Most often, and in most decks, the Magician was male. The image on the card was a man in white robes with a red sash holding a sword aloft while a snake coiled around his waist. The infinity symbol hovered over his head, showing that he operated outside of time and space. The snake and the symbols in front of him meant he was able to use anything to create anything. The Magician wielded real power. He turned energy into matter and took matter and converted it to energy. He saw the essence in all things and could use it to do what he wanted with it. Good or ill.
When accompanying the Ten of Swords, the Magician card spoke of a pernicious intent that chilled Dianna to her core.
The desire to end the reading was very strong, but her need to know was stronger still. She had to know what the implications were of such a person being present and doing such things.
“What is to come of this?” she asked and heard the tremble in her voice.
Dianna licked her lips and steeled herself before turning the last card. There were plenty of cards in both higher and lower Arcana that could change the meaning of this reading.
The one she turned, though, was not one of those.
The picture was that of a building crumbling as lightning struck it. Flames erupted from its window and two people leapt for safety but were too far from the ground. The fall would kill them.
The Tower. Another of the higher Arcana cards.
The card of total destruction.
She recoiled from it. Depending on when it appeared in a reading, the Tower could represent physical structures being destroyed. Dianna knew of a psychic who’d had that card appear in every reading leading up to when the planes hit the Twin Towers. But it could also represent so much more. It could represent systems. It could represent people. Lives. The Tower represented the greater body of anything—physical or metaphorical. The Tower represented the dismantling of those systems or structures.
She pushed her chair back from the table. A sound made her turn and she saw that both of her cats were now standing together, trembling with fear, their hair raised and stiff along their spines. Toby Oscar made a sick mewling noise. Zoey bared her teeth and hissed.
8
Sergeant Mike Sweeney saw the cow as he topped the rise.
It was standing in the middle of the road, staring bemusedly at the blocky ambulance that had stopped a few yards from its nose. A silver Kia Sorento squatted on the shoulder; its hood had an expensive dent in it, and there was a head-size crack on the passenger side of the windshield. As he slowed to a stop, Mike could see a smear of blood on the inside of the glass. He kept his lights on and parked at an angle that would force all traffic to share the opposite lane. As soon as he opened his door he could hear the yelling. Part of him wanted to get right back into the cruiser and drive over to the Harvest Inn for a couple-three beers.
Three men and one woman, all of them screeching at each other at the top of their lungs from behind the ambulance. Mike sighed and trudged around to see a woman standing with her knuckles on her hips and a man seated in the back of the ambulance as two EMTs took vitals. The man wore a foam cervical collar and held a compress to his forehead. There was a lot of blood—typical of scalp wounds—but the man didn’t appear to be hurt all that badly. The EMTs were yelling at the man to let them put him on a gurney and transport him. They wanted to strap him into a back-and-neck immobilizer. The woman was also screaming at the man—shrieking, really—telling him that it was his own goddamn fault for not wearing a goddamn seat belt. The bleeding man was yelling at everyone, but because he was outnumbered he wasn’t finishing any sentences.
Mike girded his loins and plunged in.
“Folks, please,” he said in what he thought was an appropriately loud and authoritative voice. They all ignored him. It wasn’t clear they even saw him. So, Mike slapped the flat side of the ambulance with a hard palm, a booming whump that sounded like a hand grenade. Maybe louder. The blow was hard enough to rock the vehicle and everyone suddenly shut up and gaped at him.
Mike Sweeney was conspicuously large. Six foot four, with the massive arms and shoulders of someone who spent some part of each day clanking free weights. He had dark-red hair and fierce blue eyes and there were all kinds of scars on his face and hands. He knew he was imposing as fuck, and so he deliberately loomed.
Into the ensuing silence, the cow mooed.
Mike cleared his throat, identified himself, and asked what happened.
Everyone started talking at once. This time all he had to do was hold up a hand. They instantly became as silent and attentive as kids in a country day school. Mike pointed at the woman.
“You first.”
She actually bristled and her eyes became immediately reptilian. “Why? Because I’m a woman?”
“No,” he said slowly, “because you were driving.”
There was a beat. “Oh.”
Mike gave her a small nod. “Start at the beginning.” Before she got a word out, though, thunder rumbled overhead. “Long story short,” he encouraged.
There were, he knew, no short stories in anything related to couples in crisis. Not on domestic disturbance calls. Not in traffic incidents. He was philosophical about it, though, because he still thought that was all this was.
9
Dianna Agbala hated the term psychic, even though it was on her business card and in neon in the window of Nature’s Spirits, where she worked.
She was more than that, but the word was a convenient catchall label. Good for business, and a lot of people who came to the store did so because of Dianna and her gifts. Personally, she preferred “sensitive,” which is what her grandmother called it. Her mother called it “Satan’s curse,” but that was Mom—the quintessential church lady. BFF of our lord and savior. Not like Nanny, who was much more than open-minded. She’d been completely open. Every sense, not limited to the five physical ones. Mom was a sensitive, too, but spent all those years begging Jesus to save her soul from the demons who possessed her.
So often growing up Dianna wished Nanny had been her mother. Would have been a happier life. Nanny would have loved Pine Deep for all the reasons Mom said she’d never come back.
“Lady Di,” said a voice and Dianna turned to see the assistant manager, Ophelia—all frizzy blond hair and enormous glasses—coming into the reading alcove, a schedule sheet held out. Dianna accepted the sheet. “You’re going to be busy tonight.”
“Idle hands…” murmured Dianna. Her schedule varied between daytime, ten to four, and evenings until nine o’clock closing. Card readings, some palmistry, or simply reading a client and discussing the forces at work in their lives. She preferred the later shifts because after a long self-imposed drought Dianna was back in the club scene. Drinking, dancing, and hunting for the kind of woman who matched her energies and her needs. Size, shape, age, and color didn’t matter, but there had to be that spark. A bit of magic.
There was a huge bang and the windows shuddered in their frames. Both women jumped and then looked at each other and laughed. Outside the rain was falling softly, but Dianna wasn’t fooled. It started this way every day lately—thunder for hours as the storm clouds came to a boil out over the farmlands, and then the rain would march into town. Then, as it had since the end of summer, it would rain all afternoon and well into the night.