by Isobel Bird
Then, to make everything even worse, she’d gone home to find her aunt had been going through things in her room. In particular, she had been moving around the paintings that Annie’s mother had done. Normally, Annie kept them lined up against one wall, where she could look at them. But that afternoon she’d come in to find them rearranged. She just knew that her aunt had been going around the house looking at what would have to be packed when the time to move came. She’d clearly waited to do it when Annie was out of the house, and that made her madder than anything.
She’d planned on having it out with her aunt when she finally came home. She’d even waited longer than she should have, hoping that Aunt Sarah would come back from wherever she had taken Meg for the afternoon. But she hadn’t returned, and finally Annie had left, not wanting to miss class. But she was going to talk to her aunt when she got home and have it out once and for all. It was hard enough having one of her best friends treating her strangely. She didn’t need her aunt doing it as well.
She made it to the store with only a few minutes to spare. She went into the back room and dropped onto the floor beside Cooper and Kate.
“Have I missed anything?” she asked.
“Only Kate worrying about seeing Tyler,” Cooper said.
“I’m not worrying,” Kate said, looking around.
“No,” Cooper said. “She’s just sort of being paranoid.”
Annie knew that Kate had been thinking a lot about seeing Tyler again. She was feeling terrible about what had happened with Scott at the beach. To make things even harder, Scott had called her twice since then. Kate had been reluctant to talk about it, and Annie was afraid to ask too many questions. But Cooper wasn’t.
“Are you going to tell him you lip-locked your old guy?” she teased Kate.
“Shh!” Kate hissed at her. “Why don’t you just announce it to the whole room?”
“I’ll leave that to Sherrie,” Cooper replied.
Kate looked around nervously, as if maybe Sherrie really had shown up and was about to tell the entire class what Kate had done.
“Relax,” Cooper said. “I’m just giving you a hard time.”
“Well, don’t,” Kate said.
Fortunately for Kate, Tyler didn’t seem to be there. Annie thought it was a little strange, since he almost always came to class so he could see Kate. But perhaps he was busy with something else. As far as she was concerned, it was better for Kate if he didn’t show up. At least then Kate wouldn’t be so edgy.
Archer walked in and stood at the front of the room.
“I’m sorry I’m a little late,” she said. “Something came up that I had to help with.”
It seemed to Annie that Archer sounded a little bit upset. She hoped nothing was wrong. But if it was, Archer didn’t say anything else about it.
“We’re almost done with our Tarot work,” she announced. “While we could talk about this for literally years and still not get to all of it, I think you’ve had a good introduction to the subject. I know a lot of you have found it interesting enough to study on your own outside of class, and that’s great. The only way you can really get good at understanding Tarot is if you work with it. So tonight I’d like you to do readings for each other.”
Annie groaned. The last thing she wanted to do was a reading. Why couldn’t Archer have come up with something else for them to do?
The class began to arrange itself into groups. As Annie was rearranging her cushion she noticed Thea come in the door and go over to Archer. A few moments later the two of them came to where the girls were standing.
“Kate, Cooper, and Annie, can we talk to you for a minute?” Archer asked.
“Sure,” Cooper said. “What’s up?”
“Let’s go into the office,” Archer suggested.
They left the room and went into the store’s tiny office.
“I didn’t want to say anything in front of the whole class because this is a private matter,” Archer said after she shut the door. “But it’s about Sasha.”
“Sasha?” Annie said. “What about her?”
“She’s run away again,” Thea said seriously.
“What?” Kate said. “But why? Everything was going so well for her.”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Archer said. “We thought you three might know something.”
“Right before class I found this note,” Thea said. “Sasha left it on the refrigerator, and I found it when I got home.”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to Cooper. Kate and Annie looked over Cooper’s shoulder, reading it.
Dear Thea:
Thanks for everything you’ve done for me. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it, and how much I love living with you. But I have to go take care of something. They’re not going to let me stay with you. Not when they find out what I did. So it’s best if I just leave. I wish I didn’t have to. Please thank my friends for warning me. And please don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.
Love,
Sasha
Annie felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. She couldn’t even look at Thea and Archer, and she knew that Kate and Cooper must be thinking the same thing. What had they done? What had she done? She didn’t even want to think about it.
“What’s this about?” Thea asked.
Annie took a deep breath. “It’s my fault,” she said.
“What does she mean about a warning?” Thea said. Annie could hear the concern in her voice. She wanted to tell Thea everything. But she found that she couldn’t speak.
“We did a Tarot reading for Sasha,” Cooper said, breaking the horrible silence. “Well, Annie did one.”
“A Tarot reading?” Thea said, looking at Annie. “I don’t understand.”
“I wanted to see if what I saw in Tarot readings would come true if I told someone the opposite of what the cards said,” Annie explained. But she knew that it sounded ridiculous even as she said it.
