The Witch's Familiars

by G. A. Rael

  Inside the box was a standard deck of Tarot cards. She knew now that they could easily be purchased online for little more than the cost of a book, but Ezekiel had risked more to find those cards for her than any smuggler of gold or gems. The deck was worn and well-loved from countless late-night divination sessions hidden under the covers.

  Ezekiel had always been fascinated by the very gifts that scared Jordan most. In the end, their father had been right about one thing. Ezekiel had certainly paid the price for his interest in the occult. He wouldn't have been there the night of the fire if he hadn't been so fascinated with her power.

  Jordan was jolted from her memories as two volunteers peeled back the curtains. "Oh good," Cindy cried, walking toward the booth. "You're already dressed and set up, and don't you just look adorable?" she gushed, tucking the clipboard she was carrying underneath one arm.

  Jordan gave her a patient smile, even though the camp was already wearing on her patience. The sooner the fair was over, the better. “You look great, too. And less theatrical.”

  "Oh, here," Cindy interrupted, setting a metal box down on the table. It looked out of place amid the array of exotic colors and fabrics. "They're posting the sign out front, but it's ten dollars for a palm reading and twenty for tarot. Remember to tell them it's for charity!"

  "I don't really have any experience reading palms," Jordan warned her for what seemed like the twentieth time.

  "Well, of course you don't," Cindy scoffed. "The bearded lady wears a stick-on, but tonight is the autumn equinox," she said in a spooky voice. "Anything is possible when the veil between the living and the spirit world is thin."

  "So we're fleecing people under the guise of cosmological forces," Jordan muttered. She had assumed the readings would at least be free.

  "Yes, but we're fleecing them for charity," Cindy replied in a singsong voice. "Don't worry so much, you'll be done by nine."

  Jordan sighed. "Okay, I guess I can handle it."

  "Sure you can, and remember," she said, leaning in, "have fun! You're twenty-four, it wouldn't kill you to act like it sometimes."

  It felt more like fifty-four, but Cindy had a point. “I’ll do my best."

  "Text me if you need anything, I'll be in the admin trailer most of the night," Cindy said, already navigating the gravel lot in her stilettos. Jordan wasn't sure how she managed to walk in them at all without snapping an ankle.

  As soon as the sign was placed, the booth began to draw attention. A small line formed and Jordan took a deep breath before greeting her first customer. How was a fortune teller supposed to talk, anyway?

  "Good evening," she said stiffly to the first group that approached. "Can I interest you in a glimpse of the future?"

  Nearly two hours and a few dozen BS fortunes later, Jordan had become a master in the art of reading people, but she wasn't sure if she was any better at reading the cards. She was starting to think that clairvoyance wasn't like riding a bicycle, after all. Maybe Hermes was right and she had suppressed her magical abilities for so long that they were starting to atrophy.

  The crowd had long since died down with competition from the food stands, the live band that was performing its final set and the modest selection of rides, but Jordan still had a customer every few minutes.

  At least Cindy would be pleased with how full the cash box was. A small group of teenagers nearly passed by the booth before one of the girls pointed in Jordan's direction and waved the others over to join her.

  "Good evening," Jordan said with a well-practiced air of mystery. The cornier the better in the eyes of the festival goers. "Shall I consult the spirit world for you this evening?"

  "Ben wants to get his palm read," said a tall brunette as she approached the stall, grinning impishly at the shorter boy beside her.

  "I do not," Ben mumbled, flipping his long hair out of his eyes. Jordan always wondered how the teenagers with that hairstyle managed to see.

  "C'mon, Ben," chided the red-haired girl beside him, keeping her eyes locked on her phone. "Don't be a loser, just let her read your hand."

  Ben sighed and fished a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket. Jordan took it with no small amount of shame and placed it into the money box. "Thank you for your donation," she said, holding up her palms. The boy reluctantly held out his right hand.

  "Yes, I see good things in your future," Jordan mumbled, relieved that the teenagers didn't seem to be taking her seriously at all. "You'll have good success in your education and your career if you work hard," she said, glancing at the band patches sewn onto his knapsack. "I also see music in your future… are you perhaps in a band?"

