The Branded Rose Prophecy

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  When her mother had died almost exactly two years later, her father had already been absent for nearly a year; so had the waitress. Unnur had worked a series of jobs trying to support herself. The most successful of them had been hard labor as a dishwasher in the big kitchen at the Richmond Hotel on Main Street, where she could keep her back to most everybody most of the time. But the slave wages hadn’t covered her few bills, so she had added a second job as kitchen hand in another hotel, but that hadn’t worked out so well with her gammy leg and they had let her go.

  She had learned about Tarot cards from one of the kitchen hands at the Richmond. He had been a short, pure-blood Shawnee Indian, whose real name, Tenskwatawa, no one could pronounce, so everyone called him Tenska. Tenska had a Tarot deck that he kept in a silk sleeve in his back pocket and whenever he had a spare moment, he would shuffle the cards. He would use them to answer even simple questions, like whether he wanted to take a smoke break outside. Unnur had no idea what the cards told him, but it was the images on them that fascinated her.

  On her lunch break two days after Tenska had started, he sat down on the opposite side of the tiny table she always used, at the far corner of the little closed-in yard the staff were permitted to relax in. He had studied her closely. His whites were grease-splattered and there was a burn on the corner of his apron. But his eyes were clear and very young, while he looked old, like he had seen all of history and was wearied by it. It was the first time she had ever looked at them closely.

  “It’s time for you t’learn,” he said. His voice was astonishingly deep for a man so small. He was shorter than her.

  “Learn?” she asked.

  Then he did something so totally unexpected that it left Unnur frozen and speechless. He reached out with one long finger and very gently touched the center of her mark, high up on her cheekbone. “You’re the one.”

  Then he had started laying out the cards, face upwards, talking softly with his deep voice, telling her the story of each one.

  “Don’t you have your own gods, who tell you these things?” she had asked. It was an impertinent question, but she felt like he owed her for touching her mark.

  “My gods, your gods…they’re all the same god,” he said, with a smile. “Just like these cards. The cards are just a way for them to talk to you and me. Others use different ways. My neegah, she looked into the water and that’s how they talked to her.”

  A week later, he didn’t show for work and was never seen again. It was as if he had arrived in time to show her the power of the Tarot, then left. She was more sure of that when she discovered his name meant “open door”. He had opened a door for her that would never be closed again.

  She hadn’t learned everything in those few days. The learning, the heavy study, would be a lifetime’s work. But Tenska had shown her the way.

  Unnur realized she was shuffling the cards in her hands, staring without seeing at the silk cloth laid over the velvet cover that draped over the whole table, right down to the floor. She often did this when she was about to ask The Question. She would come to and realize she had spent long minutes wandering through memories or thinking about something. She accepted that this was her way of preparing herself for the reading.

  The cards themselves had guided her to The Question. She was not the most powerful medium in the world. She knew that very well. Her sight was weak and intermittent, but she was a willing student, prepared to work hard to maximize what little power she had.

  She had bought her first Tarot deck the day after Tenska disappeared, and borrowed every book about Tarot available from the library. Her mother was sick by then and spent most of her time in bed, so Unnur could spend her evenings reading, in between morphine shots. Reading, and laying out spreads and studying them.

  Because her memory had been fried at the same time as her leg had suffered, Unnur wrote down every single spread she laid, along with her interpretation and the date. She developed her own notation system for the cards, which made understanding them easier, too. Each card was related to other cards, not just those in their own suite. The Major Arcana fed their power into the minor cards. The royal cards built upon the number cards. They were life itself, tangled, interwoven and persistent as hell.

  Unnur did her first reading for someone else nearly a year later. Her mother had been transferred to a hospital for more dedicated care than Unnur and her crooked leg could manage, and her father still hadn’t reappeared. The reading had happened casually, quite by accident, which was the only way it could have happened for her. Because of her mark and her brace, she was timid about talking to complete strangers, but this one had stopped by her corner of the big table at the library, where she was reading an in-house-only volume and laying out cards experimentally as she read.

  “Do you do readings?” the well-coiffed woman asked.

  “I…” Tongue-tied, Unnur looked down at the tabletop. Her glance had fallen upon the Strength card: the woman in white, taming a lion not with physical strength but with her will and her courage.

  It was silent encouragement.

  Unnur lifted her head to look at the woman again. “I do readings,” she said.

  Seven months later, she opened her store.

  * * * * *

  Tell me.

  Once Unnur had learned to listen instead of asking, the cards had begun to speak. Sometimes, she needed to clarify their message with follow-up questions, but usually the meaning was very clear. In hindsight, she realized she had been gumming up the channel with her misguided questions.

  She didn’t know if it was gods or God who spoke to her. She thought of them/it as the Earth reaching out to her, as she was one of the few who could hear. She called it Gaia when she really needed a name for it.

  After the first time she had thrown her mental hands up into the air with a plea for guidance, things had begun to change. Customers increased. Not a flood, not all at once, but foot traffic through the door picked up slowly and surely.

