Mom, why is Neeve here?” Blue asked.
Like her mother, she was standing on the kitchen table. The moment she’d come back from school, Maura had enlisted her help for changing the bulbs in the badly designed stained-glass creation that hung over the table.
The complicated process required at least three hands and tended to be left until most of the bulbs had burned out. Blue hadn’t minded helping. She needed something to keep her mind off Gansey’s looming appointment. And off Adam’s failure to call. When she thought about giving him her number the night before, she felt weightless and uncertain.
“She’s family,” Maura replied grimly. She savagely gripped the fixture’s chain as she wrestled with a stubborn bulb.
“Family that comes home in the middle of the night?”
Maura shot Blue a dark look. “You were born with larger ears than I remember. She’s just helping me look for something while she’s here.”
The front door opened. Neither of them thought anything of it, as both Calla and Persephone were about the house somewhere. Calla was less likely, as she was an irascible, sedentary creature of habit, but Persephone tended to get caught in odd drafts and blow around.
Adjusting her grip on the stained glass, Blue asked, “What sort of
something?”
“Blue.”
“What sort of something?”
“A someone,” Maura said, finally.
“What sort of someone?”
But before her mother had time to reply, they heard a man’s voice: “That is a strange way to run a business.”
They both turned slowly. Blue’s arms had been lifted for so long they felt rubbery when she lowered them. The owner of the voice stood in the doorway to the front hall, his hands in his pockets. He was not old, maybe mid-twenties, with a shock of black hair. He was handsome in a way that required a bit of work from the viewer. All of his facial features seemed just a little too large for his face.
Maura glanced at Blue, an eyebrow lifted. Blue lifted one shoulder in response. He didn’t seem like he was here to murder them or steal any portable electronics.
“And that,” her mother said, releasing the beleaguered light fixture, “is a very strange way to enter someone’s home.”
“I’m sorry,” the young man said. “There is a sign out front saying this is a place of business.”
There was indeed a sign out front, hand-painted — though Blue didn’t know by whose hand — that read PSYCHIC. And, beneath that: “By appointment only,” Maura told the man. She grimaced into the kitchen. Blue had left a basket of clean laundry by the kitchen counter and one of her mother’s mauve lacy bras sat on top in full view. Blue refused to feel guilty. It wasn’t as if she had expected men to be wandering through the kitchen.
The man said, “Well then, I’d like to make an appointment.”
A voice from the doorway to the stairs made all three of them turn.
“We could do a triple reading for you,” Persephone said.
She stood at the base of the stairs, small and pale and made largely of hair. The man stared at her, though Blue wasn’t certain if this was because he was considering Persephone’s proposal or because Persephone was quite a lot to take in at first glance.
“What,” the man asked finally, “is that?”
It took Blue a moment to realize that he meant “triple reading” rather than Persephone. Maura jumped off the table, landing with enough force that the glasses in the cabinet rattled. Blue climbed down more respectfully. She was, after all, holding a box of lightbulbs.
Maura explained, “It’s when three of us — Persephone, Calla, and I — read your cards at the same time and compare our interpretations. She doesn’t
offer that to just anyone, you know.”
“Is it more expensive?”
“Not if you change that one stubborn bulb,” Maura said, wiping her hands off on her jeans.
“Fine,” said the man, but he sounded vexed about it.
Maura gestured for Blue to give a lightbulb to the man, and then she said, “Persephone, would you get Calla?”
“Oh dear,” Persephone said in a small voice — and Persephone’s voice was already quite small, so her small voice was indeed tiny — but she turned and went up the stairs. Her bare feet were soundless as she did.
Maura eyed Blue, asking a question with her expression. Blue shrugged an agreement.
“My daughter, Blue, will be in the room, if you don’t mind. She makes the reading more clear.”
With a disinterested glance at Blue, the man climbed onto the table, which creaked a bit under the weight. He grunted as he tried to twist the stubborn bulb.
“Now you see the problem,” Maura said. “What is your name?”
“Ah,” he said, giving the bulb a jerk. “Can we leave this anonymous?”
