Patrick was casting an eye over three plates about to be served, as the server loaded them onto her tray. He saw Charlee and gave her a short nod, to let her know she had been seen.
Charlee stepped back out and leaned against the wall to wait. She pulled her coat tighter around her. It was March, but it was one of those days when winter was winning the fight against spring, which had gone back to bed to recover. Everything looked grey, wet and slushy. The trees looked bare and forlorn, and the grass that had been uncovered by the snow was brittle and ochre-colored. The snow had gone and so had the really cold temperatures, but nothing had sprouted. Green buds would have at least said that this would be one of the last days of winter and that spring was on the way.
Patrick slammed open the screen door nearly ten minutes later and banged his way outside, his kitchen whites a bright contrast to the overcast day. He might be calm in manner, but he was clumsy in movement. His size thirteen boots were always thudding up against cupboards and corners, catching on chairs and table legs.
He was carrying a soup bowl with a spoon in it, a towel underneath to protect his fingers from the heat. “Here, it’s a new recipe. Tell me what you think,” he told her, thrusting the bowl toward her.
Charlee took it curiously, sliding her fingers beneath the same way he had been carrying it. “It smells divine,” she told him. Rich, brothy scent, spices she would never be able to name, all in a thick stew of what looked like simple old cauliflower and a meat of some kind. Possibly chicken. She took a careful mouthful and let her brows lift to show surprise. “Delicious!” she declared, once she had swallowed. “Is that chicken?”
“Shrimp,” Patrick told her. He leaned back against the wall as she had been and lit up a cigarette. “How you doin’, kid?”
“I’m doin’ fine. Just fine,” she told him, between mouthfuls of the beautiful soup. Stew. Whatever it was. “Did you have a good week off?”
“The best,” Patrick said, with a sigh.
“Lord Tight-Pants still on your case?”
The manager Asher had hired when Ylva left had been running one of the restaurants in the Waldorf Astoria. Anthony Brigand, which was his real name, was the best of the best, Pierre had told Charlee. Asher had gone for quality and got it. But while Anthony shined as a manager, he made up for it with a complete lack of people skills when it came to the staff.
He was a martinet who made the kitchen staff’s lives a misery when Pierre was not there, and the front of house staff miserable all the time.
He always wore skin-tight suit pants and jackets with huge lapels and shoulders, in garish pinstripes. Everyone was wearing suits like that now, but what fascinated Charlee was the strained fabric of his trousers. It pressed against his crotch, showing almost everything. She had looked away, dismayed, the first time she had realized that what she was looking at was his thing and now she avoided letting her gaze get anywhere near his general hip area.
Patrick blew out another breath, expelling a heavy cloud of smoke at the same time. “Anthony is an asshole, but he really knows his stuff.”
It was because of Anthony that she no longer used the front door of the restaurant. He did not allow her to sit at the tables the paying customers used. He frowned upon her visits, but in a moment of unusual sensitivity, had suggested that if she must visit, she arrive via the kitchen entrance, where all her friends were.
“Pierre tipped him off that you’re a friend of Asher’s,” Patrick had told her confidentially. “He’s got just enough sense of self-preservation that he didn’t kick you out and tell you to never come back. Although I bet he wanted to. If he knew you were eating out of the kitchen and cutting into his profits, he’d have a cow.”
“I eat leftovers,” Charlee pointed out.
Patrick had grinned. “Sometimes they’re not that left over,” he told her. “If Lord Tight-Pants has pissed all over someone, they’ll get up a plate for you, just to spite him.”
She didn’t mind using the kitchen entrance, anyway. It was true; she had friends in the kitchen and now, no one at the front of the house to say hello to. Which brought her back to why she was here. Charlee tipped the bowl to get at the dregs, enjoying every last drop enormously, then made herself ask the question. “Is Asher here today?” She was pleased when it came out sounding very casual and offhand.
Patrick didn’t move from his tired lean against the wall, his big boot pressed up against the wall behind him for added stability. “I haven’t seen him since I got back.” He pulled out another cigarette and lit it with the butt of the first. “Sandy said he hadn’t seen him for a while, when he handed off.” Sandy was one of the other three sous chefs the restaurant rotated through.
Charlee bit her lip. That made it official. Ninety days exactly since she had last seen Asher. Ylva had left (and that was another blow), he’d hired Anthony to run the show and disappeared himself.
Where was he?
Patrick straightened up and screwed the butt of his cigarette into the ground with his food-splattered boot. “See ya tomorrow?” he asked.
She had made a deal, she told herself. She would check up on Asher every single day, just to make sure he was being careful. Just because he wasn’t here (didn’t want to be here) when she was, didn’t mean she got to bail on her half of the deal. She would not feel right (prickly gruellies!) if she didn’t.
And she really wanted to know where Asher had been. She was going to kill him herself when he did finally show, and he would. Sooner or later, he’d turn up again. This was his restaurant. The place where he could almost be himself. He’d turn up again because there probably weren’t that many places where he could be himself, where the superhero could just sit and relax.
