This is a mistake...
Her fingers stilled against the deck, which was the size of a paperback novel. She preferred the big cards because of the greater detail. She had always used them, ever since she had first started reading—at the age of four. She had read cards before she’d been able to read words.
“I’ve been working here almost since you opened a few months ago, but I’ve never seen you do a reading,” Raven remarked.
And she shouldn’t be doing one now. She shouldn’t risk it...but it had been so long. She had missed it. Surely it couldn’t happen again. The cards wouldn’t come up the way they had before...
“I haven’t done one in a while,” she admitted. But she hadn’t lost the ability. Energy continued to tingle up Maria’s fingertips, spreading into her arms and chest. Before the girl could ask her why she hadn’t, Maria shuffled the cards again and eased one off the top of the deck. “This first card will represent your environment.”
Maria turned over the card atop the Significator, and dread knotted her stomach as she stared down at it. The moon shone down upon snarling dogs and a deadly scorpion.
A gasp slipped through the girl’s painted black lips. “That’s not good.”
Maria’s temple throbbed, and her pulse beat heavily in her throat. “No. The moon represents hidden enemies. Danger.”
The girl’s eyes, heavily lined with black, widened with fear. “You’re saying I’m in danger.”
Not again...
“That’s what that means, right?” Raven persisted, her voice rising into hysteria.
Since Maria had already taught the girl the meaning of each card, she couldn’t deny what Raven already knew. So she nodded. “Danger. Deceit. A dark aura...”
Maria saw it now, enveloping Raven like a starless night sky—cold and eerie, untold dangers hiding in the darkness. Goose bumps lifted on her skin beneath her heavy knit sweater, and she shivered.
“Turn over the next card,” the girl urged. “That’s what’s coming up—that’s what’s going to be my obstacle, right?”
Maria shook her head. She wouldn’t do it; she wouldn’t turn that card. “No. We need to stop. We can’t continue.” She shouldn’t have even begun; she shouldn’t have risked the cards coming up the way they had before. But it had been more than a year...
She had thought that she might have reversed the curse, that her fortunes might have finally changed. She’d been using the crystals, herbs and incense that she used for healing to treat herself.
“Turn the card!” The girl’s voice had gone shrill, and her face flushed with anger despite her pale pancake makeup. “Turn it!”
“No.” Her heart beating fast, she could feel the girl’s panic and fear as if it were her own. But she also felt her desperation and determination.
“I have to know!” Raven shouted.
Maybe she did. Maybe they both needed to know. Maria’s fingers trembled as she fumbled with the next card. Then she flipped it over to reveal the skeleton knight.
Raven screamed. “That’s the death card.”
“It has other meanings,” Maria reminded her. “You’ve been studying the tarot with me. You know that it might just mean the end of something.”
“What is it the end of? You see more than the cards. You see the future.”
As Maria stared across the table at the young woman, an image flashed through her mind. The girl—her face pale not with makeup but with death—her fearful eyes closed forever.
Raven demanded, “What is my future?”
You won’t have one.
“I don’t see anything,” Maria claimed.
“You’re lying!”
Maybe the girl actually had a gift—because Maria was a very good liar. Like reading the cards, she had learned at a very young age how to lie from her mother. “Raven...”
“You were looking at me, but you weren’t really looking at me. You saw something. Tell me what you saw!”
“Raven...”
“Oh, God, it’s bad.” The girl’s breath shuddered out, and tears welled in her eyes. “It’s really bad.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Maria assured her. “We can stop it from happening. I’ll make you an amulet of special herbs and crystals...” And maybe this time it would work.
The girl shook her head, and her tears spilled over, running down her face in black streaks of eyeliner. “Even you can’t change the future!” She jumped up with such force she knocked over her chair.
Maria jumped up, too, and grabbed the girl’s arms. “Don’t panic.” But she felt it—the fear that had her heart hammering in her chest and her breathing coming fast and shallow in her lungs.
“Stay here,” she implored the girl. “Stay with me, and I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”
Blind with terror, Raven clawed at Maria’s hands and jerked free of her grasp. Then she shoved Maria away from her, sending her stumbling back from the table.
“No. It’s you,” the girl said, her eyes reflecting horror. “I’ve seen it—the dark aura around you.”
That was what Maria had been trying to remove. But she had failed. As Raven had said, even she couldn’t change the future—no matter how hard she tried.
“It’s you!” Raven shouted, her voice rising as she continued her accusation. “You’re the moon!”
She hurled the table at Maria, knocking it over like the chair. The cards scattered across the old brick pavers of the barn.
Raven was right: even she, with all the knowledge of her witch ancestor, could not change what she had seen of the future. Like that witch ancestor, who had burned at the stake centuries ago, Maria was helpless to fight the evil that followed her no matter how far and how fast she had tried to outrun it.
The girl turned now and ran for the door, leaving it gaping open behind her as she fled. Just like Maria, Raven wouldn’t be able to escape her fate: death.
* * *
The night breeze drifted through the bedroom window and across the bed, cooling Seth Hughes’s naked skin and rousing him from sleep. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. But it couldn’t have been long, because his heart pounded hard yet, his chest rising and falling with harsh breaths. The breeze stirred a scent from his tangled sheets, of sandalwood and lavender, sweat and sex.
He splayed his hands, reaching across the bed. But she was gone even though he could still feel her in his arms and how he’d felt buried deep inside her body. He could taste her yet on his
