Thompson looked ready to ask more questions, but the reverberation from an electric guitar cut him off. We stepped under the band shelter just as my ex-boyfriend took the stage.
Chapter Eight
I knew I’d see Nikolai there, but I wasn’t really prepared for it to be like this. Spotlights always adored him, and he was in his element on stage with a guitar slung over his shoulders. He looked incredible. His long, silken black hair hung like a mysterious veil in front of his eyes. In tight leather pants and a poet shirt that would have looked dorky on anyone else, he captured everyone’s attention.
He opened his mouth and began to sing. Wouldn’t you know it? It was the song he wrote for me, the one we’d just heard on the radio. Somehow, through some awful luck, he spotted me and swept me into the intensity of his gaze.
I flushed bright red under his scrutiny. Even though I knew it was impossible, I felt certain Nikolai could tell I’d kissed Thompson.
Just as quickly as he pinned me under his gaze, he seemed to remember he was performing for other people, and I was released.
Even if Nikolai couldn’t read my mind, I was beginning to think Thompson could, because he was watching me curiously. “It must have been nice dating a musician, huh?” he said lightly, but I could hear the jealousy in his tone.
Actually, it kind of sucked. But no one believed that when I told them. They thought it was all VIP parties and backstage passes. The reality was that Nik was always either busy practicing or in the spotlight being adored by legions of fans way hotter than I. But, even if I told Thompson that, he’d take it the wrong way. I sighed. “I’m going to get a drink. Do you want water or something?”
“I’ll go with you,” he insisted. “It’s too loud here, anyway.”
Thompson followed me as I went in search of a cooler. When we stepped out from under the shade of the shelter, the music seemed farther away. The sudden sunlight stunned my eyes.
The crowd was thick with bangles, beads, and other accoutrements of the groovy. A lot of the people in the Outer Circle compensated for not being True Witches by adopting the costumes and customs of the pretenders. Others didn’t know any better. Thompson and I threaded our way past a group of long-haired, gray-bearded drummers pounding out a meditative yet danceable beat, oblivious to the competing throb of the bass a few feet away. Women of all ages and sizes swirled around nearby, mirrored silk skirts and scarves winking in the sun. Under the shade of a sprawling maple tree, a heavyset woman with a spike of short dreadlocks held court, reading palms. All the exposed skin sported tats of images familiar to me—ankhs, runes, Celtic knot work, dragons, faeries, and, of course, classic goddess images, like the snake-headed Nile statuette, which had been the talisman. Fashion ran the gamut from the faux gypsy belly dancers, classic Goth, punk, and everything in between.
In among all the woo-woo, there were hints of normal: booths promoting witch-friendly financial services, pediatricians, and law firms. There was even a bloodmobile taking donations. I smiled at the irony, given the current vampire problem, but it was just one of a dozen civic-minded volunteer opportunities.
Thompson’s eyes grew wider the deeper into the crowd we moved. He looked a bit gob-smacked. He’d forgotten all about Nikolai. “All these people are witches?”
“Yep,” I said.
“I had no idea there were so many,” he said.
“Minnesota has one of the largest pagan communities in the United States. Some people call this ‘Paganistan.’”
He nodded, but I didn’t think he’d heard. We’d just walked into a row of vendors, and his eyes were darting from witch-related T-shirts and clothes to jewelry and magical tools. We slowed as he admired some handcrafted staffs with dragons’ heads carved into the top. I figured he’d spasm when he saw the “athames.” But he breezed right past those and stopped dead in front of a silk-draped caravan tent that looked like something straight out of some mundane’s wet dream of a gypsy camp.
“Wow, check this out! A tarot reader!”
Thompson was desperate for me to try it. I wanted to tell him I’d had Bea read my cards a dozen times, and her readings were spookily accurate because she had a divination talent. But since he was so excited and already had money in his hands, I let the lady pull me into her tent. Thompson followed behind.
