by Ashley Ladd
Clestie prayed the crowd would listen. She glanced at Elizabeth. “You ready? Should we go for it?”
“Better do it now before I lose my nerve.” Elizabeth picked up the papers and strolled toward the door.
Puffing out his chest, Leo halted her. “I’d best go first.”
Elizabeth held out her hand with a chuckle. “Be my guest.”
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As they approached the door, an ear-splitting roar arose and thunderous clapping ensued. Clestie sucked in a ragged breath. “We can still run and hide. Call for air rescue to land on the roof.”
Elizabeth eyed the shelves of strange ingredients. “Or turn them into toads.”
Clestie had to chuckle and cracked her first grin of the morning. “Remind me not to piss you off.”
Clestie clutched the key in her hand and glanced at her cohorts. “One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go! Here goes nothing.” She inserted the key and turned it.
As soon as they opened the door an inch, the mob tried to crowd in. The line disappeared into a wall of seething, writhing humanity, pushing and shoving.
“Close the door! Hurry!” Clestie turned and pushed with her back.
When Leo added his brute strength and the door clicked, she hurriedly locked it.
He frowned. “They’re thick as locusts.”
Duh! “You think?” She hugged herself. When someone banged on the glass door, she jumped and her heart raced.
“I know!” Elizabeth pointed at the stairs. “Lean out the upstairs window and lay out the terms.” She gave Leo a nudge. “Go now.”
Clestie trudged up the steps behind him, and flung open her bedroom window that looked over the street. “Do it now before they tear down the building.”
When he leaned out the window, Clestie choked back a laugh. With his long and flowing golden locks cascading out the window, he looked like Rapunzel.
“Please be quiet and listen.” Leo cupped his hands about his mouth like a megaphone and projected his voice.
Clestie sidled up to Leo and took in the scene below with mounting dread. From up high, the situation looked worse. The entire block was filled up. “God, it looks like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”
Although the hum died down, an angry voice yelled, “What’s taking you people so long? Open up now!”
The chanting started again, louder and angrier. “We want Leo! Give us Leo!”
Clestie’s heart fell to her feet. “This won’t work. Who are we kidding?”
Leo yelled, “We won’t open until everyone is quiet and orderly. Form two single-file lines. One for those who want a reading. The other for people who only want to buy other wares.”
People shoved and pushed. Fistfights broke out.
Clestie regarded Leo with awe. What was it about him that inspired such strong emotions? Aunt Petunia had never been swamped with business like this, at least not during her visits.
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She heard a voice ring out with supreme authority. “Do as the gentleman says now.”
Clestie leaned out the window with curiosity and looked for the source of the voice. She spied their neighbor, the tae kwon do master, standing tall and proud in the center of the crowd.
A bug-eyed, paunchy man with a tuft of blond hair combed back over a shiny bald spot got up in the master’s face. “Why? So you can butt in line? I’ve been standing out here since eight a.m.”
The soft-spoken tae kwon do master folded his muscular arms over his chest. “Please keep your distance, sir.”
Snarling, the aggressor moved forward and shoved the master. “Or you’ll do what?”
“This.” The master grabbed the man’s arm, twisted it behind him and put him in a joint lock hold. Then the master forced his blond assailant to the ground and looked around at the rest of the crowd, who had begun to cheer. “Would anyone else like to take me on?”
Clestie clapped and whistled. “Thank you,” she murmured under her breath. She would definitely sign up to learn self-defense as soon as she found a free moment.
The master lifted his head and his gaze met hers. “Why don’t you pass out numbers? Or appointment times?”
Clestie nodded. Turning to Leo, she asked, “About how long does it take you to do a reading?”
Leo looked thoughtful and then said, “The initial gathering of information takes only about ten minutes. Another ten minutes for me to talk to them to get a feel for the individual. The actual charting can take several hours. In-depth readings take days.”
Hours? Days? Clestie gulped. She counted at least a couple hundred would-be patrons. “How can we ever service all of them? It’ll take months!”
“Have them fill out their information before they meet with me.”
“Someone will have to translate for you.” Her fingers itched to dial the employment agency back to order a secretary fluent in Greek. “We are so unprepared. Who are we kidding?”
Leo took her hands in his and gazed down at her. “Trust me. I can help them. We can do this together.”
His energy vibrated through her and seeped into her bones.
“But you’re only one man.”
He smiled his flittering, heart-stopping smile. “I’m Leo, son of Zeus.”
“If you’re truly the son of a god, why are you stuck with us?” She let her gaze roam over the anxious people. “With all this?”
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* * * * *
At the end of the longest day in history, Clestie plopped onto her bed. Totally spent, her mind blown, her feet aching, her fingers numb, she stared at her ceiling. Faces blurred in her memory. Her stomach growled and she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten or if she had put any food in her mouth since breakfast.
As exhausted as she was, as much as her muscles ached and groaned with each minute movement, she couldn’t sleep. Finally giving up on the elusive sandman, she crawled out of bed, shrugged into a dumpy terrycloth robe. She still reeled that Richard had turned out to be such a jerk. She wondered what she had ever seen in him. Good riddance!
