“Are these cards about me or about you?” I asked, stopping her from flipping the first one. “I’m asking in advance so you don’t make me guess after the fact.”
“Nice try, Gray.” Sophie grinned. “The cards work in mysterious ways. Who are we to question their methods? When the universe has a message to share, the intended recipient is always revealed at the intended time, no sooner, no later.”
Now she was starting to sound like Liam. I opened my mouth to tell her as much, but changed my mind. Liam, Death, the unknown quantity… You kind of had to meet him in person to understand.
I realized, with a shudder, that maybe she already had.
“Ready?” she asked, and I nodded, half expecting the Death card to appear.
But the first card she turned over was the Six of Swords reversed. In it, a creature escaped a burning city in a hot air balloon affixed to a boat with six swords. The impression I got from the reversal was one of being trapped.
“Way to kick things off, universe,” I mumbled.
Sophie turned the next card. This one was upright—Seven of Swords. With his legs in the air, a harlequin balanced a sword on his feet, another dangling from the end by a frayed rope, perilously close to falling into his open mouth. Five additional swords lay around him.
“Someone is trying to trick us,” I said. “A cunning, dangerous foe. I don’t know—I just get the feeling that this guy is sitting here doing these death-defying tricks, all the while distracting us from what’s really going on.”
“That’s my feeling, too,” she said.
“Coupled with the poor guy trapped in the burning city, I’m already not liking where this is going.”
“Let’s look at the rest,” she said, and I nodded, gesturing for her to turn them all over at once.
She flipped the Eight of Swords next, followed by the Nine, then the Ten.
A shiver rolled across my scalp and down my back. Every instinct inside me was telling me to bolt. Escape. Get out. Run. Leave.
The Eight had turned up the night I’d seen Reva in the flames, and that night, I’d felt like someone was trying to force her to do his bidding—likely the hunter. Clearly under the influence of some other force, the woman on the card was a breath away from falling out the window to her death, impaling herself on the eight swords below.
The Nine was the nightmare card, featuring a creature riddled with anxiety sitting upright in bed, gnawing nervously on her own hand as an imp gnawed on her shoulder. Behind her, nine swords hung on the wall.
The Ten in this deck was particularly creepy, and it always unsettled me a bit when it turned up. But tonight it felt downright terrifying. It had turned up in my reading for Asher the night he’d crashed at my place, and I’d thought it was referring to something in his past that he’d yet to release. Now, it felt like another imprisonment, a man shoved into a tiny wooden box, his body run through with ten swords. He tried to stop them with his hands, to resist the sharp blades, but he couldn’t. The end was inevitable.
Something was coming to an end, but unlike a peaceful transition or a necessary release to make way for the new, this one was going to hurt.
Imprisonment. Trickery. Coercion. Nightmares. Painful endings.
Everything about the reading made me itch to flee.
“What do I do?” I asked. “What is this about? The witches?”
“I don’t know, Gray. But judging from your reaction, I’d say this message was intended for you.”
I jumped to my feet, no longer able to sit still.
Run,a voice echoed in my head. A breeze rolled in across the lake, raising goosebumps on my arm.Get out now.
“But I’m not trapped here!” I said, though I had no idea who I was speaking to.
The message in the cards put me on edge, but there was no danger in my realm right now. Everything was at peace. I was sure of it.
“I’d better go,” Sophie said, packing up her cards.
“But you just got here.”
Sophie smiled, but she was already fading. Fresh pain blossomed in my chest. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
“Please,” I whispered. “Don’t leave me. Not this time.”
