was a bit of friction with the longtime locals. They didn’t want the festival, despite all the money it would bring with it. There was some validity to their pushback. The Trouble had happened during a Halloween festival, and since then the “events” in Pine Deep tended to be apple festivals that lasted an afternoon, and Santa arriving on a fire truck on Black Friday. Dianna had enough locals as clients to know that they thought having another big festival was asking for trouble. Tempting fate. Invoking the wrong kind of spirits in a town known to have troubling energy going back centuries.
So it was the town that formed the basis of her three-card reading, even if unintentionally. Dianna never swam against the current in her readings.
She turned over the first card. The Ten of Swords.
The image showed a man lying facedown with ten swords stabbed into his back. Dianna stiffened, reading both the traditional meaning of that card but also experiencing a sharp stab of instinctive awareness. And the old line from Shakespeare flickered through her thoughts.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
Clients often thought that the Devil or Death cards were the worst or direst, but for Dianna the Ten of Swords was far worse. But it was also maddeningly nonspecific. The people in town should be on the lookout for betrayal, painful endings, loss, wounds, and crisis. Some unforeseeable pain was on the horizon, something that could not be avoided. A pain that would cut deeply, leaving some of her neighbors feeling like they had been stabbed ten times over, and completely leveled out emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
Her heart stopped for a frozen moment when she saw that card.
It was an ugly card to get at the start of a new day.
It was an ugly card to have, ever.
She almost stopped to reshuffle. Almost. But Dianna took a breath and plunged ahead.
“What is the outcome of this?” she murmured.
She turned over the second card.
The Magician.
She chewed her lip. The Magician was not inherently a bad card, but its meaning was conditional on the other cards. Sometimes it was an empowered and uplifting card. However, if something bad was coming to Pine Deep, or was already there, then the cause of it was whomever the Magician card referred to. Because the card was part of the Major Arcana, unlike the Ten of Swords, it represented an actual individual person. Minor Arcana cards—those of the swords, cups, wands, and pentacles—represented situations that would happen to someone. Major Arcana cards represented the people or individual that created those situations.
Most often, and in most decks, the Magician was male. The image on the card was a man in white robes with a red sash holding a sword aloft while a snake coiled around his waist. The infinity symbol hovered over his head, showing that he operated outside of time and space. The snake and the symbols in front of him meant he was able to use anything to create anything. The Magician wielded real power. He turned energy into matter and took matter and converted it to energy. He saw the essence in all things and could use it to do what he wanted with it. Good or ill.
When accompanying the Ten of Swords, the Magician card spoke of a pernicious intent that chilled Dianna to her core.
The desire to end the reading was very strong, but her need to know was stronger still. She had to know what the implications were of such a person being present and doing such things.
“What is to come of this?” she asked and heard the tremble in her voice.
Dianna licked her lips and steeled herself before turning the last card. There were plenty of cards in both higher and lower Arcana that could change the meaning of this reading.
The one she turned, though, was not one of those.
The picture was that of a building crumbling as lightning struck it. Flames erupted from its window and two people leapt for safety but were too far from the ground. The fall would kill them.
The Tower. Another of the higher Arcana cards.
The card of total destruction.
She recoiled from it. Depending on when it appeared in a reading, the Tower could represent physical structures being destroyed. Dianna knew of a psychic who’d had that card appear in every reading leading up to when the planes hit the Twin Towers. But it could also represent so much more. It could represent systems. It c
ould represent people. Lives. The Tower represented the greater body of anything—physical or metaphorical. The Tower represented the dismantling of those systems or structures.
She pushed her chair back from the table. A sound made her turn and she saw that both of her cats were now standing together, trembling with fear, their hair raised and stiff along their spines. Toby Oscar made a sick mewling noise. Zoey bared her teeth and hissed.
8
Sergeant Mike Sweeney saw the cow as he topped the rise.