“Annie saw something in Sasha’s cards about a guy she used to know,” Kate said.
“I really don’t understand,” Thea said. “What exactly did you tell her?”
“I told her this guy was going to come around and that he was going to tell everyone a secret about her,” Annie said.
“What kind of secret?” asked Thea.
“I don’t know,” Annie answered. “I couldn’t see that. I just told her that it would make things hard for her when he did it.”
“But that wasn’t the truth?” Archer asked.
Annie shook her head. “No. In the reading I saw that this guy was afraid of what Sasha could tell people about him. But I told her the opposite.”
“Good Goddess,” Thea said. “Why would you do that?”
“It was kind of an experiment,” Annie said miserably.
“An experiment?” Thea exclaimed.
“I didn’t know she would run away,” Annie said.
“Well, what did you think she would do?” said Thea.
“I guess I didn’t really think about it,” said Annie. “So many things had been going wrong with my other readings that—”
“Other readings?” Archer said, stopping her. “You mean you did other ones besides Sasha’s?”
“A few more,” Annie said.
“A lot more,” Cooper corrected her.
“And things went wrong with them?” Archer probed.
“A few things,” Annie said again.
“A lot of things,” Kate said.
Archer sighed and shook her head. “Kate and Cooper, I think you two should probably go back to the class. Annie, I think we need to talk some more.”
Annie looked at her friends. They seemed almost as embarrassed as she did. But at least they weren’t being asked to stay. Annie didn’t know what Archer and Thea were going to say to her, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t like it.
After Kate and Cooper were gone Archer shut the door again. She motioned for Annie to have a s
eat in one of the chairs, and she sat across the desk from her. Thea continued to stand, pacing as much as was possible in the small room.
“Tell me about these readings,” Archer said.
Annie didn’t know where to begin. “I just started doing them,” she said. “I had a lot of fun in class, and I seemed to be pretty good at it.”
“But the readings you gave weren’t right?” Archer asked.
“The first ones were,” Annie said, thinking about Sherrie’s trip and Cheryl’s fall. “But then things started to go wrong.”
“Wrong how?” said Archer.
Annie tried to figure out how best to explain herself. “The things I saw would happen,” Annie said. “But the results would be bad.”
“Can you give me an example?” Archer inquired.
Annie thought about that. “Well, I did a reading for someone that said she was going to maybe cheat on her boyfriend with her ex-boyfriend,” Annie said carefully. She didn’t want Archer to know that she was talking about Kate. She was in enough trouble as it was.
“And she did it?” asked Archer.
“Yes,” Annie said. “But she said she only did it because I told her that it was going to happen anyway.”
Archer smiled a little, then looked sober again. “Anything else?” she said.
Annie knew that the only hope she had of helping was if she told Archer everything. Growing more and more embarrassed, she laid out the whole story, from her reading for Loren to using the Tarot reading to humiliate Sherrie to the disastrous result of Tara’s taking her advice. When she was done she sat back and looked at Archer and Thea. Neither spoke for a moment, making her feel even more anxious.
Archer nodded. “I think I get it,” she said.
“Then maybe you can explain it to me,” Annie said. “Because I’m sure confused.”
“The Tarot is a tool,” Archer told her. “It’s not a game. You aren’t supposed to use it indiscriminately. That’s what you were doing.”
“But how come?” Annie said. “I was just trying to tell people what was going to happen.”
“Sometimes they don’t need to know what’s going to happen,” Archer told her gently. “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it.”
“You mean that maybe I was telling them things they didn’t really have to know?” Annie said.
“I’m saying that maybe you were telling them—and they were asking—for the wrong reasons,” Archer suggested. “You said that people paid more attention to you because you were telling them things, right?”
Annie nodded. “That was bad, right?”
“I think you know the answer to that,” Archer said. “You should never use magical abilities to make people like you. But most of us make that mistake at one point or another, so don’t feel too bad.”
Annie smiled in spite of herself. Archer wasn’t making her feel as terrible as she’d expected. But she also knew that Archer wasn’t done yet.
“Using the cards to embarrass Sherrie was probably the worst of it,” said Archer. “You should never use your talents for negative reasons. Even though it sounds like this girl deserved it, you saw what happened. Tara ended up getting hurt.”
“The Law of Three, right?” said Annie. “I did something dumb and it came back to me three times as strong.”
“That may be pushing it,” Archer replied. “But yes, I think you probably asked for a little karmic spanking with that maneuver. And unfortunately, Tara got hurt, too.”
“I still don’t understand why some things happened just as I saw them and others didn’t,” Annie said. “What was I doing wrong?”