I didn’t recognize the reader from the coven, but that didn’t mean anything. A lot of people who didn’t make the Initiation had real talent. Nikolai’s mom, for instance, was Romany. Though most of the people who were true sensitives didn’t bother with all the flimflam this lady seemed to be into—she had lit a stick of incense and was going through elaborate motions to banish the negative energy or whatever from the room. Thompson ate it up. His eyes were wide with fascination. I waited patiently in the metallic folding chair set out on the flattened grass. It was a bit tippy because the ground was hard packed and uneven.
When she sat across from me, I realized she wasn’t that much older than I was. Her face was heart-shaped. She had a lot of piercings in—one stud glittered like a faux mole over the left edge of her black-painted lips. She had a ring through her nose and in her eyebrow. Her hair was so black, I suspected she dyed it.
Henna dotted the hands that shuffled the cards. In a low voice, she asked me to cut them. When she handed them to me, she reminded me to “concentrate on the question you want the cards to answer.”
Even if this woman had no particular divination skill, I had a healthy respect for tarot. Even though Real Magic didn’t work for me, I’d found that some things worked for everyone. Tarot was one of those things. Even working alone, I could get pretty good readings. Of course, tarot, like many divinations, worked partly on intuition, which lots of mundanes could tap.
So I thought about the hunt and my dad. I really, really wanted the cards to tell me there was a solution out there. I wanted a hint as to where I could find it, especially since the grimoire had been a dead end. I wanted reassurance that all this wasn’t going to end in massive bloodshed. My mind started to wander to Elias and his potential upcoming nuptials, so I quickly handed the cards over to the reader.
She did some more drama. Closing her eyes, she held the cards meaningfully in front of her. She set them on the table and waved her hands over them. Thompson was silent in anticipation. At least he was getting a good show for his ten bucks.
Just when I wondered if she’d fallen asleep, she separated the deck into three piles facedown. She opened her eyes with a start. She flipped the top card of the first pile over so fast that the cardboard hit the table with a snap.
Death.
Her deck showed the classic image of a hooded, skeletal figure on a pale horse. The Death figure had a black flag with a white rose in one hand, and the traditional scythe in the other. People—a king and a peasant—fell down in front of the galloping horse. The sun set in the distance.
Behind me, Thompson sucked in a breath. I wasn’t that worried myself. I mean, I knew that Death in tarot wasn’t the final big ugly that people tended to think it was. In fact, if it was right side up, it could be read positively as change or transformation. The sun might also be rising, you see. And the white rose had a new bud on it—the sign that new growth was possible with a bit of wise pruning.
However, it was reversed.
Again, I wasn’t terribly panicked because I had been asking about the hunt and vampires. There was a lot of death there.
The next card freaked me out a bit, though.
The Tower.
This image was harder to see as positive. Lightning struck a cylindrical building, and two figures fell from its walls, presumably to their deaths, in the stormy sea below. Even the stars in the background had trails and seemed to be falling.
I rarely got this card, so I would be curious to see what the reader had to say about it. I thought I remembered Bea saying something about how this one represented change in the status quo, which could be good, given that the hunt was kind of broken. I couldn’t qui
te shake my sense of foreboding looking at it, though.
The last card was a minor one, the ace of swords. It showed a disembodied hand holding a sword. The whole scene seemed to float in the clouds, which looked gray and stormy.
Lots of storms. Great.
“You need an idea to change a stagnant situation,” she intoned in a voice that was clearly trying to be mysterious. But her voice was too light to carry off the seriousness she intended.
I decided to see if she was a real practitioner or not. “I hate it when the cards just parrot back your question, don’t you?”
She blinked, as if waking up from a dream, but then she smiled. “Should I have given you the coven discount?”
I nodded.
“Let’s do a little digging, shall we?” she said, no longer pretending to alter her voice. She pulled a card from the bottom of each pile and laid it on top of the three in front of me.
