“It takes time,” I tell her. “Stop trying so hard.”
She nods and takes some of the pressure off of her lids.
“So, question?” I ask the teen.
“Right.” She shifts some on the bench. “I don’t really have like a question. I was just kind of wondering…if you could look in there and tell me what you see? I just need some direction.”
“Sure.”
I breathe in and release my breath slowly, letting my eyes close and my mind reach out to the girl. In the scene playing out before me, her hair is light brown. Not surprising. What she has going on now must be something she’s done for the fall festival this weekend.
She in a kitchen, at a table full of college brochures. Her eyes keep going to one on the far left, and every time she looks at it, misery pinches her face. She picks up a brochure from the center of the table, and longing shimmers in her eyes. But the school is expensive.
Opening my eyes, I take a good look at the girl. College, huh? Must be nice to have choices. She watches my cousin with careful, wary eyes.
“Wait, wait, wait!” Gretchen’s voice rises in excitement. “I see mountains…and an ocean?”
I glance down at the ball. I see nothing inside, but then again, I never do. “Good. What else?”
“They feel far apart.”
The girl leans forward a little.
“I feel like you’re being drawn to the ocean,” Gretchen says slowly, unsure of herself. “But…there’s conflict somewhere…” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I’m still learning.”
“It’s fine.” The girl looks over her head to my face. “Do you see anything?”
A strange emotion wells up in the pit of my stomach. Every so often the nice part of my brain actually concedes to helping someone. As much as I would love to mess with this girl, I’m suddenly not in the mood to make crap up. I’m not sure why, but I’ll blame it on Gretchen being in the room. She’s trying so freaking hard.
“If you want to go to that school,” I say after several long seconds of silence, “you have to figure out a way to pay for it yourself.” Gretchen twists around to look at me, her large eyes filled with awe.
A flicker of hope lights up the teen’s face. “You mean my dad will let me go if I can pay for it?” Then her face falls. “How am I going to pay for it?”
“You don’t have to pay for it,” I say, resigned. “You just have to act like you’re willing. Get a job. Save up some money. Apply for scholarships. When he sees you trying, he’ll cave and pitch in. He has a college fund for you. Enough for you to go wherever you want. You just need to show some initiative. He thinks you’re spoiled.”
The girl lets out a choking sound and covers her mouth with her hands. “Oh my god. You’re like…amazing. Thank you.” She squeals and hops up from the bench. “Okay, we can go,” she says when she joins her friends.
“What happened in there,” one of them asks.
“I’ll tell you on the way back to my house.”
Gretchen stares at the glass ball and shakes her head. “How did you do that? How did you know it was college?”
“She’s about the right age,” I say. “Plus, it’s around college-fair time, isn’t it?”
“Oh…wow…Did you see something different than me?”
“What you saw was fine.” I flick on the little screen and see that two more people have filled up the room. “Sometimes the best we can offer is general guidance. You know, just pointing them in a certain direction. I kind of went out on a limb, but I said what I said to get her out of here quickly. Some people can get kind of chatty. She looked like the type.”
The pouch is starting to cool against my chest. First hot. Then cold. Then warm. Then it’s ready.
Gretchen cups the glass ball in her hands. “Are the images I see in the ball supposed to make sense to me?”
“Not always.” I lift up the shade covering the little window and peek through. I can just make out the hills of the cemetery from here. It’s a ten-minute walk. If I’m gone too long, Tessandra will get suspicious. I pull the shade back down. “It’ll make sense to the client. I think what you said was speaking to her a little bit.”
“Yeah?” Gretchen sets the ball back down. “I need more practice. Most people just want palm readings. It’s not as exciting. There’s no time to practice by myself when I’m here, and Momma won’t let me do it at the house.”
“You’re doing really well. It only took a few minutes for you to see something this time.”
“I guess.”
“You’ve only been at it for a few months. It takes time to develop. Trust me. You’re way ahead of where Kalin was at your age, and you see how good she is now.”