She spied Leo’s tarot deck abandoned on her nightstand. It seemed to vibrate and call out to her, so after several moments, she picked it up and turned it over in her hands. Then she slipped it into her pocket.
Moonlight filtered in through the softly fluttering curtains, drawing Clestie’s gaze outside. She wondered where Leo the constellation was and how it should look.
Duh! Like a lion…
But exactly like a lion? Or just a vague resemblance using a lot of imagination? Clestie chewed her lower lip, wondering how to recognize it and where to begin.
Her curiosity waking her up more, she turned on the computer and Googled a picture of the constellation. Not only did she find that, but also several panicked reports that the constellation seemed to be missing from the sky.
She read several frantic articles from everybody from scared grandmothers to pimple-faced teenage boys to bona fide scientists.
It couldn’t be… Her heart banged loudly against her ribs.
Frantically now, she clicked from one website to another. Each predicted doomsday, longer and louder than the last. The Leo constellation had disappeared. Even the official NASA website verified the strange phenomena. But no one knew what to make of it except that it seemed those unfortunate individuals ruled by the sun sign were running amok and felt lost and alone.
She printed out a star chart of Leo and tucked it into her pocket. Then she stole onto the roof.
She dusted off the old lounge chair Petunia had used to sun herself, and stretched out on it. Then she gazed up into the starlit night. The heavens seemed dim and dreary, especially for a Florida summer evening. Hoping that all the astrologers and doomsayers were wrong, or maybe just having a bad joke at public expense, she unfolded the star chart.
Not that she was an expert, but she couldn’t make out Leo in the heavens. Fright fluttered in her heart and her breathin
g became scant. Was she dreaming? Stressing out? What in the world—in the heavens—was going on?
This was too bizarre.
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Clestie started to hyperventilate and tried to calm herself with logic. The Greek gods weren’t real. They were just an entertaining myth to keep middle school kids and movie audiences entertained. They couldn’t be real gods. There was only one god and he reigned on high.
According to her father, only misguided souls sought guidance from the zodiac. No logical adult truly believed this nonsense. She snorted out a laugh. Obviously, her father would think a lot of illogical, misguided adults lived in her neighborhood and were all trying to get a piece of her Leo.
Her Leo?
She shook herself and sat up. She crossed her legs beneath her Indian style, and then she shuffled the cards, once, twice and a third time. She searched her tarot basics book and the various layouts and their purposes.
“Okay,” she murmured, trying to block out the memory of her father’s voice as he preached about the wickedness of such occult evils. “Keep it simple, stupid.” She started with the most basic, a simple three-card spread.
She settled the book facedown on the lounge and shuffled the cards one more time. She took one card off the top of the deck. Then she cut the deck about a third of the way down and took another card. She laid it next to the first. And then she cut the deck almost at the bottom of the stack.
She frowned when she realized she wasn’t sure what to do next. So she flipped through the book and found a section entitled “What Question to Ask”. With interest she read, Ask any question that is important to you…what is closest to your heart.
She looked deep into herself to pick the question uppermost in her heart. First and foremost, if Leo could be the man for her.
She groaned aloud. It sounded so trite to ask about her love life, reminding her of when she was a precocious nine-year-old asking the Ouija board who she was going to marry. Truth be told, she’d always pushed the stylus to spell out Perry Mathews, a schoolmate she’d had a crush on throughout her elementary school years.
She didn’t believe in the Ouija board back then or she would have trusted it to move itself. Just like she didn’t believe in the tarot now, any more than she did in Leo’s astrology nonsense.
She stared at the three cards so long, her eyes crossed and the stars on the back of the cards started to spin.
“Oh, what the hell.” At least she didn’t believe, as her father had, that the cards embodied evil.
Officially, she asked her question aloud, “Am I meant to be with Leo?”
You hope it says yes, the little voice in the back of her mind niggled at her. She scrunched her nose and turned the number one card face up.
Okay, now she was more confused than before. As she did previously, she reread the explanation and found a glimmer of understanding. How did this relate to Leo?
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She tried to pull the main ideas out of all three cards to see if, as a whole, they answered her query. She massaged her sore neck and then rolled her head first to the right and then to the left. This was supposed to be fun? Enlightening?
So far, she showed none of the psychic spark Leo swore she possessed.
The roof door squeaked open and Clestie’s heart jolted. She bolted upright and grabbed the lapels of her robe to her throat. “What are you doing up here?”
“I heard someone moving about on the roof and thought I’d check it out.” Without awaiting invitation, Leo joined her and perched on the side of her lounger. His muscular thigh grazed hers and his hair swung out in a silky wave, caressing her arm.
The touch of his hot flesh scorched her and she sucked in a quick breath and scooted to the far side of the lounger, away from his mesmerizing touch. Trying to ignore the man beside her, she craned her neck and gazed at the heavens. “I can’t find Leo. Where should he be?”
