“Why did you involve yourself with Baron?” Arthur drummed his fingers over his desktop, the leather blotter dulling the sound.
“He purchased the wish from when my omega father died, offered me extra if I would entertain him the way an omega entertains a male.” Mads cleared his throat. “I needed the money, and after some time, it became an arrangement I saw myself being able to tolerate. He made promises, and I sought comfort. He wasn’t a bad choice considering his station…and my own.”
Arthur nodded. “One Penumbra son is as good as any other, I suppose.”
“If only it were that simple. I can walk away, I suppose. I would regret what could have been.” Mads glanced at one of Arthur’s chairs and sat down when given a gesture to do so.
“Three-thousand dollars and a wand. I give it to you, and you walk away. Never speak to or about my sons again.” Arthur waited for a response, face impassive.
Three thousand dollars had been worth enough to buy a nice house with plenty left over to pick up a trade or a spouse to cover the rest.
Mads frowned and shook his head. “Wouldn’t be right. I’ll go back to pennywitching before I take someone’s charity money just to get me out of their son’s bed.”
Arthur’s upper lip curled at the threat of pennywitching, but he reached into his desk and rummaged about before pulling out a wooden box. The resonant sound of dry hardwood over itself punctuated a scrape of fingers and a firm weight hitting his desk blotter. An ancient hand-painted deck of tarocchi cards. Old magic had infused them, and if the glint of their surface was any indication, it was due to powdered wish inundating the pigment.
“Shuffle and draw your card, pennywitch.” Arthur sat back and watched as Mads delicately lifted the deck, showing respect for something so old and valuable. He’d never held anything so costly. Touching it made a certain wrongness filter through him, or maybe it was because Arthur didn’t adhere to the conventional drawing order. One card? No rules listed? It seemed like some amateur parlor reading, but he wasn’t going to challengethe Arthurof the Eclipse covens.
Mads did a drop shuffle, limiting the amount the cards rubbed together. Every movement when he restacked the cards came calculated and with the gentlest of touches.
“For your past.” Arthur gestured kindly and Mads lifted a single card, laying it before him on its side. He pointedly did not place it vertically, as there was no point to him in interpretingforward or reverse. All cards had two meanings. His past was a balance of good and bad. All bad things had a balance, a good part to them, and had made him as resourceful as he was. Five of Pentacles. “That much is clear. You haven’t had a good past. On its side, too. Why?”
“Because life is not black and white. There is a card, and both interpretations can be true at once.” Mads stiffened as Arthur gestured for him to continue. Mads stared at the depiction of a beggar curled up under a church window with a frail child in their arms. “I’m poor. I follow the carnivals in the summer and make do the rest of the year. I keep my head above water, anything to keep myself off the street. I won’t become my fathers. So, I am the beggar, but I am moving beyond that.”
“Your present?” Arthur gestured for him to draw another.
On its side again, Mads drew and flipped over the Two of Swords. A blindfolded naked man stood holding two swords, face downcast. The night sky behind him shone with flecks of wish in the dark ink. Two choices. Good or bad, that was the question. And Mads didn’t know. To stay with Marquis and likely make Baron inconsolably angry. Or, he could leave. He could never look back and put this foul promise behind him and be far more wary of the next man with a smile and a fortune.
“Fitting. There is a decision to be made and a great time for you at this moment. Draw another for the present. We are the Eclipse coven, after all. There are two sides to us, always.” Arthur’s choice had reason, so Mads followed his command.
And Mads did. He flipped the card. Two of Cups. An impossibly dark-haired male extending a cup toward an androgynous figure. The clothing, though dated, likely depicted a female in the style of the time, but Mads could see the perfect pairing of cups clinking in his mind. He and Marquis would do well. Hope blossomed in his chest that fortune had blessed him that night.
“Marquis is a good choice for you.” Arthur nodded. “That much is clear. Baron’s folly will be your fortune. He’s your true mate.”
Mads heaved a sigh of relief and pulled his hand away from the card as if touching it would jinx his chances.
“And your future—three cards.” Arthur sat up straighter. “For no one future is ever set in stone. There is the future we see, the one thatyousee, and the one that nobody sees, but is.”
Mads pushed the deck away from himself and shook his head. “One does not read their own future. My cards are always dark.” His mind was stuck on Baron, the part of him that would always linger around if he chose Marquis.
Arthur nodded and drew three. Death. Seven of Swords. The Devil.
They stared at them for a long time before Arthur spoke. “What do they mean to you?”
“Would you permit me honesty?” Mads stared the damning cards down.
In death, he saw Baron, a great change, something that would break. The way the ink flickered over the skull made sallow features like the elder son stand out fiercely. And so too did he see Baron in the seven of swords, the wish crystal glimmering in the ink as if it were laid on the stock only yesterday. The hunched figure’s wry grin made Mads realize that roguish smile on Baron’s face had always been plotting, never flirtation. And so when the last card, the devil, arrived, the card was unlike mundane cards where the devil was depicted as a goatlike demonic creature, a satyr with pentagrams and fangs. This card was solid black, a crescent moon upturned like horns, and red staining like a fingerprint smeared over it. Debauchery, pain, temptation, horror. Flashes of all manner of sins filled Mads’s mind and if he had any sense, he’d have gone right outthe window like he should have the day before. The road more traveled was such for a reason.
“Speak freely. I see the same cards you do.” Arthur stared at the cards, not at Mads.
“I should walk away right now, because if I marry Marquis, Baron will surely make his displeasure known in a way I may not be able to handle.” Mads swallowed hard.
“And with my and my wife’s blessing, I draw one card for each of us to guide you.” Arthur drew two more cards. The Star. Ten of Cups.“And now?”
Mads stared the cards down. A nymphlike creature held a star aloft under a blood moon. Hope. Awe. The goddess herself would bless the union. He knew it. And the Ten of Cups? A happily ever after. No more pennywitching, no more selling his ass. All the promises Marquis could give him. The picture of two lovers, androgynous, embraced and kissed beneath a spread of ten cups. Children played in the background. “It’ll all be worth it.”
“Good boy.” Arthur collected the cards, put them in the box, and stowed them away. The neutral expression he carried had a mask of kindness hidden beneath carefully stowed fear. But what the cards said must have been true because he smiled. “Welcome to the family, my son.”
Chapter Eleven
