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“You can’t have that stuff. Messes up your Pythia power. Remember?”
“That doesn’t feel like it’s on board right now, anyway. And I feel like death.”
“No, you don’t. Death doesn’t hurt,” he told me, and presented something on a small tray. “Well, you know. Not after the first bit.”
“What’s that?”
“What does it look like?”
“An Irish coffee,” I said, perking up. And damn. It was like he’d read my mind.
“Better?” he asked, flopping on my bed.
I licked whipped cream off my nose. “Getting there.”
And I was, with a warm tingle that didn’t so much soothe away the aches as make me not care about them anymore. Until I peered into my closet. And realized that, in this case, the age-old lament was totally true.
“What now?” Fred asked as I just stood there, drinking and scowling.
“I don’t have anything to wear.”
“You got a whole closet full of stuff.”
“Yeah. But not the right stuff.”
“What difference does it make what you wear?” he asked. “We’re talking about people who show up, uninvited, in the middle of the night and terrorize everybody. Why dress up for them?”
“They’re not uninvited tonight,” I pointed out. “And it’s not for them.”
“Who, then?”
“Me,” I said grimly, flipping through the hangers. Like the perfect outfit was just going to magically appear.
But no. Magic gets me into trouble; it rarely gets me out. And this obviously wasn’t one of those times.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m tired, stressed, and my power is feeling wonky—”
“But you can’t afford to look like it.”
I turned, surprised, even though I shouldn’t have been. Fred wasn’t stupid. He was just . . . Fred.
Who was staring at something in my hand and scowling.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing at the hanger I was holding.
“A skirt,” I said defensively. It was cute, a multicolored tie-dyed creation I’d bought from a street vendor, which swirled around my ankles whenever I wore it. And caused the vamps to make pained faces.
Fred didn’t disappoint. “Put that back.”
“Well, I don’t have a lot of choices!” In fact, my closet had a serious identity crisis at the moment.
On the one side were my old clothes—T-shirts and jeans mostly, with a few pairs of shorts and sweats thrown in for variety. They were the kind of stuff I’d worn for years, and which had worked fine when my job was reading tarot cards at a nightclub or doing secretarial stuff at a travel agency where I never saw the public. They were comfortable and familiar and just the sight of them made me feel better.
Unfortunately, even I realized that they said Girl Who Dips Your Ice Cream at the Mall more than World’s Chief Clairvoyant.
Of course, the other side wasn’t any better. Not that it was bare; quite the contrary. There was hardly enough room to pack everything in, which explained why the rainbow spill of extravagant ball gowns had started to slum it with the 2-for-$10 tees.