Maura said, “We’re psychics, not strippers.”
Blue laughed, but the man didn’t. She thought this was rather unfair of him; maybe it was in slightly poor taste, but it was funny.
The kitchen abruptly lightened as the new bulb screwed into place.
Without comment, he stepped onto a chair and then to the floor.
“We’ll be discreet,” Maura promised. She gestured for him to follow her.
In the reading room, the man looked around with clinical interest. His gaze passed over the candles, the potted plants, the incense burners, the elaborate dining room chandelier, the rustic table that dominated the room, the lace curtains, and finally landed on a framed photograph of Steve Martin.
“Signed,” Maura said with some pride, noticing his attention. Then: “Ah, Calla.”
Calla blew into the room, her eyebrows quite angry at being disturbed.
She was wearing lipstick in a dangerous shade of plum, which made her mouth a small, pursed diamond under her pointy nose. Calla gave the man a lacerating look that plumbed the depths of his soul and found it wanting.
Then she plucked her deck of cards from a shelf by Maura’s head and flopped into a chair at the end of the table. Behind her, Persephone stood in the doorway, her hands clasping and unclasping each other. Blue slid hastily
into a chair at the end of the table. The room seemed a lot smaller than it had a few minutes before. This was mostly Calla’s fault.
Persephone said, in a kind voice, “Have a seat,” and Calla said, in an unkind one, “What is it you want to know?”
The man dropped into a seat. Maura took the chair opposite from him at the table, with Calla and Persephone (and Persephone’s hair) on either side of her. Blue was, as always, just a little apart.
“I would rather not say,” the man said. “Maybe you’ll tell me.”
Calla’s plum smile was positively fiendish. “Maybe.”
Maura slid her deck of cards across the table to the man and told him to shuffle them. He did so with proficiency and little self-consciousness. When he was done, Persephone and Calla did the same.
“You’ve been to a reading before,” Maura noted.
He made only a vaguely grumbling noise of assent. Blue could see he thought that any information would let them fake the reading. Still, she didn’t think he was a skeptic. He was merely skeptical of them.
Maura slid her deck back from the man. She’d had her deck for as long as Blue had been paying attention, and the edges were fuzzy with handling.
They were a standard tarot deck, only as impressive as she made them. She selected ten cards and laid them out. Calla did the same with her slightly crisper deck — she’d replaced them a few years ago after an unfortunate incident had made her lose her taste for her previous deck. The room was quiet enough to hear the rustle of their cards against the uneven, pocked surface of the reading table.
Persephone held her cards in her long, long hands, eyeing the man for a pregnant moment. Finally, she contributed only two cards, one at the beginning of the spread and one at the end. Blue loved watching Persephone lay down her cards; the limpid turn of her wrist and the swick of the card always made it seem like a sleight of hand or a ballet movement. Even the cards themselves seemed more otherworldly. Persephone’s cards were slightly larger than Maura’s and Calla’s, and the art on them was curious.
Spidery lines and smudgy backgrounds suggested the figures on each card; Blue had never seen another deck like it. Maura had told Blue once that it was hard to ask Persephone questions that you didn’t absolutely need the answer to, so Blue had never found out where the deck had come from.
Now that the cards were laid out, Maura, Calla, and Persephone studied
the shape of them. Blue struggled to see over their huddled heads. She tried to ignore that, this close to the man, he had the overpowering chemical scent of a manly shower gel. The sort that normally came in a black bottle and was called something like SHOCK or EXCITE or BLUNT TRAUMA.
Calla was the first to speak. She flipped the three of swords around for the man to look at. On her card, the three swords stabbed into a dark, bleeding heart the color of her lips. “You’ve lost someone close to you.”
The man looked at his hands. “I have lost …” he started, then considered before finishing, “… many things.”
Maura pursed her lips. One of Calla’s eyebrows edged toward her hair.
They darted glances at each other. Blue knew them both well enough to interpret the looks. Maura’s asked, What do you think? Calla’s said, This is off. Persephone’s said nothing.