He’s found another place. A better place. The thought surfaced as it always did whenever she reasoned out that he would reappear someday, which she did frequently. She was only thirteen, but she was old enough to know that even though they were alike in some ways (secrets! Lies!), her company wasn’t nearly as distracting as other attractions would be to a man like Asher. New York crawled with them, some legal and some not.
And that was where her heart would sink and her fear rise. What if Ylva’s leaving and Asher’s disappearance were somehow connected? What if he had given up on life in general? What if he was shooting up, or blowing his brains out on crack? Sick with some disease he’d picked up from a whore? What if he had AIDS?
Damn it, where are you?
But…she had made a deal. Charlee sighed. “I’ll be here tomorrow,” she told Patrick.
“Good deal,” he said and she looked at him, startled, until she realized he was using the new street lingo, not commenting on her promise (which was secret).
Charlee handed him her empty bowl then walked back out onto the street, to cross over to the SPCA. It was the Easter break, when school was out for two weeks, and she was more than happy to spend her vacation at the animal shelter (closer to Asher). Toward the end of last summer, Carole had offered her a tiny cash wage for her time, as she was their best assistant. Carole had also started her training the volunteers when they began. Charlee had been assisting in the hospital for nearly a year already.
It was highly satisfying work and had completely cemented her plans to find a profession that let her work with animals full time. She had chosen every science-based option available at school, to pave the way for college, although how she was going to pay for college was a giant, nebulous problem she put off thinking about whenever the question arose. There was time yet.
Carole had already promised her a proper, wage-paying job as soon as she turned fourteen and could be legally employed.
Charlee glanced at the front door of the restaurant as she passed it and sighed again.
Where are you, Asher Strand? Are you being safe?
Chapter Ten
Unnur Guillory unlocked her tiny storefront shop at 7:47 a.m. just like she had been doing for the last eleven years. That was going to change soon, and she alr
eady knew in broad sweeping outline how that change was going to happen. She also knew that there was nothing she could do to redirect her fate.
Her routine was unvarying, for reasons of health and sanity as much as because she had been following this routine for over a decade. She rose at six every morning, including Sundays, slowly drank her breakfast of juiced wheat grass and apples, and then read for an hour before showering and dressing for the day.
Sometimes she read fiction, but most often she reached for well-thumbed books about her personal heroes and their work: Edgar Cayce, Jean Dixon, Sylvia Browne. Sometimes she would range across the work of “lesser” souls like Jane Roberts and Ingo Swann, but only when she wanted something light and not too taxing. That usually happened on hot, humid mornings, when the national weather service radio reported the potential for thunderstorms in the afternoon.
On those days, Unnur had to force herself out of the little apartment above her store and down the narrow and open wooden stairs. She had replaced the iron stairs within a week of moving into the apartment. The conductive qualities of steel had made her tremble every time she had used them and she had been completely unable to touch the steel bannister. She would stand and hug herself and wait for her balance to return, risking a fall backwards down the stairs, instead of gripping the bannister and anchoring herself that way.
She pushed aside the folding cage door that protected the whole front of her store, window included, and unlocked the glass door behind it. She didn’t see her reflection in the glass. She had long ago stopped looking in mirrors. She was thirty-seven years of age, and she had come to know nearly twenty years ago that the red tracks and scarring on her face, radiating out from her right cheekbone like the roots of a particularly obnoxious weed or the bad blood of infection and disease, would never fade like it did for most victims.
She had been marked.
The brace she wore on her right leg, to compensate for the wasted muscle below her knee, clicked as she swung forward through the door and flipped the sign hanging on the inside of it from “Closed” to “Welcome! Come on in.”
The one plate glass window on the right of the door she had set up with a wide shelf in front of it to display products that could catch the eye of passers-by. There were pretty collections of scented candles, which she personally did not have much truck with. If she was going to use candles (and they had their uses, no argument), then plain household candles did the job. It was the candle’s flame that held the power, not the wax holding it up or the aroma it gave off. But people seemed to like them.
There were glass and crystal paperweights, glittering globes in a range of sizes, each with something intriguing in their centres: flowers, a small globe of the world, or colored shapes that rebounded light back at you in a thousand different colors. They sold quite well.
Then there were the plain crystal balls. Unnur displayed them on their own individual stands. The stands themselves were enticing, she admitted. She had found a wood-turner who was handy at turning a lump of kindling into a beautiful stand of intricate curves and valleys. She bought them from him for fifteen dollars apiece, then sanded and painted them herself at night. She could get fifty dollars for the stand alone. A nice stand with one of the bigger crystal balls on them she could sell for over ninety dollars. If she draped a hemmed piece of silk over the ball, and handled it with a degree of wariness that looked a lot like awe, she could ask a hundred and fifty, and it was rare they didn’t take out their pocketbook without demur.