The man chuckled ruefully in her ear. “I told you. I’m Leo and I’m here with you.”
She slanted a glance at him. Could he really be on the level? She’d never heard anything crazier, but things pointed to the fact that it could be true.
She shook herself—hard. She couldn’t possibly for the teensiest, tiniest second think that a man could be a constellation and that said constellation could fall from the heavens into her bed.
She leveled a steady gaze on him. “What proof do you have?”
He pointed to the skies. “The lion constellation is gone and I’m here.”
“I’m here too, but that doesn’t mean I’m Leo.” She tried not to gaze at his very muscular, very naked chest or the swirls of golden hair around his nipples. But looking into his bright amber gaze was no less fraught with danger. His eyes captured her, sucked her in and tried to stake their claim on her.
Dang it! She wasn’t a lioness to be added to some pride with a bunch of other lionesses. And she wasn’t prey. At least not easy prey…
“You’ve always been here. You belong here,” he answered her earlier statement.
She tucked her hair behind her ear and narrowed her eyes. “How do you know? I only took over ownership of this shop a short time before you arrived. Maybe I came from Alpha Centauri. The moon. Middle Earth.”
He grasped the hand closest to him and pulled it onto his lap and then turned her palm so that it faced upward. Then he stroked it and held it up to the moonlight. “You have a long life line, but it terminates, unlike that of a god’s.”
She snatched her hand back, not liking to be reminded of her mortality, no matter how far into the future it might be. Talk of death creeped her out.
He held his hand out to her in a nonthreatening manner. “Look at my hand. There are no lines.”
She was afraid to look so she averted her glance to look down over the now quiet, almost eerie street below. Long, shifting shadows loomed like gothic monsters and she
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shivered. Hugging herself, she rocked back and forth in her seat as visions of several horror flicks rampaged through her mind. “I’m not familiar with anatomy and physiology, so I wouldn’t know what to look for.” For all she knew, maybe he was Death on holiday and she was his next victim. That would make just about as much sense as his being the Leo.
“Don’t be afraid. Look.” He pushed his hand nearer to her nose.
She bit down on her lower lip and chanced a glance. When she saw a perfectly smooth, unlined hand, she gasped.
“See?”
She groped for explanation. “Maybe you were burned or had plastic surgery. Maybe it’s a genetic mutation.”
Leo sighed and pulled back his hand. “Modern mortals are certainly a lot tougher audience than your primitive ancestors.”
“If you truly want to prove you’re a god, perform a miracle.” Parting the Red Sea would help convince her. Or parting the ocean on the Fort Lauderdale shores would do the trick.
He laughed dryly. “Zeus has stripped my powers. He wants to teach me a lesson. Besides, I don’t do miracles on command.” Negative energy vibrated from his every pore.
Refusing to show chagrin, Clestie held her chin high. “Then I guess we’re at an impasse.”
Shaking off her feelings of anger and suspicion, she gathered together the tarot cards and held them out to him. “I hope you don’t mind, but you left these in my room. I thought I’d try to learn how to read them.” When he didn’t respond, his eyes glittering like faceted topaz, she continued, “The customers may want us to read them and you can’t do everything at once.”
His expression softened a mite.
“Please teach me.” Hopeful, she pushed the deck closer to him.
His fingers slid against hers when he took the cards. “You have to believe they possess magical powers in order for them to work. Do you believe?”
A soft breeze kissed her cheeks as she looked deep inside herself and only found a tiny spark of faith. Did magic really exist? If it did, could it be foun
d in mere cards? But for the sake of the business, to make an honest go of her aunt’s store, she needed the knowledge. “I want to. But there’s so much I can’t even begin to understand. How is astrology related to the tarot?”
She felt like she’d been sucked into a different reality. Her mind whirled with the alien thinking, reminding her of childhood visits with Petunia.
Leo drew a picture of the solar system on her notepad and colored in Earth. He turned it around to face her and tapped the paper. “They complement each other. Astrology expresses the basic aspects of your character and propensity, as illustrated by
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the celestial placements at the time of your birth.” He looked up at her and then drew a crude box and placed a stick figure inside. “The tarot shows your blueprint, the meaning and archetypes to which these placements predispose you, how your planets design your purpose and your passageway.”
Leo then removed the cards and quickly looked through them. He removed one and handed it to her. “This is the card associated with Scorpio.”
She turned it over and gulped. She stared at it several long seconds, morbid thoughts racing through her mind before she finally rasped, “The death card?”
Leo took it from her hand and held it up. “It’s not what you think. It doesn’t mean death as in the end of life.”
She breathed a small sigh of relief. “So what does it mean?”
“You’re thinking of death as in departure from this plane of existence. But we experience many little deaths along our path.”
“We do?” Perplexed, she spread her hands wide.
“Not death of the body, but the end of one phase of our life or the end of a project. The purpose is to teach us how to let go and go on. The Death card is a reminder to release what no longer serves your purpose.”
Although she’d never thought of change and renewal as death, his explanation made sense. “Okay.”
