The Fortune Teller's Daughter (9 page)

“You’re
blackmailing
me?”

“I can’t
stay here anymore!” I closed my fists and clutched them against my abdomen. “I
know how to read cards and people. I know how to pick locks and pockets. And
those aren’t exactly things I can put on a resume. My mother meant for me to be
a part of the carnival. I know she did. It’s the only thing that makes any
sense to me.”

The Magician
shook his head in disbelief. Then, like a light switch, anger. “You’re mad. I
cannot give you a job and to hell with it, I wouldn’t give you one even if it
were within my power. You stole from me and you will give it back and you will
get nothing in return!”

The boom of
his anger left quiet in its wake. Only the rain went on while we both stood
staring furiously at each other.

Somewhere
above us someone got out of bed, woken by our raised voices perhaps. He blinked
first.

“Enough
games.” He shoved his hands into his coat pockets. “You’ll give me the key and
because of my long respect for Cora, we will pretend like this didn’t happen.
It was just the stupid, desperate actions of a foolish little girl.”

Little
girl.

Not a girl
someone kissed in the dark behind tents. Not like the Courtesan or the
assistant or any number of other necessary women. I’d known better and still,
still
there was disappointment. Would I never learn?

It was dumb
to let this stranger whose name I didn’t even know make me feel so small and
ridiculous.

But he did.

“That’s not
true. About me.”

The Magician
scuffed his palm into his hair and then did something strange -- instead of
yelling or ordering me about, he dropped into the corner of the couch. The
Magician looked very tired all the sudden. Deflated. He set his hands on his
knees and stared straight ahead.

“If anything
has happened to it…”

“It’s safe.
I promise.”

“If I don’t
have it, it’s not safe.”

“It’s just a
key.”

He exhaled
his impatience, but I noticed his fingers dig into his thighs. “Even if it were
just a key
, it is mine and that should be enough. You don’t know what
you’re messing with.”

I scowled.
“Because I am a foolish little girl?”

The Magician
leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. A
black snake tattoo wrapped his left bicep, its beautifully scaled coil just
peeking out from beneath his rolled sleeve.

“It was a
mistake to return,” he said to himself, quiet enough to sound like a regret,
not an accusation.

Guilt edged
in. I fidgeted. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing. It
doesn’t mean anything.”

His response
didn’t surprise me. I could have said,
I think the sky is blue
and he’d
have answered,
but why is it snowing
? Such was the sense made of
magicians and fortune tellers.

I bit my lip
and tugged at the edges of my t-shirt, wishing badly for pants though if his
gaze strayed, I didn’t notice.

“Take me
with you. Hire me as your assistant. I’m useful.”

“No,” he
tsk
ed.
“You’re a menace.”

“Please
don’t leave me here.”

“If you do
not give back what you stole I will have to take it back by force. You, nor I,
wish for that ending.” He leveled me with his steel gaze. The truth was in his
exhausted expression - I would not win this battle, or any, against the
Magician. “Please, Serafine, bring this abominable night to an end.”

Please,
Serafine.
All the strings holding my heart in place unraveled one at a
time. I came to him, very aware of his eyes following me all the way to his
parted knees. He leaned back, mouth open in surprise, and reached for me
instinctively. I almost climbed into his lap, almost, the fleeting but
smothering desire for the Magician’s approval overwhelming my better senses.
His fingertips brushed the back of my bare thighs. His eyes darkened when I
inhaled and he pulled back sharply, breaking the moment.

I blinked,
shook my head to clear it.

All the
wonderful possibilities of the carnival, of the Magician, of everything I
thought was supposed to be mine, unraveled, too.

“You win.” I
reached behind my neck and pulled the key from beneath my t-shirt. He rose to
his feet, crowding me, his hands catching himself on my waist when I swayed
unsteadily. We stood too close, but neither of us pulled away.

“You said it
was hidden.” 

“I lied.”

