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“You saw something?”
“Well, no. I mean, I didn’t have a vision or anything, you know, magic—”
“Forgive me, my dear, but the tarot in the hands of the Pythia is magic. Yes, indeed. What did you see?”
“Well, it’s not a normal deck,” I explained awkwardly. “So I didn’t have a spread to go on, just the one card—”
“The Moon, I take it?”
“The Moon reversed.”
“Ahhh.” Jonas slowly sat down.
“Like I said, it probably doesn’t mean anything—”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” he said mildly, staring off into space. “No, no. I shouldn’t at all, really.”
I just sat and looked at him for a while, but he didn’t say anything else. Pritkin tried to ask something, but Jonas just waved a hand. “Talk amongst yourselves,” he said vaguely.
I looked at Pritkin helplessly. Most of the time I thought Jonas was a sharp old bastard who was playing some kind of weird mind game with everyone for his own amusement. But there were days when I honestly wondered if the magical world was being led by a complete nut.
“It isn’t even a real deck,” I told him, trying again.
Nothing.
“It’s a toy I was given as a child.”
Nada.
“I don’t even choose the card. It chooses for me!”
May as well have been talking to the wall.
“I’ll be right back,” Pritkin said, apparently giving up. He headed out of the kitchen and I went along because, frankly, it was getting kind of creepy in there.
“I’m just going back to my room for a moment,” he told me, when he realized I was following him. Which would have been fine, if he hadn’t turned around and tripped on the stairs leading from the living room to the foyer.
He caught himself before he face-planted, and for anybody else, it would have been no big deal. I tripped over that same step an average of once a day. But Pritkin wasn’t me and he didn’t regularly fall over his own two feet.
I grabbed him before he could escape, and I didn’t need to ask what the problem was. Blood was seeping through the lower part of his shirt, staining the soft gray cotton. Of course it was, I thought furiously. Of course it bloody well was.
“Damn it, Pritkin!”
“I’m fine,” he told me, which was less than comforting, considering he’d probably say the same thing after losing a limb. I crouched down and pushed up his T-shirt.
“Fine?” I said, staring up at him angrily. The blood was leaking out of a bandage that covered half his stomach.
“Well enough,” he said, trying to push his shirt back down. I slapped his hands and started to pry up the edge of the soaked bandage with a fingernail. It had already come loose and would have to be replaced, and I needed to see—
A steel-like grip caught my wrist. “I’m fine,” Pritkin repeated. “It will be healed by tonight, by the morning at the latest—”
“And what kind of a wound takes you that long to heal?” I demanded. I’d seen him shrug off a knife to the chest in a matter of minutes.
“A Fey one,” he admitted.
I said a bad word and started to pull off the bandage with my other hand, but he caught that wrist, too. And then he tugged me to my feet. “You said you were going to see friends!” I accused.
“Acquaintances.”