  The cards told her where to advertise and where not to advertise, when she had not thought of paying for advertising at all before that moment. Soon, she had a monthly mail-out newsletter service with over five thousand paying subscribers. She got calls from all over Florida and the eastern seaboard, asking about readings and products she had advertised.

  She did readings over the phone, and three years ago she had taken her first go-to appointment. He was an extremely successful entrepreneur here in Lakeland, and he had stressed—and paid for—an extraordinary level of discretion. Unnur understood why he was concerned about appearances. The cards told her to take the appointment and abide by his restrictions (he had appeared as the Two of Wands), and soon enough, he had referred her to another businessman, this one in Tampa. The Tampa mogul had arranged for a car to drive her there and back and she had charged two hundred and fifty dollars for the reading and her time. That had paid for new product stands for the front end of the store and a fancy new window display stand, covered in crushed purple velvet.

  Daily, she consulted the cards to hear what she should do next. Sometimes the messages were minor, or she thought they were. The cards had told her to skip an occult conference in Miami. Later, she found out the flight she had been booked on had crashed, three miles out from Miami. No one had survived.

  Two years ago, the King and Queen of Wands had appeared for the first time. Unnur had traced back through all her recorded readings to check. For general readings, for answering questions and for commercial readings, they had appeared. But they had not appeared in any of her communications with Gaia. Not once.

  The two court cards most definitely represented actual people in her spreads. Who, she didn’t know. The cards would tell her in time. Court cards could indicate people, or they could sometimes represent ideas and concepts. Abstract meanings. But this time, from the cards surrounding them, Unnur knew that two people, a man and a woman, had been brought to her attention.

  Patiently, she kept on working, ob
ediently following her guides and increment by increment, her business improved and life became a smidgen more comfortable. She knew that she would have made faster progress if she were more powerful, but she had been touched with only a small dose of the Sight and the cards were limited by her inabilities. They could be shouting their messages at her via the world’s largest sound system and even though she stood with her ear pressed against the speaker, she could only hear the messages in fits and starts.

  But she was content with what her little talent provided. She had a roof over her head, she ate when she needed to and she had the privilege of being paid to do something she loved. Who’d’ve thought little Unnur Syeda Guillory, who had been struck on the face by lightning when she was sixteen years old and had been pronounced officially dead for five minutes, would ever have amounted to this much?

  The King and Queen of Wands kept appearing after that. Not in every spread, but always together. Unnur gradually built a picture of the pair. He was a leader, bold, forceful and charismatic. She was creative, working to accept the position life had thrust upon her. Unnur began to like them and look forward to their appearance.

  As she shuffled her cards, she wondered if she would see them today. It had been a few weeks since they had come back to visit. Wondering so might skew the reading, so she cleared her mind once again, holding the cards.

  Tell me.

  Slowly, she laid the spread upon the table, her fingers dexterously manipulating the cards with the mastery of long practice, while she held herself in a mental breath-holding position. She meditated her way through the laying out, so that her thoughts and expectations did not affect the spread in any way. She made herself a pure conduit.

  Only once the last card had been laid and she had reverently placed the remainder of the pack at the top of the table did she study the cards.

  There they were, together as always. Well, hello! Unnur smiled and moved on, looking at the cards around them.

  The Devil. The Lord of Sorrows, with his three swords piercing the heart and dripping life’s blood. The Lord of Ruin—right next to the Queen. Unnur stared at the ten blades thrust into his back, her heart screaming along in her chest.

  Violence. By the blade.

  Unnur sent out her thoughts to the King and Queen, wherever they were. Be wary!

  She stroked the side of the Queen’s card, where the bloom was. Especially you, she added, for the danger surrounded her on every side except the one where the King lay.

  * * * * *

  Sergio was very happy. He was twitching with it. Positively fuckin’ wired to the max.

  Oh, it was going to be a beee-you-tiful night, filled with righteous fuckin’ comeback. The monkey that had been on his back for two dark years was about to get his. Oh, yes he was, in every way Sergio could think of. He had spent every night for the last two years fantasizing about what he would do if this exact situation ever came to pass, so now he didn’t have anything left to plan. He knew exactly what he was going to do.

  He sat in the back booth in Green’s deli, where they sold excellent milkshakes that tasted even better when he was high. He was waiting for the others to report in and it gave him some spare time. He let himself savor the upcoming payback.

  He didn’t know how many people there were in New York. Fuckin’ millions, he guessed. The chances of accidentally spotting someone you really wanted to see, to see them bop along by, completely unaware that you had seen them, why, those chances were so thin that you could practically see your hand through them.

  But someone was dealing out lucky breaks and his number had come up.

  Ruffy, one of only three of his soldiers who had made it out of the park alive that night, had come hurrying into the deli three weeks ago, his hood up over his head, not wearing his colors and sniffing away his need for a fix. It was only just past noon, too early to start dishing out crap about not wearing his colors.

  He’d slid onto the bench opposite Sergio, his hands still deep in the pockets on the front of his hoodie, slouched down on the seat until his chin was bare inches above the table. His leg instantly started to bounce up and down under the table, his sneaker doing a soft tap on the lino beneath.

  “What’t fuck d’you want?” Sergio demanded. He was enjoying his buzz. Being disturbed ruined it.

