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“I don’t think that’s why I’m here,” Jem said. “I think that’s why I thought I was coming here, but now that I’m here, I think something brought me. Something led me to you. Do you know what I mean?”
She didn’t answer. Her breathing sounded like a razor on a strop. “Prove it.”
“What do you do,” Jem asked, “when people ask you to prove it?”
Nothing changed in her face.
“I’ll tell you about you,” Jem said, and a shiver went through the woman. “How about that? You’re a smart person, but sometimes you make choices that you know are dumb, and you do them anyway. You’re brave and you’re willing to stand up for what matters to you, but you also know when discretion is the better part of valor. You care about people, but you’re not going to let them walk all over you.”
It was called the rainbow ruse, and it was one of the best ways to start—you’re brave but you’re careful, you’re smart but you make mistakes. Big, general statements that covered opposing qualities, so that no matter who it was, the statement rang true. The whole point was to get them saying yes, because once they said yes, they wanted to keep saying it.
Heather stared at him. Her nod was barely anything, the tiniest movement of her head.
“You were waiting for someone, weren’t you? You knew someone was coming tonight?”
Another nod, a little stronger.
“And here I am.” The next bit was a gamble, but Jem thought it was right. He was riffing, and he’d stayed alive a long time because when he riffed, he trusted his gut. The psychic credit could be a swing and a miss—if you told someone they had psychic gifts, the wrong person might laugh at you, and that ruined the whole read. But Jem thought about what he’d seen in the front room and said, “When I met you in the hotel, I saw the Archangel Michael standing behind you. I saw the seraphic eye on his forehead, and the wings that burned when they opened.” He tossed in a veiled question; the more the mark filled in the blanks, the easier the read. “I don’t know what it means, not entirely. Do you?”
“My grandmother had the gift,” Heather whispered. “She said it looks different to different people. She said I had a witch’s tooth on the roof of my mouth; that’s how she saw it.” She seemed to wrestle with something before blurting, “Can you see anything? I tried calling Delilah for a reading, but she won’t pick up, and I packed the cards, and...well, can you?”
Jem nodded, trying to picture what a witch’s tooth might look like—let alone how it could be on the roof of your mouth. Tean didn’t look like he had much patience for fooling around, though, so instead of following up on that tantalizing piece of batshittery, Jem said, “Why don’t we sit down somewhere more…receptive?”
She nodded, as though the question had been obvious, and led them to the living room. She touched the wand. She uncovered the crystal ball. She sat in a lumpy armchair with what looked like velveteen upholstery, directly under the seven swords mounted on the wall. After lowering the lights, Jem sat too, and Tean sat next to him, taking a sofa done in blue chintz—which served, from the amount of dog hair and torn fabric, as the Corgi brigade’s chosen spot in the living room.
As Heather leaned forward, face eager, Jem checked Tean again. He still couldn’t read anything in his husband’s expression. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. But he knew how he felt, that sense of a door opening in his brain, of someone moving to the front of his head, someone who was smarter, luckier—someone who never lost. In sports, they called it clutch. Tean had told him about a book and something called flow. Jem called it riffing, and it felt like light riding along his nerves, like if he turned his hand and looked close enough, he could see the glow under his skin.
“Give me a moment,” he said, and he let his eyelids lower a fraction. Seconds ticked away. “I keep getting a sense of darkness. Something closing around you. The fingers of a dead man’s hand.”
“Oh God,” Heather said. “Oh Jesus.”
“I don’t know what that means, though. I don’t—” He’d been working on pauses. The pauses were as important as what you said, most of the time. “I don’t even know if it’s a man’s hand.”
“Saint Michael,” Heather said, fumbling a medal out from under her shirt to kiss. “Protect me. I didn’t do anything to her. I didn’t do anything to that woman. I didn’t mean to do anything.”
Jem narrowed his eyes. Piercing the veil, maybe. Scrying. He thought they’d said scrying in a few episodes ofBuffy. Maybe that was a little too much because Tean cleared his throat. Twice.
But one of the tricks—one of the good ones—was not to follow up too soon. If you came back to it later, after the mark had forgotten, they thought it had come from the cards or the tea leaves or the ether. So, instead, Jem asked, “You didn’t want to start buying at the Cottonmouth Club, did you? There’s something there. Something I can’t quite make out.”
Another long moment.
Heather wiped away a tear and said, “I had to. They wouldn’t fill the script anymore. They’ve got these pain centers, and they say they can help, but they’re as scared as anybody else these days. They don’t want their licenses taken away.”
“And you didn’t mean for things to go so far, did you? Not with the Cottonmouth Club. Not with Yesenia.”
This time, the tears came faster. “I told her it was Vicodin. I told her I needed it—it’s medicine. And she shouldn’t have been there, shouldn’t have been in the club. She took it and—and she laughed. Everyone talks about what a nice person she was, or is, or whatever we’re supposed to say. But she wasn’t. She was a bitch. She took the bag, and when I didn’t let go, she shoved me. Right outside the club. A couple of guys saw it happen, and they didn’t do anything.” She had to stop for a moment and press one hand over her eyes, the other back at her side, probing again. “You saw. At the resort, at registration. You saw how she treated people. She’s gone, and everybody’s acting like they’re worried. But nobody’s willing to say what she was: a bitch.”
That was twice now she’d dropped Yesenia into his lap. Next to Jem, Tean shifted on the worn upholstery, and Jem understood his impatience. If they were interviewing her, if they were working this the way they had in the past—if they’d been cops, and for a moment, the memory of John-Henry’s disturbingly blue gaze, those cop eyes, almost made Jem lose his flow—now would have been the time to ask. But that wasn’t how this worked. And Jem hoped Tean would trust him enough to go along for a few more minutes. And he hoped Tean loved him enough to—to forgive this, although Jem wasn’t even sure if that was the right word.
“I’m getting something else now,” Jem said. “A kind of disturbance. There’s a natural flow to the universe, a way energy moves through us, a pattern we’re all connected to. You know this.” Heather was nodding along eagerly, the wattle trembling with each movement. “What I sense is a place—maybe a few places—where that energy is snarled. These are confluences.” He’d spelled that word out from a book, and he kept it in his front pocket now for games like this. “When they get knotted like this, it’s because something has disrupted the natural flow of things.”
“The cancer,” Heather said, her voice breaking on the word.
Jem nodded, and he forced himself to sit up straight, to keep his face interested and serious and…mystic, for lack of a better term. He tried not to see Tean, tried not to remember he was there. Not for this part of it. “Of course. But there’s something else. We’re working our way backward, following the flow back to its source, and this is more recent. I get the sense of struggle. Conflict.”
“The fight with Yesenia at the club,” she said. “I told you about that. She took my medicine.”
She took your pills, Jem thought, which wasn’t the same thing as medicine. He made a considering noise. “This seems bigger. A bigger snarl, I mean. Something about money. It might be recently. Or maybe it’s—it’s in the future? It’s so close it’s hard to tell. Perhaps it’s a decision about money.” He didn’t exactly say, You tried to hock your TV tonight, lady, but he thought it as loudly as he could and hoped she’d pick up on it and explain, oh, just maybe, why she was getting the hell out of Dodge.