The first one showed the High Priestess. She sat on a throne, holding a book in her lap and an ankh held casually in her right hand. The other held a staff entwined with the Goddess’s other symbol, a snake. Her crown was two crescent moons on either side of a full moon. Behind her was a veil that was partly opened to show a green verdant hill leading to a distant castle.
It could only represent one thing: Mom.
And it was lying right over the Death card.
I wasn’t sure I liked that, especially after what Prince Luis had said about how the Queen of Witches of his region sacrificed herself to the hunt.
The next card was another queen, only this one, the queen of swords, came from the court cards. Like the ace, the queen held a sword aloft. Unlike the ace, she had a body attached to the hand and sat on a throne that seemed to float among swiftly moving clouds. She faced to the left, and her other hand was raised in a gesture that reminded me of giving—as if maybe she was offering a judgment from her throne.
I didn’t know who she might be, but I thought she might be part of the clue I was looking for. She covered that horrible Tower and seemed, at least to me, to be offering help.
The last card was a baffler. It was a minor one, the seven of cups. It showed seven goblets. All of them were filled with strange things—rainbows, a dragon, a creepy shroud-wearing figure, jewels, a laurel crown, a snake, and another severed body part—this time a weirdly serene-looking head.
I had no idea what to make of that. “I know who this is, I think,” I said, pointing to the High Priestess. “But what does it mean?”
The reader thought about it, but normally, not with any hint of spooky stuff. I wondered briefly if Thompson was disappointed. “I’m not sure,” she said, with a glance at where Thompson sat by the doorway. “Can you tell me more about your question?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “What does the seven mean? I don’t get that one very often.”
“Illusions. Dreams. Creativity,” she said. “I always think it kind of looks like some kind of hallucination, you know?”
All the weird things floating in the cups did remind me of some kind of Dali painting. “This woman,” I said, moving the queen of swords so that the card more fully covered the Tower. “She’ll help? What kind of woman is she?”
“Smart, maybe with a sharp tongue. A bitch even, maybe, but with good common sense. The kind who tells you the truth you don’t want to hear.”
Bea? I wasn’t sure. She hadn’t been much help so far. The grimoire had been a dud, and, unless she was holding out on me, that pretty much tapped her knowledge of vampires and the hunt. “Could it be someone I haven’t met yet? Does it have to be a woman?”
I was thinking maybe someone from Luis’s camp might know more and that maybe I should go looking for advice there.
The reader shook her spiky head. “My experience is that court cards can be anybody, male or female, but usually they’re someone I know, even if I don’t know them well—like a teacher or something. But they’re someone important—you know what I mean?”
I did, though I still had no idea whom that card could represent. “You gave me a lot to think about,” I said.
“Did your question get answered?”
“No,” I said. “But it’s a pretty big question.”
She laughed, pulling out the Death and Tower cards to put them back into her deck. “You think?”
“I guess that’s obvious, huh?”
“I figured you were going to ask about a relationship.” She smiled, then gave Thompson a broad wink.
Oh! I supposed I should have. “Maybe another time,” I said.
She tried to return some of Thompson’s money, but he refused. “No,” he said. “That was totally cool.”
Despite the brightness outside the tent flaps, I brooded on the fortune. It bothered me that the High Priestess covered Death. Did that mean Mom was going to do something against the vampires or help them … or die trying? I didn’t like any of those options.
Then there was the mysterious queen who maybe had the answer to the “status quo” toppling of the Tower—did she have the solution to the hunt? I could only hope. But who was she? And what was up with the trippy cups? Was a potion going to be involved?
“What did you ask?” Thompson said, startling me from my reverie.
“Oh, um.” What was I supposed to say? I wanted to tell him the truth, but he’d never believe me. “Just some family stuff, that’s all.”
“Man,” he said. “I thought I had heavy family problems. Yours involve dead guys on horses and people falling out of buildings.”