Gretchen smiles. “She’s not as specific as you are though.”
“All of our gifts are different.” Most of mine are apparently unheard of and probably the reason Tessandra’s been so reluctant to have the guardianship lifted. She doesn’t trust me. It doesn’t help that she’s had to warn me several times now to stop being so specific when people come in to see me. She says it could attract the wrong kind of attention, but where’s the fun in that? The look on people’s faces when I repeat their innermost guarded thoughts is priceless.
“I’m about ready for lunch.” I move over to the heavy curtain and pull it aside. “Bring me someone who won’t take all day, yeah?”
Gretchen places the glass ball back on the shelf and scurries out into the waiting room.
Chapter Four
Tessandra doesn’t like me going to lunch alone. She gives me the stink eye on my way out the door. If she could follow me, she would. It’s not like I can go too far on foot—just far enough to get myself in trouble.
The cemetery is calm right now, just a few people walking about. I make my way straight through the center pathways towards the back of the cemetery, the older part. The leaves are just starting to change. Bright colors pop out at random, and the full branches cast cooling shade down across the concrete and grass.
I take in a deep breath of fresh, pre-autumn air. The last bits of summer cling tight, making the air heavy and humid and uncomfortably warm. I deviate from the path and walk along the grass. The dry blades crunch under my flats.
Nestled near the back of the cemetery, close to a deep cluster of trees, is an old, weathered mausoleum. Unmarked. Moss crawls up the pillars flanking either side of the rusted iron door. Ivy hangs down from the roof. Grass grows up around it. It almost looks forgotten, tucked away back here like a dilapidated monument to a greater time.
After a quick look around, I approach the building, taking care on the rickety steps, and pull on the door. It scrapes along the scaffolding, emitting a low groan as it opens. I open it just enough to slide inside and then pull the door shut behind me, enclosing myself in darkness.
I fumble through my bag for a flashlight. I can’t pull it out and flick it on fast enough. I shine the light in every corner and crevice in the tight, crumbling space. Coming down here today was not a good idea.
With my heart clamoring in my throat, I dig the warm pouch out of my bra and drop it into my bag. I had almost forgotten about the stone I stashed inside. That would have been fun, having to pull it out in front of a customer.
Horizontal marble slabs line the walls on either side of me. They, like the outside, are unmarked. I like to think this mausoleum is just for show, but icy prickles finger-walk up my spine anyway at the thought that there might be bones lying on the other side.
Against the far wall, just a few feet in front of me, sits an open stone coffin. I feel around the inside and find the latch that triggers the trap door. I shine the flashlight down the hole. The ladder looks like it extends into eternity, but I know from experience that it’s only about ten feet. I carefully climb into the coffin and down into the darkness.
The light is unsteady along the stone walls, betraying my nerves. Only today would I be afraid of this short trip. My feet touch the soft dirt floor of a cir
cular enclosure that opens into a narrow alleyway. Fitted in the stone at the end of the alley, is a black steel door without a handle.
I knock three times, wait a beat, and knock twice more.
The door slides open soundlessly, and I dart inside before it closes again. In front of me is a thick curtain. I cut the flashlight off and dump it back into my bag before pulling the thick, heavy fabric aside.
Dim lights line two moving pathways. One gliding up at an angle, the one beside it gliding down. I hop on and hold onto the cold, steel railing. It levels off next to a wide half-moon shaped silver desk in a well-lit room of stainless steel.
A woman of about thirty-five with dark skin, a sharp nose like a fox’s, and stark white hair cut stylishly to her chin sits behind the desk. She looks up as I step off the pathway, and a bright, friendly smile crosses her face. “Miss Torabi!” She presses some numbers into a keypad, and the one set of doors in the enclosed space opens up. Heavy music escapes into the sterile room. “How is life treating you today?”
“Great. Anything exciting happen since I was here last?”