  His eyes widened slightly. "I was thinking about starting one with my friends, actually. How'd you know that?"

  "The spirits see many things," she said, holding in a chuckle. "Just don't quit school--or date anyone in the band, I hear that rarely works out."

  "Kara, you do it," he said, nudging the girl who had quite literally forced his hand.

  Kara rolled her eyes. "Palm readings are lame. I want her to use the cards," she said, stuffing a twenty into the box.

  Jordan looked down at her deck and began to lay out a basic spread for the girl. She hadn't worked her cards in years, not since Ezekiel's death. Part of her hoped she didn't still have it in her.

  "Your present is represented by the Hierophant," she said, tapping the top card in the spread. "You've begun some new work, adopted a new system of belief, maybe."

  Kara frowned. "Well, I did just start a cleanse yesterday morning. Hey, that's pretty good."

  Jordan flipped over the bottom card. "This card is the Seven of Swords. It represents romantic distress of some kind in your past. Perhaps infidelity?"

  Kara's eyes widened and she looked over at Phone Girl. "Oh my God, Ellie, she's talking about Jason. Cheating asshole," she muttered. "Go on, what does it say about my future?"

  Jordan flipped the last card, smiling a bit. "The Two of Cups. It symbolizes love, happiness, and the eternal union between two people. You'll find happiness with someone very close to you."

  Ben was staring intently at the ground and Kara was obviously trying to hide her smile. "Knew it," she mouthed, glancing back at Ellie. "Come on, El, you have to do it. She's the real deal."

  The real deal? It was all Jordan could do to keep from laughing. If the poor girl only knew. Maybe she was the real deal, or at least had been at one time, but the card in the future position, even though it was the only one anyone really cared about, was hardly a guarantee. The future wasn't set, any decent precog knew that. Whatever the card promised, whether fortune or despair, the recipient was the one who chose its meaning in the end and brought it to fruition.

  "Nah," said Ellie, tapping away at her phone, "I don't do cards."

  "So get a palm reading," said Ben. Jordan realized she had created a true believer and wasn't sure how she felt about it.

  "Ugh, fine," Ellie muttered, keeping her phone in one hand as she shoved a ten into the box and thrust her other hand in Jordan's general direction.

  Jordan hesitated as Ellie continued to text, but she waved her hand over the girl's upturned palm and decided to carry on with the show. "Ah, yes," she murmured, placing her hand underneath Ellie's. "I see a bright future ahead of you. College and an exciting career."

  Ellie yawned.

  Jordan trailed a finger along Ellie’s lifeline, prepared to improvise some cautionary warning about living in the present when a blinding flash of light took her off guard. Jordan gasped sharply as her hand spasmed, gripping the girl's wrist involuntarily. Ellie panicked and tried in vain to pull her hand out of Jordan's grasp.

  The blinking lights of the festival rides and attractions went black and gave way to a hallucination of celluloid film playing a series of clips, each one starring Ellie at some point in her life. Some clips were innocuous, mere glimpses of summers spent playing underneath the sprinkler and searching the grass for frogs, but there was one glimpse that was unlike the res
t.

  The vision disappeared as quickly as it had come and Ellie finally succeeded at pulling her hand away. "What the hell," she shrieked, garnering the attention of some passersby across the gravel lot. Her phone hit the rocks with a crunch. "That hurt, you freak!"

  Jordan stared at Ellie and all three teenagers stared back at her. It took her a moment to catch her breath. "Your brother," she choked, looking at Ben. "He was sick."

  Ellie was still glaring as she rubbed her head. "What are you talking about?"

  "Wait," said Kara. "What do you mean he was sick?"

  "When you were younger," Jordan continued, her breath caught in her throat. "You were in the hospital with your parents. You were almost too young to remember, but you helped your mom pick out a stuffed lizard in the gift shop, because it looked like --"

  "Godzilla," Ben interrupted, staring at Jordan like he was seeing a ghost. "I was obsessed with old monster movies and they thought it would make me feel better."