Maura touched the edge of the five of pentacles. “Money’s a concern,” she noted. On her card, a man with a crutch limped through snow under a stained-glass window while a woman held a shawl beneath her chin.
She added, “Because of a woman.”
The man’s gaze was unflinching. “My parents had considerable resources. My father was implicated in a business scandal. Now they’re divorced and there is no money. Not for me.”
It was a strangely unpleasant way to put it. Relentlessly factual.
Maura wiped her palms on her slacks. She gestured to another card. “And now you’re in a tedious job. It’s something you’re good at but tired of.”
His lips were thin with the truth of it.
Persephone touched the first card she had drawn. The knight of pentacles.
An armored man with cold eyes surveyed a field from the back of a horse, a coin in his hand. Blue thought if she looked closely at the coin, she could see a shape in it. Three curving lines, a long, beaked triangle. The shape from the churchyard, from Maura’s unmindful drawing, from the journal.
But no, when she looked harder, it was just a faintly drawn, five-pointed star. The pentacle for which the card was named.
Persephone finally spoke. In her small, precise voice, she told the man,
“You’re looking for something.”
The man’s head jerked toward her.
Calla’s card, beside Persephone’s, was also the knight of pentacles. It was unusual for two decks to agree exactly. Even stranger was to see that Maura’s
card was also the knight of pentacles. Three cold-eyed knights surveyed the
land before them.
Three again.
Calla said bitterly, “You’re willing to do whatever it takes to find it.
You’ve been working at it for years.”
“Yes,” the man snapped, surprising them all with the ferocity of his response. “But how much longer? Will I find it?”
The three women scanned the cards again, looking for an answer to his question. Blue looked, too. She might not have had the sight, but she knew what the cards were supposed to mean. Her attention moved from the Tower, which meant his life was about to change dramatically, to the last card in the reading, the page of cups. Blue glanced at her frowning mother. It wasn’t that the page of cups was a negative card; in fact, it was the card Maura always said she thought represented Blue when she was doing a reading for herself.
You’re the page of cups, Maura had told her once. Look at all that potential she holds in that cup. Look, she even looks like you.
And there was not just one page of cups in this reading. Like the knight of pentacles, it was tripled. Three young people holding a cup of full of potential, all wearing Blue’s face. Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark.
Blue’s skin prickled. Suddenly, she felt as if there was no end to the fates she was tied to. Gansey, Adam, that unseeable place in Neeve’s scrying bowl, this strange man sitting beside her. Her pulse was racing.
Maura stood up so quickly that her chair keeled back against the wall.
“The reading’s done,” she snapped.
Persephone’s gaze wandered up to Maura’s face, bewildered, and Calla looked confused but delighted at the appearance of conflict. Blue didn’t recognize her mother’s face.
“Excuse me?” the man asked. “The other cards —”
“You heard her,” Calla said, all acid. Blue didn’t know if Calla was also uneasy, or if she was merely backing Maura up. “The reading’s over.”
“Get out of my house,” Maura said. Then, with an obvious attempt at solicitude, “Now. Thank you. Good-bye.”
Calla moved aside for Maura to whirl past her to the front door. Maura pointed over the threshold.
Rising to his feet, the man said, “I’m incredibly insulted.”
Maura didn’t reply. As soon as he was clear of the doorway, she slammed
the door shut behind him. The dishes in the cupboards rattled once again.
Calla had moved to the window. She drew the curtains aside and leaned her forehead against the glass to watch him leave.
Maura paced back and forth beside the table. Blue thought of asking a question, then stopped, then started again. Then stopped. It seemed wrong to ask a question if no one else was.
Persephone said, “What an unpleasant young man.”
Calla let the curtains drift shut. She remarked, “I got his license plate number.”
“I hope he never finds what he’s looking for,” Maura said.
Retrieving her two cards from the table, Persephone said, a little regretfully, “He’s trying awfully hard. I rather think he’ll find something.”
Maura whirled toward Blue. “Blue, if you ever see that man again, you just walk the other way.”
“No,” Calla corrected. “Kick him in the nuts. Then run the other way.”
