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“There’s nothing to tell.”
“I bet you wish there was something to tell,” she said, chuckling at my expense.
“You’re impossible. I don’t know why I bother coming to you.” I don’t want to speak to her or to anyone about Storm.
“You come because I can keep your secrets.”
I gave her a surprised look and she cackled again. “Oh yes, I know Theo told you to come to me because I can keep secrets.”
She was right. When I had refused to see a proper psychiatrist, even one accustomed to working with the eldritch as Theo had called it, he had reluctantly told me about Roopa. He knew her through his magic shop. She sourced customers through him for her special amulets — her taweez as she called them. Theo got a percentage for any referrals he made, and the sums were hefty given how much people were willing to pay for them.
Theo said she was a powerful witch. I would never have guessed it to look at her. The thing that made me give in was that Theo had said she would keep my secrets even from him if I desired it. And that he trusted her not to try to use anything I told her for her own use. Aside from her large family, Roopa was pretty much a recluse. She was untrained too. She only knew how to use her magic one way, and that was to make her taweez. Even she couldn’t say how they really worked, only that they did. Theo was her only contact in the world of magic and otherkind, and that was only by accident.
In the moments that it took me to have these thoughts, Roopa’s mood had flipped. “Tell me a secret or I won’t sign your paper,” she said abruptly.
“But you have to sign my paper,” I wheedled. “The deal was that I come here to talk to you, and I haven’t been doing anything but talking of these past thirty minutes. Don’t be mean, Roopy-Roo.”
“Not real talking. Just nonsense talking. Three weeks you’ve been coming to me and you tell me this nonsense and that nonsense. But Theo said to me you are a dreamer — a firr. But you have not told me once about any of these dreams! Tell me a dream. I want to hear it today.”
“Ugh. You’re killing me here.” I pretended to glower at her.
Trust her to pick today when Storm was mad at me to make a fuss. I needed my paper signed. These past three weeks I had been working every Monday to Wednesday at Agency Headquarters. I even had my own office, sort of. But only so long as I completed this course of therapy and proved that I was not a danger to myself or to anyone else. All because I had accidentally got a murderer’s head blown off that one time.
And I very much wanted to keep this job. I needed it. Storm’s team were the Agency’s top hunters in this part of the world. They were the ones that the Devil Claw Killer case had been assigned to. DCK was the notorious serial killer who had murdered my biological mother Magda. Working for the Agency was the only way I would get put on the the case next time DCK murdered again. And I was determined to catch the evil elusive murdering bastard.
“What’s a firr?” I asked.
“No distractions.”
“Tell me w
hat a firr is and I will tell you about a vision of mine.”
“You know! A firr!” She shouted it as if volume would clarify matters, and waved a hand at me impatiently as if only an idiot lacked this knowledge. “A person who sees things. In my country our people go to see them to find lost things or seek paths to lost dreams. They practice in the occult. But their knowledge comes from the djinn you know, and the djinn aren’t to be trusted. Half of what they tell you is the truth but the other half are lies. But you are an interesting one. A different type of firr. I should send my family to you next time.”
“Do your family think you are a firr?”
“My family think I am mad. They think I should be locked up. They call my gift a curse. They don’t believe it works, even when my taweez cured them of the bad spirits that were plaguing them. All my life I thought I was mad and then your friend Theo comes along and tells my I am a witch. Ha! He says witches and magic and werewolves and vampires are all real. Ha! He says this Otherworld is real!”
“Otherworld is real. It’s common knowledge! Has been for decades.” I was astonished she would think otherwise.
“It’s only real in the fake news. They make these things up to scare you.”
“You can’t really think that!”
“Have you been there?” she demanded.
“No,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You’re a witch. You’ve met Theo and you must know he is a wizard. He wouldn’t have sent me to you if he didn’t think you’d understand. I know you don’t think Otherworld is a myth or hoax.”
“I did think that. So do all of my family, my community. But now I don’t know what to think anymore. If I said it out loud they would think I had gone even more mad. Your friend Theo is a funny one, huh? He changed my life, but his news is not easy news for the mind to understand.”
“I thought Theo was your friend too!”
“Pah! I don't have friends. What are friends? Nobody. They will stab you in the back as easily as smile at you.”
“That’s a harsh way to look at the world.”
“You tell me about your friends, huh? You have no friends. If you had friends you’d be talking to them, not to me!” She said this triumphantly.