  Ruffy sniffed and brought out a hand to wipe at his nose with the back of it. “I saw him, man.”

  Sergio stared at him. He couldn’t even be bothered asking who. He just plain didn’t give a fuck.

  Ruffy leaned forward earnestly. “Him,” he whispered.

  Sergio didn’t need to be told more. Him could only mean one dude: the fucker who had choked him off in the park. The one who had thought he could get away with threatening him. The one who had stood over the red-haired dog-loving freak and her puny brother like an invisible shield for two fucking years.

  Sergio snatched at Ruffy’s hoodie and dragged him across the table. His milkshake spilled and the glass rolled up against the wall, slopping green milk across the Formica. “You better not be fuckin’ wit me.”

  “Honest to god,” Ruffy said. “I saw him real good that night. An’ I just saw him now. Walkin’ into a buildin’ on Wall Street, cool as a cucumber.”

  “What’choo doin’ down there?”

  “Delivery,” Ruffy said, sounding scared. “You said to give the stuff to that guy. Remember?”

  “Right.” He had to check. Sometimes the shits decided they were gonna do their own thing and had to be reprimanded. It wasn’t his memory that was slipping. He remembered just fine. “Which building?”

  * * * * *

  Ruffy took him back to the building. It was a fuckin’ bank, but that figured—it was Wall Street. Sergio had stood across the street, just out of the line of suits hurrying along the sidewalk and settled in to wait. The guy would eventually leave the building again. If he’d already left, then he’d be back. Sooner or later.

  After four hours, Ruffy got the fidgets bad enough he was drawing attention, so Sergio sent him home with a growled command. But Sergio stayed in place, steady as a rock, his gaze on the street entrance of the Strand Manhattan Trust building, scanning every tall man who stepped out through the glass doors.

  Sooner or later, he kept telling himself. He was filled with energy. Pumping with it. He knew he could stand here for a century if that’s what it took.

  Sooner or later.

  It took four days.

  Sergio used the payphone ten paces away to call up his soldiers, while still keeping an eye on the glass doors. Once his men arrived, he sent them for food and used them for washroom relief as he needed it. He got rid of the patrolling cops by telling them he was loitering because he was waiting for his brother, the vice-president of the bank over there. They were going to do lunch/dinner/whatever meal was closest, but his stuck-up brother didn’t want him seen by his stuffy co-workers. It had just enough of a ring of authenticity that the cops left him alone to wait, watching the doors over the road. They had no fuckin’ idea.

  Sergio slept in Central Park. There was no one who would dare fuck with him even there. He returned to his post early each morning and so it was that he was in position close to eight in the morning, Wall Street already firing on all cylinders, when he saw from the corner of his eye a tall suit striding toward the bank.

  His eyes narrowed. His heart revved up.

  It looked like the fucker. He was tall enough and the shoulders were big enough. The prissy blond hair, though…he hadn’t guessed the guy was a faggot. No one had hair like that for real. It came out of a salon where all the queer boys got up each other. Had Ruffy got it right? The fucker that had shoved a goddamn sword up under his chin and locked him into that iron-hard arm lock was…a suit?

  It was an expensive suit. Not that Sergio knew anything about suits, but it just looked expensive. The faggot had pulled his hair back into a goddamn for-real pony tail. Shit on a stick.

  His surprise kept Sergio completely
still for twenty vital seconds. Then he took off like a startled rabbit, diving between cars and cabs, until he jumped onto the opposite sidewalk and slowed to a walk as hurried as everyone else’s. He pulled off his shirt and turned his cap around, so he looked like any one of the dozens of maintenance dudes and grunts coming in and out.

  He came up behind the fucker and got his first true measure of the guy’s height, which matched his memories. Then there was a jam at the door, a woman coming out with a walker trying to pull it open ahead of her kiddy, which caused the four people trying to get in the door to bunch up in front of it. The front one held the door open for her. Which put Sergio right behind the fucker and then he knew.

  The smell was right.

  It wasn’t often Sergio took conscious note of smells, but the fucker had held him up against his chest, his arm wrapped around his throat, Sergio’s ear jammed into his armpit. He might not have been able to describe that scent but as soon as he smelled it, he recognized it. It made him flash back to the night two years ago in the park: the pain of the sword digging into his chin, the iron band around his throat, the fear crawling low down in his belly, writhing and wanting to leap right up into his throat. The flashback and the start it gave him convinced him more than anything else he had the right guy.

  He faded away, back into the crowd, before the fucker could even twitch that he’d been there.

  Sergio spent the next three days carefully finding out more about the dude. He started with one of the security guards at the bank, slipping him a package of the good stuff. Sergio’s description made the guy raise his brows. “Him?” he whispered, looking around, suddenly scared. He flipped open a binder filled with plastic sleeves and tapped the page. “Him?” he questioned.

  Sergio looked. Blue eyes, prissy white hair shorter than it was now. “That’s him,” he confirmed. He glanced down at the bottom of the page. These were mug shots that the guards used to identify key personnel in the building and this one had a neat description underneath. Asher Strand, President, Strand Manhattan Trust.