  "What?" Kara asked, folding her arms. "What's she talking about, Ben?"

  "He was a mutant," Ben continued, ignoring her. "He was bombed and poisoned by radiation, but it made him bigger and stronger. It helped him fight the other monsters. My dad told me about it because he thought it would help me feel better about the radiation treatments."

  "You never told me you had cancer," Kara said, clearly hurt.

  "That's because I don't like to talk about it," he murmured, his eyes locked on Jordan. "How did you know that?"

  Jordan looked away. She didn't know how to answer that without causing an even bigger spectacle.

  "Oh my God," muttered Kara. "It's supposed to be fake. You're not actually supposed to be able to do this shit."

  "I'm sorry," said Jordan. Kara couldn't possibly know how much she meant it.

  "Wait," said Ellie after picking her phone up off the gravel. "You were reading my palm, not his. Why didn't that come up before?"

  The other two watched her in silent expectation. Jordan gulped. This had always been the part she hated the most. "Because the vision wasn't about Ben," she said softly, looking up at Ellie with an apologetic gaze. "It was about you."

  The girl blinked back the moisture forming in her eyes. "What? No, you're full of shit!”

  "I'm so sorry," she murmured. "But you need to see a doctor as soon as possible. I think the cancer he had back then was genetic."

  Ellie covered her mouth to stifle a gasp and turned away. Kara rushed to her side. "Come on, El, this is bullshit," Kara said in a barely convincing tone. "Don't listen."

  Ben kept his eyes on Jordan the entire time. "What else did you see?" he asked. "Is she going to be okay?"

  "Come on, Ben," Kara scolded.

  "Just give me a minute," he snapped.

  Kara shot him a scathing look as she led Ellie away from the tent.

  "Well?" he insisted, taking another bill out of his wallet and slamming it on the table. "Is my sister gonna be okay or not?"

  Jordan slid the bill back to him. "I don't know," she said quietly. "I only saw the past and the present. All I know is that her cancer is more aggressive than yours was. You need to convince her to get checked out as soon as possible."

  Ben grabbed a handful of his hair and turned away from her for a moment. "Fuck," he muttered underneath his breath. "She's always taking aspirin for headaches. I should have said something before."

  "You can't blame yourself, and you can't change the past," Jordan said gently. "All you can do is try to change the future."

  Ben took a deep breath and watched her for a long moment. "This is fucked up, you know that?”

  “I know,” Jordan assured him. “I don't suppose I could convince you to keep this quiet?"

  He gave her an incredulous look and she sighed. "Doesn't matter anyway. I won't be here long enough for it to matter."

  Ben glanced back at Kara, who was still consoling Ellie. It seemed to be working. "You should get back to them," said Jordan.

  Ben clenched his jaw and seemed to want to say something else, but he turned away.

  "Wait," called Jordan.

  The boy stopped and turned around with a wary look. "Yeah?"

  "She loves you," said Jordan, trying to hide the quiver in her voice. "Maybe she doesn't say it a lot, but she does. The little girl who used to call you the best big brother in the whole world is still in there, and she's going to need you now more than ever."

  Ben frowned and muttered something unintelligible under his breath before he left the booth, but Jordan didn't need to hear the words to know that he thought she was crazy. It didn't matter. The scans and tests the doctors would perform probably wouldn't matter either, but at least it would give Ellie a fighting chance.

  It was in that moment that Jordan knew she couldn't stay. Even if it wasn't for her father, Cold Creek had more than its fair share of tragedy and its inhabitants were vulnerable to charlatans like her. Darren had been right about that from the very beginning, even though she hadn't been able to see it then. Settling down in one place and being open about her gifts would only give people false hope. Sure, she could heal a few of them, just as she had healed a select few of the congregants chosen by her father, but in the end it was all just a matter of biding time. Miracles gave people hope in a loving God and hope for the future, but they were nothing more than the flicker of warmth that drew a moth to its death.

