Almost Everything (14 page)

I thought
for sure she’d be able to tell something was different when we walked up to the theater steps. Bea, instead, hardly even noticed our approach. She and the lone survivor of her admirers’ club were head-to-head over something on his iPhone. I was glad to see it was the pun guy. Erik? Nathan? Rupert? I had no idea, and I wondered if I needed to remember, given that she was supposed to be dating Malcolm.

Thompson cleared his throat. “Ready?”

Bea blinked as if coming out of a dream. “Oh!” She grabbed the pun guy’s phone and messed around on it, as though she owned it, and then made more noises of concern. “Ana! We’re going to be late to the potluck. Malcolm is picking me up at my place in ten minutes.”

The pun guy’s eyebrows twitched at the mention of another boy’s name. He grabbed for his iPhone petulantly, but Bea handed it back without protest. She was up and moving to the truck, leaving us to apologize and say an awkward good-bye to her jilted paramour.

We followed after her, shaking our heads at her frantic dialing and constant stream of inventive curses. She let out a blue streak when she apparently connected to Malcolm’s voice mail. “Hey, hon,” she said, in a voice as sweet as her expletives had been strong. “Tryouts ran late. You’ll have to meet us at the park.” She proceeded to give directions to the band shelter at Como Park.

“Where are we taking her?” Thompson wanted to know.

“Oh, um, do you have plans?” I asked, and when he didn’t immediately jump in, I continued. “Bea and I have a potluck for this, uh, group we belong to. Anyway, it’s kind of a big deal. Bea always calls it the social event of the season. Want to
come?”

Thompson looked a bit unsure.

“As our first date,” I added to sweeten the deal.

So many witches attended the Midsummer Gathering that Thompson had to park his truck two blocks from the pavilion. “Wow,” he said as we started the long walk through the park. “What is this? Some kind of charity event?”

“Sort of,” Bea said snidely, and then went back to her phone.

I shot her a glare, but she didn’t see it. She was busy trying to figure out how to meet up with Malcolm. Their conversation had been going on for more than five minutes. I was beginning to think he’d gone to the wrong part of the park. Como was huge.

“Sort of?” Thompson asked.

“Bea’s just being a jerk,” I said. What she meant was that the Midsummer Gathering was one of the few events where non-Initiates, or failed ones, like me, got the “privilege” of hanging out with the Inner Circle and the Elders. “It’s just a party for our coven.”

“Wait.” Thompson, who had been holding my hand again, jerked back. “You guys really are witches?”

“Duh,” Bea said before going back to berating Malcolm for going around Como Lake instead of coming over to the zoo side.

“I’m not really,” I said. “I didn’t make the tryout.”

“You have to audition?” he asked incredulously.

“In a way,” I said. I was under a strict oath not to reveal too much about the nature of True Magic, but I hated lying. If Thompson and I were going to try to date, I needed to be able to tell him something about all this, didn’t I? “Think of it like cheerleading squad or hockey, right? There are some things you have to be good at. If you are, you make the team. If not …” I shrugged.

Thompson
looked ready to ask more questions, but the reverberation from an electric guitar cut him off. We stepped under the band shelter just as my ex-boyfriend took the stage.

I
knew I’d see Nikolai there, but I wasn’t really prepared for it to be like this. Spotlights always adored him, and he was in his element on stage with a guitar slung over his shoulders. He looked incredible. His long, silken black hair hung like a mysterious veil in front of his eyes. In tight leather pants and a poet shirt that would have looked dorky on anyone else, he captured everyone’s attention.

He opened
his mouth and began to sing. Wouldn’t you know it? It was the song he wrote for me, the one we’d just heard on the radio. Somehow, through some awful luck, he spotted me and swept me into the intensity of his gaze.

I flushed bright red under his scrutiny. Even though I knew it was impossible, I felt certain Nikolai could tell I’d kissed Thompson.

Just as quickly as he pinned me under his gaze, he seemed to remember he was performing for other people, and I was released.

Even
if Nikolai couldn’t read my mind, I was beginning to think Thompson could, because he was watching me curiously. “It must have been nice dating a musician, huh?” he said lightly, but I could hear the jealousy in his tone.