“I wish.”
I move through the doors and enter a large, brightly lit space, wide and spherical, with escalators leading down and up from the bottom floor. Silver railing races along the entire balcony-like upper portion of the room. People dressed in dark colors, mostly casual, eat lunch and chat on the various benches dropped sporadically around. A few nearby peddlers wave or nod a greeting. I hop on the escalator and let it take me the fifty or so yards down to the bottom. Down here the light is dimmer, and the music is faint.
The marketplace is a circular maze of tables with people milling this way and that, buying, selling, and bartering all manner of common and uncommon things. Several more tables with even stranger wares cling to the shadows created by the pillars holding up the balcony.
The room is full of energy, brewing and steaming out of the transactions. Buyers from all over clamor for items only legal in the dark—dangerous items that don’t exist in the world above. And in some cases, shouldn’t even exist. But of course some merchants are peddlers of super harmless merchandise like bath products and handbags and ties. There is lots of delicious food down here as well, the scent of which collects in the heavy air like a cloud.
I make my way to a particularly nervous-looking woman by the up escalator. Her eyes dart around the room, and her hands wring around the hem of her shirt, stretching it out. She couldn’t be more out of place if she tried. A lot of people down here look her up and down just to freak her out.
She grabs my arms as soon as I reach her. “You’re late.” Her voice trembles.
“I had a hard time getting away. You know my situation.”
She runs her hands down her face. “God, I hate this place. Please, tell me you have something good for me.”
I fish the velvet pouch out of my bag and hold it just out of her reach. “And you have something for me?”
She peels her desperate gaze from my hand and pulls a wad of bills out of her back pocket. “Two fifty, right?”
I do a quick count of the bills before stowing them away and handing her the pouch. “Be careful with this. You’re responsible for any crap that goes wrong. Don’t mess around and accidentally use it on yourself.”
She wraps her fists around the pouch and hugs her hands to her chest. Her eyes brighten. “What kind of curse did you give me?”
“Something to make him sick enough to get your point across without killing him. It should dissolve in water. Just make sure no one else eats what you make him, and throw the pan out afterwards. Also, wear gloves. Just in case. But it’s tasteless so you can put it in anything.”
She nods emphatically. “Thank you so much, Tatum. My husband has been getting on my last nerve.” She kisses the pouch and makes a beeline for the escalator.
Something dark slides around the nearest pillar, and for a moment my heart stops. But it’s just Shepard Ross, late twenties, I would guess, peddler of crap he’s hijacked from dumpsters and landfills. Harmless but super creepy. He watches me under heavy lids, his dark eyes made even darker by the shadows around him. One white scar stands out against his skin. It cuts across the left edges of his lips, making him look a little more dangerous than he probably is.
I move away from him nonetheless and search for my next client. Peddlers who stick to shadows tend to sell rather horrific things and have merchants with gifts and abilities that I don’t even want to know about. There’s a guy in the deep recesses with the ability to drain all different kinds of fluids from bodies with his mind. I made the mistake once of letting him corner me and talk to me about his wares. Most of his clientele is made up of rather seedy individuals looking to procure human blood, sweat, or tears, but he also sells urine and pus and other bodily fluids I wouldn’t let him tell me about.
Unfortunately, he’s not the only seller of blood. Another booth set up close to him sells human and animal blood, claiming that their “proprietary blends” have anti-aging and beautifying properties.
Someone taps me on the shoulder, startling me a bit. A tall, muscular guy steps around me. He looks awful. Heavy bags under his eyes. Shoulders weighted with distress. “I’m so sorry for calling you at work yesterday. Thank you a thousand times for not hanging up on me.” He sniffs and wipes at his nose with the back of his fingers.
He hired me to make a forgetting draught for him so he could move on from his last breakup. I find his bottle in my bag. The blue crystal fizzes in the container, tinting the carbonated water. He hands me two hundred fifty dollars in cash, and I hand him the glass vial.