The store was longer than it was wide so in the front section, where tourists and the merely curious browsed, Unnur had put stands of what she tended to think of as gewgaws. Cystals, more candles, scents and essential oils, cards, books on horoscopes (“What does YOUR future hold?”), Chinese sun signs, jewelry, magazines and more. There was a waist-high, V-shaped stand that held big posters inside plastic sleeves, including fantasy scenes, movie posters and occult calendars. The sale of all the paraphernalia was where she made most of her rent.
It wasn’t that she thought most customers were gullible, or that the products she peddled for revenue as quackery, but she did think of them as essentially harmless trinkets.
The real stuff, where the true power lay, was at the back of the store. Here, she had spent weeks stripping back decades of indifferent paint colors, right down to the cement floor and cinderblock walls. Then she had painstakingly resealed and repainted everything. The floor was unapologetic black, sealed over so feet didn’t scuff it, although she had refinished it a few times since the original application. The walls from curtain height through to the ceiling and the ceiling itself were a matte black, and in among the pot lights and spot lights, she had added little fairy lights, the ones that adorned Christmas trees. She had stripped off the decorative crystal-shaped tips and left just the bare light to gleam like the stars she had wanted them to represent.
On the walls on either side, she had spent nearly three weeks drawing by hand and then painting two long fantasy murals. She had copied them out of a fantasy art book that she had bought as starting stock for the store but never got around to actually putting on a shelf for sale. It had been a draw-by-numbers exercise, for she knew her mind wouldn’t be able to hold the image for long. She would forget bits of it and others would rub themselves clean out of her memory. So she had drawn a grid over the images and scaled up a larger replica grid on the walls and she slowly drew in the elements with constant reference to the originals. Painting them had been the same dot-to-dot duplication, and she had pushed herself to finish them, working late into the night, until her one good leg throbbed from carrying her weight for so long without cease and her headaches had threatened to call in on her.
The result was two landscapes that looked, so customers said, like you could step through the wall and roll around in the purple grass and play with the baby dragon. Unnur always looked and saw the mistakes she had made. But it pleased the customers.
The murals drew the more-than-curious customers deeper into the store and it was there that Unnur’s real work happened.
On both sides of the store, on low, stand-alone shelving units that didn’t block the view of the landscapes, were the Tarot.
There was every type of Tarot deck available, including some of the gimmicky ones that featured sea creatures, or elves, or other nonsense that Unnur didn’t truck with, but the Tarot was the Tarot: Its power came through no matter what the card carried on its face. She preferred the standard Waite-Rider-Smith deck, herself, and that was the one she used for personal and pay-for readings.
There were also books, and it was in this section that she kept big and small posters of the Minor and Major Arcana.
Her reading table was at the back of the store and in between customers, she would handle the deck, shuffling it and pouring her warm regard over it. Sometimes, she would do readings for herself, asking questions as they occurred to her: What will this week bring the world? What will come to this little corner of Florida? A favorite was, What will the weather be today?
But the question that brought the most interesting answers wasn’t a question at all. She would hold the pack in her hands, cradling it softly, and when she was relaxed and ready, she would whisper to the ether: Tell me.
Then she would lay a six-month special spread out upon the silk and see what it was she was to hear.
Unnur had stumbled upon The Question, as she had begun to think of it, almost eight years ago to the day. She had been between customers. Back in those days, customers had been rare. On that day, she had just had a visit from the princeling who ran the company that owned her building. She was behind in her rent, didn’t she know? Well, of course she knew. Her rent covered both her business and her home. She was preternaturally aware of each due date and (usually) the yawning gap between what she owed and how much she had. Her little occult store was ailing. It seemed there wasn’t much call for divination in Lakeland. But Unnur didn’t know how to do anything else. She couldn’t do
most other things that a body might do to pay for their daily gumbo. Her weak right leg wouldn’t let her do manual work at the pace they would want her to, and her marked face meant that jobs like selling pretty smelly stuff in the local Walgreens or trading stamps door-to-door were just as out of reach.
But she could read the cards, better than most. She had been marked, and this was the other side of that marking. Ever since the day she had got her mark, she had sometimes just known things: things that had happened in places far away, things that were about to happen.
Her mother had called people like her gifted, but what she had really meant was that they were cursed, for she would have no dealings with anything that held a hint of heresy. She was a good Catholic woman and God was her guide, as He should be for everyone. Unnur had been old enough when she was marked to know that revealing her new gift to her mother would end with her cast out of the family. Her acceptance as a good girl by her mother was already in jeopardy because of the mark. Her mother hadn’t quite made up her mind if the mark was a sign from God or if the other fella had singled her out.
Unnur had her own opinion on who had done the marking and wisely kept it to herself, along with her ability to sometimes see things before they happened or just know things that she didn’t have any right knowing. She knew her daddy was seeing the waitress at the diner where he ate lunch every weekday. She also knew her mother wouldn’t live another two years because the growth in her belly had already grown an inch across and was sucking the life out of her body, even though no one, including her mother, had any idea that she was anything other than perfectly healthy.
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 16