Actually, it kind of sucked. But no one believed that when I told them. They thought it was all VIP parties and backstage passes. The reality was that Nik was always either busy practicing or in the spotlight being adored by legions of fans way hotter than I. But, even if I told Thompson that, he’d take it the wrong way. I sighed. “I’m going to get a drink. Do you want water or something?”

“I’ll go with you,” he insisted. “It’s too loud here, anyway.”

Thompson followed me as I went in search of a cooler. When we stepped out from under the shade of the shelter, the music seemed farther away. The sudden sunlight stunned my eyes.

The crowd was thick with bangles, beads, and other accoutrements of the groovy. A lot of the people in the Outer Circle compensated for not being True Witches by adopting the costumes and customs of the pretenders. Others didn’t know any better. Thompson and I threaded our way past a group of long-haired, gray-bearded drummers pounding out a meditative yet danceable beat, oblivious to the competing throb of the bass a few feet away. Women of all ages and sizes swirled around nearby, mirrored silk skirts and scarves winking in the sun. Under the shade of a sprawling maple tree, a heavyset woman with a spike of short dreadlocks held court, reading palms. All the exposed skin sported tats of images familiar to me—ankhs, runes, Celtic knot work, dragons, faeries, and, of course, classic goddess images, like the snake-headed Nile statuette, which had been the talisman. Fashion ran the gamut from the faux gypsy belly dancers, classic Goth, punk, and everything in between.

In among
all the woo-woo, there were hints of normal: booths promoting witch-friendly financial services, pediatricians, and law firms. There was even a bloodmobile taking donations. I smiled at the irony, given the current vampire problem, but it was just one of a dozen civic-minded volunteer opportunities.

Thompson’s eyes grew wider the deeper into the crowd we moved. He looked a bit gob-smacked. He’d forgotten all about Nikolai. “All these people are witches?”

“Yep,” I said.

“I had no idea there were so many,” he said.

“Minnesota has one of the largest pagan communities in the United States. Some people call this ‘Paganistan.’”

He nodded, but I didn’t think he’d heard. We’d just walked into a row of vendors, and his eyes were darting from witch-related T-shirts and clothes to jewelry and magical tools. We slowed as he admired some handcrafted staffs with dragons’ heads carved into the top. I figured he’d spasm when he saw the “athames.” But he breezed right past those and stopped dead in front of a silk-draped caravan tent that looked like something straight out of some mundane’s wet dream of a gypsy camp.

“Wow, check this out! A tarot reader!”

Thompson was desperate for me to try it. I wanted to tell him I’d had Bea read my cards a dozen times, and her readings were spookily accurate because she had a divination talent. But since he was so excited and already had money in his hands, I let the lady pull me into her tent. Thompson followed behind.

I didn’t
recognize the reader from the coven, but that didn’t mean anything. A lot of people who didn’t make the Initiation had real talent. Nikolai’s mom, for instance, was Romany. Though most of the people who were true sensitives didn’t bother with all the flimflam this lady seemed to be into—she had lit a stick of incense and was going through elaborate motions to banish the negative energy or whatever from the room. Thompson ate it up. His eyes were wide with fascination. I waited patiently in the metallic folding chair set out on the flattened grass. It was a bit tippy because the ground was hard packed and uneven.

When she sat across from me, I realized she wasn’t that much older than I was. Her face was heart-shaped. She had a lot of piercings in—one stud glittered like a faux mole over the left edge of her black-painted lips. She had a ring through her nose and in her eyebrow. Her hair was so black, I suspected she dyed it.

Henna dotted the hands that shuffled the cards. In a low voice, she asked me to cut them. When she handed them to me, she reminded me to “concentrate on the question you want the cards to answer.”

Even if this woman had no particular divination skill, I had a healthy respect for tarot. Even though Real Magic didn’t work for me, I’d found that some things worked for everyone. Tarot was one of those things. Even working alone, I could get pretty good readings. Of course, tarot, like many divinations, worked partly on intuition, which lots of mundanes could tap.