Dead guys? Ha! But I just shook my head. “You have no idea.”
“No, I don’t,” he agreed, “but I’d like to.”
“Oh, Thompson, it’s not that I don’t want to share; it’s just … complicated.”
“It’s cool,” he said with a shrug, though I could tell it wasn’t cool—not entirely.
Having finally wandered far enough, we found the place where the food was being set up. I spotted the drink cooler. I dug through the melting ice for something good. A lot of the Outer Court members were foodies or health nuts, so there wasn’t a lot in the soda pop department, though someone had brought home brew root beer in a barrel.
Thompson peered over my shoulder. “I don’t even recognize this stuff. What the hell is basil seed drink?”
“It’s weird,” I agreed with a smile, remembering the first time someone had offered it to me. It was sort of like pop, but with tapioca “bubbles” containing basil seeds. If you weren’t expecting those, it could be quite the surprise to find your drink … chewy. “You should try it.”
Thompson saw my mischievous smile but took the can I offered anyway. He popped the top bravely and tipped his head back to take a big gulp. When his mouth filled with balls of goo, he gave me a horrified expression. I started to laugh as he grimaced and chewed.
“You are evil,” he teased after swallowing the last of the mouthful.
I got myself a bottle of water. Someone had carefully stickered each bottle with a warning about BPA chemicals and a reminder to recycle. Thompson had moved over to check out the spread. He shot me a helpless look. “I’m not going to find chili and hamburgers, am I?”
I shook my head.
“Hot dogs?”
“Tofu pups, maybe,” I offered. At all this talk of food, my stomach gurgled, but what I was craving couldn’t be found at the picnic. I covered my stomach with my hand, but if Thompson noticed, he didn’t say anything.
He took another mouthful of basil seed drink and plunked himself down on the picnic bench seat, his back to the various plastic-wrap-covered Tupperware tubs. I sat down beside him, ignoring how queasy the smell made me. I was about to tell Thompson to take heart. Bea’s mom always made something really good, despite the often-unusual ingredients. Before I could open my mouth, I heard a familiar voice behind me. It was Mom.
I tucked my head into Thompson’s shoulder to hide, and I strained to hear what she was saying. He responded by putting an arm around me an
d softly kissing the top of my head. It was a little distracting, but I could still hear snatches of what Mom was saying.
“No, Victor, the lottery is barbaric. We’ve discussed this. It will not be reinstated under my watch,” Mom said.
Victor? She was talking to Mr. Kirov, Nikolai’s dad!
Thompson’s nuzzling grew a little more intense, but I tried to stay focused on listening.
“When they attack, it will be on your head too.” His voice was menacing, not at all melodious like Nik’s. He still had a trace of a Russian accent, and I always thought of him as a hard-as-stone man. Granted, I’d seen him only a few times, and each time I did, he was threatening either me or my friends.
“What else can we do?” asked a voice that wasn’t my mother’s.
“What of your experiments on the elite captain?” It was Mr. Kirov again. “The potion did not bind the vampire?”
I jerked, knocking my head into Thompson’s chin. Holy crap! Had Elias been right? It sounded as though my mom had been slipping something into his drink. But what did “bind” mean? Was she trying to come up with some other way to enslave vampires … and trying it out on my sort-of ex-boyfriend?
“You okay?” Thompson murmured in my ear. His breath tickled erotically.
“Uh, you surprised me,” I said stupidly, trying not to get all shivery. I couldn’t let myself get carried away right now. What were they saying? Why did the band have to be so loud? Or Thompson’s passionate breathing for that matter!
“… No other option, then,” Mom was saying. “Will Nikolai fall into line?”
“Do you even eat meat?” Thompson asked.
“What?” I snapped, irritated that I missed Mr. Kirov’s response.
“No need to get cranky,” he said, pushing away slightly. “It’s not that I care. Not really. I’ve never dated a vegetarian before. Of course, I’ve never dated a witch either.”
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