“Let me,” he
murmured and took the cord from my fingers. He pulled it over my chin, nose,
and carefully threaded it from my bed-messy hair. His hands were gentle,
different than the ones that had threatened me earlier.

He returned
the key to his own neck where it lay stark against his white shirt. For the
next minute, the next year, we lingered longer than was appropriate and with
all my body I begged him not to leave me behind.

“I would
have made an excellent member of
Imaginaire
, you know.”

“Maybe. But
things are complicated right now. There’s no place for outsiders.” The Magician
touched a finger beneath my chin and lifted it as he had behind his tent. I
shivered at the touch, at the way he gazed down at me, his expression
unreadable but intense. “Don’t look at me with your big, sad green eyes. It
won’t work. I am unmoved by the manipulations of lion-haired girls. I cannot
hire you, and wouldn’t hire you if I could. I assure you that despite what you
think, Cora would not thank me for taking you with us. Likely she would have me
murdered in my sleep. Violently and thoroughly.”

His skin
felt warm and he smelled of chocolate and caramel, which seemed viciously
unfair.

“I don’t
believe you.”

“Things are
different now.”

“I am not
afraid, if that’s what you think.”

I could feel
him breathing, that was how close we stood. He lowered both hands to my arms
and for a moment I thought he might pull me the last inch into him. I wouldn’t
have minded. It was too easy to be bewitched by him.

Instead he
pushed me back, displaced me from his control. “Do not return to the carnival,
Serafine. It is not for you.”

His words
acted like ice water and I instantly chilled to his touch. He stepped away from
me and headed for the door. It was difficult to turn and watch him go. At the
door he hesitated, backlit by the hallway light, half the tube lights burnt
out.

“This is no
place for you, either. You should leave this miserable apartment and go
somewhere brighter.”

He lingered
a minute longer, gazing at me, at my shoulders and arms and naked legs. He ran
his hand across his firm mouth as if he considered something important, but
without giving it voice, he turned and was gone.

I closed the
door. Locked it. I could feel the loss of his presence right away, cold on my
skin and the smell of damp in the walls. Not even a hint of caramel popcorn. As
if I’d made him up. Wished him into existence.

Thunder
clapped and shook the old building, made the windows groan and the radiator
whine. I got out a pair of cotton pants and pulled them on to guard against the
new cold. He was right, of course, this was no place for me. I was tired of
being here alone. Waiting.

I made it
halfway to the couch when he knocked on the door. Proper this time. Two knocks.
I stopped in my tracks, my heart catapulting against my rib cage. The cold
retreated. The loneliness too. Before he could flee, I ran to the door and,
shaking, undid all the locks.

“You came
back. I didn’t think…”

The man in
the doorway was not the Magician.

Though I
didn’t realize it until he was shoving his way inside.

__________________

In a nothing
neighborhood outside Boston, my mother and I lived for two weeks in July in a
tiny motel where the doors all faced the parking lot and women in their bras
smoked cigarettes off the balcony at two in the morning. I was sixteen and we’d
just had another knockdown, drag out screaming match that had the neighbors banging
on the paper thin walls and Cora crying in the bathroom when I slammed the
front door, swearing I was running away for good.

I’d made it
to the street, sweat soaking my hair, pooling down my back and thighs. I
weighed more then too, so round I’d taken refuge in men’s clothes far too big
for me. They hid the bump above my belly button and the bulges around my bra.
Wearing the big men’s clothes made me feel thinner than I was, but I was still
full of self-disgust because I was lonely and no one noticed me and I lived in
a motel with a mother who treated me like her pet.

I walked far
enough that I could only just see the motel lights when I froze. For the first
time in my life I felt danger, the skin crawling, heart racing feeling girls
get telling them that something very bad will happen if they take another step.
I knew in the creeping sensation on the back of my neck that if I kept walking,
I was never going to come back.

All the
worst predators chased me down when I turned and ran for the motel, sick with
fear. I didn’t stop until I’d shoved my way into the motel room and locked the
door behind me. My panic sent Cora over the edge and we moved to Arundel, Maine
the next day.