“Wait for it to dissolve completely. Then drink the whole thing before you go to sleep tonight.” Sad lump.
He pockets the vial with a sleepy nod and disappears into the crowd.
“Tatum!” A woman, late thirties with dark, bouncy curls, pushes through the mess of people and rushes up to me. “I’m so glad to see you here today. I need to place an order.”
I pull a pad and pen out of my bag. “Yeah, what do you need?”
She taps her chin for a second and then grins at me. “I need a sleeping draught. Strong enough to knock a two-hundred-pound man out for…let’s say a couple of days?”
I don’t ask questions, but Mona never does have good intentions. “Are we going for a coma-like sleep here? Or do you want it to mimic a concussion?”
“Hangover?” She nods slowly, narrowing her eyes a bit as she plays out a scene in her head. “Really bad hangover. And yeah, maybe they hit their head a little when they passed out?”
I jot down some notes and sign her name to it. “Sure. When you want it?”
“How soon can you get it to me?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Excellent. Perfect. You’re the best.” She plants a kiss on my cheek and moves back off to her booth. Mona is a peddler of voodoo dolls and other trinkets infused with human hair and nails designed to give the buyers a small amount of vengeance over someone who’s offended them.
Next to her is a booth that sells lava lamps and dreamcatchers. The merchants advertise the different dreamcatchers as having the ability to catch negative energy, anxiety, depression, and nightmares. The lava lamps are said to cure a variety of ailments, headaches, and diseases and are very expensive. The youngest of the three women working that booth claims she can shift into different animals. Having never seen it, I have my doubts, but I wouldn’t say it doesn’t exist somewhere after everything I’ve seen.
When I turn around, I see Shepard, still leaning against his pillar and staring at me. Despite his chosen profession, his appearance is actually quite neat. He’s fit and clean-shaven and wears simple, light-colored button-down shirts with dark slacks and suspenders, giving him a somewhat quirky look. His hair is shaved on the sides but long and softly teased back on top. Someone Kalin would find attractive, creepy staring aside.
I watch him for a moment. He doesn’t move an inch. He doesn’t even blink. Damn fr
eaky-ass black-market merchants.
He wasn’t here a few years ago when I used to come down here all the time, selling curses and remedies to the desperate and desolate and somewhat crazy, until Tessandra found out and made me stop. No, he showed shortly after I started coming back earlier this year. He told me his name and offered me a diamond bracelet he found in a gutter.
I have no use for fancy jewelry—I’d just have to hide it or pawn it. Not that I would have taken it even if I did want it. I’m not sure what his aim is, but he has a different kind of energy than even the strangest person I’ve ever run into down here. I can’t stand to be within a yard of him. I’d rather talk to the pus peddler again.
It’s not the smell. You’d think someone who went around digging in dumpsters would smell like garbage, and he does. It’s light, but it hangs around him like a mist, just unpleasant enough to turn your stomach. But it’s worse than that. It’s cold around him. Like he’s wrapped in a layer of ice, and it just emanates from him with every breath that he takes, sucking the warmth from the air and everything else nearby. I get the impression things die around him. I can almost see death when he’s near.
He’s taken a particular interest in my business down here. Asking me every so often how I get the curses and “blessings” into the stones. Asking me what I do for a living in the real world. Asking me what part of town I live in. I always leave without answering him, hoping one day he’ll get the hint and stop trying to talk to me.
A young girl approaches me next, drawing my attention away from Shepard. She’s probably still in middle school. Her stone is in a pendant she wanted me to alter, an heirloom from her grandmother. She pays me—just one fifty this time as she provided the materials and she’s just a kid—and I hand over her sister’s necklace, wrapped in tissue paper.
“Three weeks’ worth of nightmares for your sister, give or take a day or two,” I say. “Everything you told me she was afraid of.”
No Rest for the Wicked Page 3