It was standing in the middle of the road, staring bemusedly at the blocky ambulance that had stopped a few yards from its nose. A silver Kia Sorento squatted on the shoulder; its hood had an expensive dent in it, and there was a head-size crack on the passenger side of the windshield. As he slowed to a stop, Mike could see a smear of blood on the inside of the glass. He kept his lights on and parked at an angle that would force all traffic to share the opposite lane. As soon as he opened his door he could hear the yelling. Part of him wanted to get right back into the cruiser and drive over to the Harvest Inn for a couple-three beers.
Three men and one woman, all of them screeching at each other at the top of their lungs from behind the ambulance. Mike sighed and trudged around to see a woman standing with her knuckles on her hips and a man seated in the back of the ambulance as two EMTs took vitals. The man wore a foam cervical collar and held a compress to his forehead. There was a lot of blood—typical of scalp wounds—but the man didn’t appear to be hurt all that badly. The EMTs were yelling at the man to let them put him on a gurney and transport him. They wanted to strap him into a back-and-neck immobilizer. The woman was also screaming at the man—shrieking, really—telling him that it was his own goddamn fault for not wearing a goddamn seat belt. The bleeding man was yelling at everyone, but because he was outnumbered he wasn’t finishing any sentences.
Mike girded his loins and plunged in.
“Folks, please,” he said in what he thought was an appropriately loud and authoritative voice. They all ignored him. It wasn’t clear they even saw him. So, Mike slapped the flat side of the ambulance with a hard palm, a booming whump that sounded like a hand grenade. Maybe louder. The blow was hard enough to rock the vehicle and everyone suddenly shut up and gaped at him.
Mike Sweeney was conspicuously large. Six foot four, with the massive arms and shoulders of someone who spent some part of each day clanking free weights. He had dark-red hair and fierce blue eyes and there were all kinds of scars on his face and hands. He knew he was imposing as fuck, and so he deliberately loomed.
Into the ensuing silence, the cow mooed.
Mike cleared his throat, identified himself, and asked what happened.
Everyone started talking at once. This time all he had to do was hold up a hand. They instantly became as silent and attentive as kids in a country day school. Mike pointed at the woman.
“You first.”
She actually bristled and her eyes became immediately reptilian. “Why? Because I’m a woman?”
“No,” he said slowly, “because you were driving.”
There was a beat. “Oh.”
Mike gave her a small nod. “Start at the beginning.” Before she got a word out, though, thunder rumbled overhead. “Long story short,” he encouraged.
There were, he knew, no short stories in anything related to couples in crisis. Not on domestic disturbance calls. Not in traffic incidents. He was philosophical about it, though, because he still thought that was all this was.
9
Dianna Agbala hated the term psychic, even though it was on her business card and in neon in the window of Nature’s Spirits, where she worked.
She was more than that, but the word was a convenient catchall label. Good for business, and a lot of people who came to the store did so because of Dianna and her gifts. Personally, she preferred “sensitive,” which is what her grandmother called it. Her mother called it “Satan’s curse,” but that was Mom—the quintessential church lady. BFF of our lord and savior. Not like Nanny, who was much more than open-minded. She’d been completely open. Every sense, not limited to the five physical ones. Mom was a sensitive, too, but spent all those years begging Jesus to save her soul from the demons who possessed her.
So often growing up Dianna wished Nanny had been her mother. Would have been a happier life. Nanny would have loved Pine Deep for all the reasons Mom said she’d never come back.
“Lady Di,” said a voice and Dianna turned to see the assistant manager, Ophelia—all frizzy blond hair and enormous glasses—coming into the reading alcove, a schedule sheet held out. Dianna accepted the sheet. “You’re going to be busy tonight.”
“Idle hands…” murmured Dianna. Her schedule varied between daytime, ten to four, and evenings until nine o’clock closing. Card readings, some palmistry, or simply reading a client and discussing the forces at work in their lives. She preferred the later shifts because after a long self-imposed drought Dianna was back in the club scene. Drinking, dancing, and hunting for the kind of woman who matched her energies and her needs. Size, shape, age, and color didn’t matter, but there had to be that spark. A bit of magic.