So I
thought about the hunt and my dad. I really, really wanted the cards to tell me there was a solution out there. I wanted a hint as to where I could find it, especially since the grimoire had been a dead end. I wanted reassurance that all this wasn’t going to end in massive bloodshed. My mind started to wander to Elias and his potential upcoming nuptials, so I quickly handed the cards over to the reader.

She did some more drama. Closing her eyes, she held the cards meaningfully in front of her. She set them on the table and waved her hands over them. Thompson was silent in anticipation. At least he was getting a good show for his ten bucks.

Just when I wondered if she’d fallen asleep, she separated the deck into three piles facedown. She opened her eyes with a start. She flipped the top card of the first pile over so fast that the cardboard hit the table with a snap.

Death.

Her deck showed the classic image of a hooded, skeletal figure on a pale horse. The Death figure had a black flag with a white rose in one hand, and the traditional scythe in the other. People—a king and a peasant—fell down in front of the galloping horse. The sun set in the distance.

Behind me, Thompson sucked in a breath. I wasn’t that worried myself. I mean, I knew that Death in tarot wasn’t the final big ugly that people tended to think it was. In fact,
if
it was right side up, it could be read positively as change or transformation. The sun might also be rising, you see. And the white rose had a new bud on it—the sign that new growth was possible with a bit of wise pruning.

However, it
was reversed.

Again, I wasn’t terribly panicked because I had been asking about the hunt and vampires. There was a lot of death there.

The next card
freaked me out a bit, though.

The Tower.

This image was harder to see as positive. Lightning struck a cylindrical building, and two figures fell from its walls, presumably to their deaths, in the stormy sea below. Even the stars in the background had trails and seemed to be falling.

I rarely got this card, so I would be curious to see what the reader had to say about it. I thought I remembered Bea saying something about how this one represented change in the status quo, which could be good, given that the hunt was kind of broken. I couldn’t quite shake my sense of foreboding looking at it, though.

The last card was a minor one, the ace of swords. It showed a disembodied hand holding a sword. The whole scene seemed to float in the clouds, which looked gray and stormy.

Lots of storms. Great.

“You need an idea to change a stagnant situation,” she intoned in a voice that was clearly trying to be mysterious. But her voice was too light to carry off the seriousness she intended.

I decided to see if she was a real practitioner or not. “I hate it when the cards just parrot back your question, don’t you?”

She blinked, as if waking up from a dream, but then she smiled. “Should I have given you the coven discount?”

I nodded.

“Let’s do a little digging, shall we?” she said, no longer pretending to alter her voice. She pulled a card from the bottom of each pile and laid it on top of the three in front of me.

The first
one showed the High Priestess. She sat on a throne, holding a book in her lap and an ankh held casually in her right hand. The other held a staff entwined with the Goddess’s other symbol, a snake. Her crown was two crescent moons on either side of a full moon. Behind her was a veil that was partly opened to show a green verdant hill leading to a distant castle.

It could only represent one thing: Mom.

And it was lying right over the Death card.

I wasn’t sure I liked that, especially after what Prince Luis had said about how the Queen of Witches of his region sacrificed herself to the hunt.

The next card was another queen, only this one, the queen of swords, came from the court cards. Like the ace, the queen held a sword aloft. Unlike the ace, she had a body attached to the hand and sat on a throne that seemed to float among swiftly moving clouds. She faced to the left, and her other hand was raised in a gesture that reminded me of giving—as if maybe she was offering a judgment from her throne.

I didn’t know who she might be, but I thought she might be part of the clue I was looking for. She covered that horrible Tower and seemed, at least to me, to be offering help.

The last card was a baffler. It was a minor one, the seven of cups. It showed seven goblets. All of them were filled with strange things—rainbows, a dragon, a creepy shroud-wearing figure, jewels, a laurel crown, a snake, and another severed body part—this time a weirdly serene-looking head.

I had no idea what to make of that. “I know who this is, I think,” I said, pointing to the High Priestess. “But what does it mean?”

The reader
thought about it, but normally, not with any hint of spooky stuff. I wondered briefly if Thompson was disappointed. “I’m not sure,” she said, with a glance at where Thompson sat by the doorway. “Can you tell me more about your question?”