The face of
the man in my doorway was the thing I’d run from that night. Vacuous yellow
rimmed irises traced my face and body in that half second it took me to shove
my door closed on him, but he was faster and stronger. He barreled into my
apartment, cutting off my scream by clapping a hand over my mouth and across
the back of my head. He
shhhed
me, flat lips forming a grotesque
O
and leaving spit dotted across my cheek until he had me against the wall.

In the light
bleeding in from the hallway, another figure snaked in, then another, black
silhouettes who were not quite men. Flashlights clicked on and as the
yellow-eyed man fought to contain my wild struggles, the other two began to
tear my apartment to pieces.

“Baby girl,
baby girl, stop. Stop.” He pushed my head back, forced my head at an unnatural
angle. I felt his fingers prod at my mouth. I clawed and fought, snarling,
snuffling noises muffled against the palm of his hand. He
shushed
me kindly
with eyes so dead they left me feeling rotten on the inside.

He pressed
his barreled chest into mine until it was hard to breathe. “Baby girl, why
don’t you make my night and tell me what the Magician wanted with a thing like
you?”

Something
behind him crashed to the ground and I heard plates shattering against the
wall.

Please,
please let someone come…

He slid his
hand away from my mouth.

“Tell me.
Tell me what he wanted.”

“Go screw
yourself, you fucking psychopath,” I snarled and flailed at his face, fully
prepared to gauge his eyes out with my nails.

I caught his
cheek and ripped lines of red to his jaw.

He hissed,
narrowed his eyes into snake-like slits and calmly grabbed me by the hair and
face and cracked me solid against the drywall.

Pain
blossomed across the back of my head, a brief and angry swelling that dulled
and left me feeling dizzy and light headed.

I gasped,
hating the taste of tears on my lips and the grainy, dirty flavor of his skin.

And then
before he could strike me again, his hands were yanked off in a single grunt,
the only sound he managed before the Magician struck him in the face with his
fist. With the sound of bone breaking bone, he crumpled to my feet.

Without the
yellow-eyed man holding me up my legs gave out and I slid down the wall.

“Stay,” the
Magician ordered and then he turned to face the other two men ransacking my
apartment. They came at him together, but it was clear very quickly that it was
no match. The Magician opened his hand and sent one flying back into my fridge
without even touching him. The other swung, but he blocked the punch, delivered
one of his own, and in the dark I could hardly follow their street violent fist
fight that left fine mists of blood on my walls. A flashlight spun chaotically across
the hard wood, flashing on the yellow-eyed man every half second, highlighting
the blood drooling from his nose and lip.

The second
silhouette bent at the middle and fell forehead first into the floor. The
Magician stumbled back and twisted towards us in time to see the one he’d put
into my fridge scramble out the front door and hit the stairs at a run.

“Dammit,” he
swore, but didn’t go after him. Instead he slid to his knees next to me and
captured my face in his hands so gently I hardly felt him. “Let me see. Are you
hurt? Did he hurt you, Sera?”

“My head…” I
touched the back of my head but there was no blood. “I’m ok. I think.”

He closed
his eyes briefly. “I need you to pack some bags. Only what you can carry. Only
what you need. As fast as you can. Can you do that for me?”

I gripped
his arms as I got my balance. “What’s going on? Why did they come here for
you?”

“Later, I
promise. Others are coming and we have to go right now.”

Without
arguing, I pulled down two of my mother’s powder blue suitcases and my backpack
and started stuffing them too quickly for neatness.

It wasn’t
hard to leave things behind.

The Magician
stood sentry at the door. When I’d packed the box that contained my mother’s
ashes in my backpack, put on shoes and my coat, I took one last glance around
the dark apartment. I’d wanted to leave it so badly for so long, but not like
this.

He took one
of my suitcases, my hand, and pulled me down the stairs. Out into the empty
street I hardly felt the rain and had to practically run to keep up with his
long strides. He did not release his hold on me. We did not speak.