“Nothing,” Archer said. “The things you saw in the cards were true. But you have to remember that what the cards show are possibilities. They show what is most likely to happen if a person behaves in a certain way or if the other people involved behave in certain ways. But it doesn’t mean that the situation can’t be changed. You saw that Loren might be successful as a model. But there were all sorts of things that had to fall into place to make that come true. You don’t know which one of them didn’t happen and resulted in her not getting accepted by the agency. But all she saw was that what you told her might happen didn’t.”
“So there’s no such thing as fate, then?” Annie asked. “I mean, things don’t have to happen just because I see them in the cards?”
“Definitely not,” Archer answered. “We aren’t controlled by some giant cosmic machine. We have free will. We make choices. The Tarot just shows us what might happen if we make particular choices. But people forget that. Sometimes they want easy answers. So they ask for a Tarot reading, or they do one for themselves, and they decide that whatever they see there is going to happen whether they like it or not.”
“Some of the things I saw were so specific, though,” said Annie. “Like Cheryl’s accident.”
“You saw that Cheryl was going to be in a situation that might result in an accident,” Archer said. “That doesn’t mean it had to happen. And just because it did happen doesn’t mean you caused it. That’s what you were worried about, right?”
Annie nodded. “It looked like all the things I was telling people were happening,” she said, thinking about Kate’s kissing Scott. “And some people blamed me for that.”
“In a way, you were responsible,” Archer said. “By telling people that you saw certain things in the cards, you were putting that information into their heads.”
Annie looked crestfallen.
“But you aren’t responsible for what people did with that information,” Archer continued. “They made their own choices. Your friend who kissed her ex-boyfriend, for example. She didn’t have to do that. She probably wanted to and was using your prediction as an excuse to do something she knew she probably shouldn’t do.”
It was starting to make more sense to Annie now. She hadn’t caused any of the bad things to happen, but she had certainly helped them along in a couple of cases.
“Except in one instance,” Archer said. “Sasha.”
Annie had almost forgotten about Sasha. Now she looked at Thea, who had been standing silently behind them during their discussion.
“I really didn’t know she would run away or anything,” Annie said. “You have to believe me. I was just trying to figure out if I was doing something to cause all the bad stuff.”
“I believe that,” Archer told her. “But something bad did happen because of what you told her, and we have to figure out what to do about it.”
“Do you have any idea where she went?” Annie asked hopefully.
“No,” Thea said. “We were hoping you might know something.”
“Me?” Annie said. “She didn’t tell me anything at all.”
“We know,” Archer said. “But we were hoping you might be able to help out in a different way.”
Annie was confused. She was the reason Sasha had run away in the first place. How could she help now?
Archer opened one of the desk drawers and took something out. She laid it on the table. It was a deck of Tarot cards.
“Want to do one more reading?” she asked.
CHAPTER 16
Annie stared at the cards laid out in front of her, taking in the images. Archer and Thea were watching her, and she was incredibly nervous.
“What do you see?” asked Archer.
Annie swallowed. She pointed to a card showing a woman bound and blindfolded, surrounded by a forest of swords stuck into the ground.
“The Eight of Swords,” she said. “That’s someone who feels trapped, right?”
Archer nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “But there’s more to it than that. She feels trapped by what people are saying about her or what they think about her.”
“And this,” Annie said, pointing to another card showing a young man looking straight ahead. “That’s the same card I saw last time. That’s the blond guy she’s afraid of. But who is this?”
Annie pointed to a
card showing a beautiful dark-haired woman with a kind face. “I know it’s the Queen of Rods, but why is she there?”
“See how the Page of Swords is on one side of the Eight of Swords and the Queen of Rods is on the other?” Archer said. “That suggests that the person represented by the card in the middle is torn between those two people.”
“That’s Sasha,” Annie said. “We know the boy is someone from her past, but who is the woman?”
“Me,” Thea said quietly. “That’s me.”
“The Queen of Rods represents a happy home life,” Archer explained. “Sasha is running away from that because of what this guy represents. But we don’t know what that is.”
“The first card is the Six of Cups,” Annie pointed out. “That has to do with things that have happened to you in the past. I told her that this guy knows something about her. Whatever it is, she’s afraid of him telling people.”
“And this last one,” Archer said, pushing the card toward Annie. “What do you think it means?”
Annie picked up the card and looked at it. “The Six of Swords,” she said. “That’s the card Sherrie had. It means travel.”
“Now put it all together,” Archer encouraged Annie. “What does it say to you?”
Annie looked at the line of cards. She knew what they meant individually. But what story did they tell? She tried to picture Sasha walking along a path made of the cards. They were taking her somewhere. But where?
“Running away,” Annie said, thinking out loud. “Someone from her past. Afraid he’ll tell something. Travel.” Suddenly everything clicked. “She’s running from him,” she said excitedly. “That’s where she is. She’s trying to get away.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Archer said. She looked at Thea. “We’ll call Rowan and tell her to search the bus and the train stations. Sasha may be trying to get out of town.”