There was a huge bang and the windows shuddered in their frames. Both women jumped and then looked at each other and laughed. Outside the rain was falling softly, but Dianna wasn’t fooled. It started this way every day lately—thunder for hours as the storm clouds came to a boil out over the farmlands, and then the rain would march into town. Then, as it had since the end of summer, it would rain all afternoon and well into the night.
“Maybe we’ll get the afternoon crowd,” said Ophelia doubtfully. “Tonight’s going to be a bust. If it’s like last night I might close up early.”
“Sure,” said Dianna. “Whatever you want.”
She used a bottle-green fingernail to run down the list of names. It was a nearly even split between her regulars—mostly older locals who just wanted to know that this was not going to be another Black Harvest year—and new names she didn’t recognize. Some of the names were the kind of nicknames or stage names that immediately marked them as people from Boundary Street. The Fringe. Or whatever it was called, depending on who you asked. Kiki LaOomph had to be a burlesque dancer, and Dianna figured, either transvestite or actual trans-woman. The name made her smile, made her want to read her cards but also catch the act. Other names included Skinz, Brutal John, Yo-Yo, Jellicho, and Tammiduck. Names that defined the metamorphic identity and true persona of each, rather than the birth names that often carried baggage. Dianna had once considered changing her own name after the divorce from Jaden, but hadn’t. She’d kept her so-called maiden name when they’d gotten hitched, and Dianna was Nanny’s middle name. So … she kept it. But she understood the desire to reinvent oneself all the way down to the birth name.
“First one’ll be in soon,” said Ophelia, which was also not her real name. She’d been born Mary Janowitz but shed that skin twenty years back to become Ophelia. Just Ophelia, except on social media, where she was OpeheliaUndrowned.
“Thanks,” said Diana, folding the schedule and tucking it under the stack of tarot cards. “I’ll play for a bit.”
When Ophelia left, Dianna considered the decks of cards. She had over a hundred decks at home and always selected seven at random—as much as anything a sensitive does is truly random—and brought them to work. Standard Arcana as well as oracle cards of different kinds.
The reading she’d done half an hour ago at the kitchen table hovered around her like a cloud. It had been so intense, so threatening that it felt like a betrayal, as if the cards had decided to turn on her. But when she looked through the window the town was not crumbling down and no one she knew was in any kind of real crisis. Dianna told herself it was a hangover reading. Last night had been a bit wild, with a few too many exotic vodka drinks at Tank Girl and more than her share of a big bottle of wine with Nellie, a petite blond with piercings in very interesting places.
Just a crazy night,
she told herself. Only that.
Dianna took a cleansing breath and then ran her fingers lightly down the stack, eyes unfocused, letting the cards speak to her. They always did.
Her fingers slipped off the edge of the last deck and thumped the tablecloth.
Dianna blinked in surprise.
Not only had none of the cards given her that tingle, none of them even felt cold. Warm cards were nothing, they were asleep. When a deck went cold it was like opening a window to look out into another world. There was always one deck or another that was like touching an ice cube, especially when she was doing her own morning three-card reading.
She leaned back in her chair and studied the cards, her fingers resting on the curved edge of the table. The cloth was a deep purple velvet and embroidered with birds, insects, and flowers stylized to suggest pre-Colombian art. She’d had it since college, when it had been a wall hanging. Like the cards, the cloth was an old friend. As were the crystals Dianna often handled to cleanse her energy between clients. Now, though, the cloth felt oddly rough beneath her fingertips.
“Don’t be that way,” she said. The cards, being cards, managed not to look contrite. She wasn’t fooled, though. They could hear and understand her.
A shadow crossed the weak sunlight, rubbing it out and casting the storefront in dirty gray shadows. All the colors seemed to drain from the amethysts and turquoise and apophyllite on display in the window. And even the Lemurian seed points and heulandite clusters looked washed out. By itself she would never have taken particular note. After all, the rain had been almost unstoppable in town this fall. However, Dianna was not the kind of person to ignore patterns, especially when she was as open and receptive as she usually was at the start of a long day.
The cards, the cloth, the crystals, and the clouds.
“I—” she began, but the jangle of the bell above the door pulled her immediately out of the pattern of thought that had begun to form. Not just the bell, but the man who came in.
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