  Twenty-Two

  The rest of the festival was mercifully uneventful as Jordan worked her way through a smattering of forced readings. Whatever small measure of enthusiasm she had possessed before vanished with the knowledge that she had upturned the world of three unassuming teenagers. By a quarter 'till nine, traffic to the fortune booth had died down enough that Jordan felt it was safe to start closing up the booth. All she had to do was drop off the cash box at the admin trailer and she was free to leave Cold Creek behind.

  While most of her night had been spent dreading another encounter with Darren, she found herself irrationally disappointed that he hadn't come. And why would he after what she had said in his apartment? Surely her words had served their purpose of earning his hatred, if not his apathy.

  "Got time for one more?" The familiar voice was a welcome distraction from the one railing in her head. Jordan looked up to see Max standing in front of her booth. He looked like he’d just been working on one of his cars since his tank top was stained with grease and there was a dirty rag sticking out of his jeans pocket. His dark hair, which was usually slicked back so much that it looked black, was newly shaved on the sides of his head and the coif left on top fell over his eyes in a charmingly rakish look.

  "You don't really believe in this stuff," said Jordan, motioning to the chair.

  Max sat down, leaning over the back of the chair. “Maybe not,” he conceded, slipping a bill into the cash box. “But you’re not an easy woman to find these days and I was hoping you’d be here.”

  Jordan sighed. "If Darren sent you--"

  "He didn't, but I'm sick of listening to him bitch like a girl who got stood up at prom,” Max snorted. "You really did a number on him. The impenetrable wall of ego is an act, y'know. He does have feelings."

  "I'm sorry," Jordan said, and she meant it. "I never meant to hurt him."

  "As my uncle puts it, 'Never be sorry for something you can fix yourself,'" Max said, mimicking the mayor's gravelly voice.

  "I can't fix this," Jordan said ruefully. “Trust me on that.”

  "Whatever he said can't be that bad, can it?"

  "He didn't do or say anything. That’s not why we broke up.“

  "Darren's always been a little rough around the edges," Max pressed. "I've known him my whole life and I've never seen him the way he is with you. He loves you, Jordan, and if you give him the chance, I know he'll prove it."

  Jordan looked down at the cards she had been shuffling to channel her nervous energy. "If your aunt catches us talking, I'll get in trouble. Do you want me to read your cards or your palm?"r />
  "Palm," Max said, placing his grease stained hand face-up on the card table. “Sorry about the grime. The soap only does so much.”

  "Working on one of your race cars?" Jordan asked, lighting a fresh candle.

  "My bike. Steering's been acting up ever since I got it."

  "Why don't you just replace it?" Jordan asked. If there was one thing the Danbridges weren't pressed for, it was money.

  "I like fixing broken things," said Max, holding her gaze pointedly. The flickering glow of the candle brought out the gold in his eyes more than usual.

  Jordan bit back the retort forming in her throat--or at least, she tried. "Is that why you stayed and fixed things with Lauren?"

  Max’s eyes narrowed sharply and his nostrils flared wide. The words that came out of his mouth were surprisingly measured, considering his obvious irritation. “There are reasons I had to break things off with Lauren. Reasons even Darren doesn’t know about.”

  "And there are reasons I had to end things with him," Jordan said firmly. "I'm not good for Darren, you'll just have to trust me on that."

  "Can't do that."

  "Why not?" Jordan asked tersely. It had been a long day and getting interrogated by Darren's guard dog wasn't how she had hoped to end it.

  "Because he deserves better than that," said Max. "He's been through enough. First his parents die, then his high school sweetheart bails on him. The poor guy's life is a country album. This is the first time I've seen him actually happy since we were kids, and it's obvious that he makes you happy, too."

  "He does," Jordan admitted. More than she’d ever imagined was possible.

  “Then why does the look in your eyes say you’re about to fuck it all up?” he challenged. “Take it from someone who’s done the fucking up enough times to know.”

  Jordan bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. "Let's just do your reading," she said, reaching for Max’s hand. As soon as her fingertips brushed over Max’s rough palm, it was like what had happened with Ellie Jacobs all over again. A vision flashed, but this time it wasn't a sobering picture of someone else’s hospital room.