“Why does that question scare me?”
“I’ll pick you up at six. This is gonna be great.”
Arie shivered. She and Chandra had vastly different definitions of the word “great.”
Chandra’s eyes were bright with excitement as she gripped the steering wheel. “I’ve been going to her for months now. She’s a remarkable woman. I’ve been wanting you to come see her for ages. Remember, I told you about her?”
Arie groaned. “Please tell me you aren’t taking me to your psychic lady. You know I don’t—”
“For someone who died and visited heaven and then came back with her very own psychic gift, you sure are close-minded.”
Okay, she had a point. So many weird things had happened to Arie recently, and aside from Chandra, she really didn’t have anyone to talk to.
Her mother cringed at any discussion of “the incident.” In fact, Evelyn still seemed unconvinced that her daughter had actually been dead for four minutes, despite the doctor’s affirmation and the medical records. Evelyn didn’t even like talking about the events leading up to Arie’s death, as if her daughter having been mugged in a parking lot was unseemly.
Arie gently rubbed the puckered, starfish-shaped scar just over her collarbone. The doctors had stated that blood loss was the primary cause of death. Maybe, Arie mused, the blood they’d used to refill her had come from someone with a gift, as Chandra called it.
It didn’t feel like a gift. It might be too soon to call whatever she had a curse, but it was certainly a burden and scary as hell. And because of it, Arie didn’t feel comfortable opening up to her usual confidants.
Her father had always been there for her. Although she might have kept some of her boneheaded decisions from him initially, she almost always fessed up eventually. And although there might have been times Edward Stiles was disappointed in his daughter, he always forgave her, and he always helped her see the best in herself.
They had been able to talk about her visit to the OS. As a pastor, Ed had no trouble believing in heaven or even rejoicing in it.
But talking about it set him at odds with his wife, and Arie didn’t like being the cause of conflict between them. Besides, death visions were a whole ‘nother level of freaky.
Chandra pulled the car to the curb in front of a well-kept trailer home, interrupting Arie’s train of thought.
The bathroom is filthy, of course. The tub loaded with dirty . . .
Arie felt dizzy and braced herself against the dash of Chandra’s car.
“Are you okay?” Chandra’s eyebrows furrowed, and she patted her friend on her back. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this is too soon. I thought it might be good for you to talk to somebody who’s comfortable with this stuff. I already told Walynda about your NDE.”
“I’m okay. I just needed a minute. I think it was seeing the trailer . . .”
“What’s the big deal about a trailer?”
“I’m not sure. Marissa grew up in a trailer. Maybe she . . . I dunno . . . got upset?”
Another wave of dizziness flowed through Arie. She’d never really thought of it that way. A dead person was sending her thoughts, her memories, her life straight into Arie’s head.
Arie sucked in a deep breath.
Wait . . . Walynda? Who named their kid Walynda?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A gypsy caravan had vomited across the whole of the interior. Yards and yards of royal-blue fabric decorated with tiny silver stars, ivory crescent moons, and golden suns draped the windows and the back wall. A round table dominated the middle of the room, and candles, crystals, and incense holders lay scattered across every available flat surface. A maroon wingback chair had been pulled up to the table. Walynda’s chair, Arie assumed. The other three chairs ringing the table looked like ordinary dining room chairs with scarves thrown over them.
Walynda arrived.
The decor immediately ceased to be the main attraction because a six-foot-two woman with brilliant purple hair and long burgundy fingernails had her own attention-gaining abilities. The long, flowing white satin choir robe helped.
A pastor’s kid, Arie knew her choir robes.
“Welcome. I’m so glad to finally meet you.”
Walynda’s voice had a soft, otherworldly lilt. She floated to Arie’s side and held her by the shoulders. Peering into her eyes, the psychic smiled widely. “Welcome, indeed.”
“Thank you,” Arie mumbled.
Walynda released Arie and turned to Chandra, adding a cheek kiss to the shoulder-grabbing thing.
Chandra’s eyes sparkled. “You did your hair.”
Walynda patted her purple tresses self-consciously. “Oh. Yes. I like to go to Becky’s Institution of Beauty Art to get my hair done. It’s very economical, and it’s nice to see all the young girls as they’re starting out on their life’s journeys.” She blushed and patted her hair again. “There are drawbacks, of course.”
Leading the way to the table, the psychic offered Arie a seat. Chandra perched on the edge of another chair and pulled a pen and notebook out of her purse. Instead of joining them, Walynda circled the interior of the room, lighting candles. Then she picked up one of the incense holders, a thin stream of fragrant, sandalwood-scented smoke already wafting from the opening, and circled again. This time, she fluttered her hand through the smoke, dispersing it throughout the room.
Arie coughed.
“Oh, dear, are you allergic?”
Without waiting for Arie’s answer, Walynda set the incense aside, gathered her skirts, and folded herself into the burgundy chair. She reached across the table and grabbed Arie’s hands in her own. Walynda’s fingers had so many rings on them they clicked and clattered whenever she used them, which was a lot. Walynda was a hand-talker.
They were still clicking as Walynda opened an intricately carved wooden box and pulled out a deck of tarot cards. Walynda held them lovingly to her chest, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. After a few moments, she began shuffling them.
“Think of a question while I shuffle, and keep thinking of it as I lay out the spread.”
A question? How about ten? Arie tried to narrow it down, but she was nervous, and it was hard to prioritize from the multitude of questions swirling in her mind.
Walynda set out five cards: three side by side in a line, then one above and one below the middle card. The images were brightly colored, a jumbled mix of yellows and blues and reds. She placed a sixth card crosswise over the center card.
“Don’t stop thinking of your question,” she trilled. To the left of the arrangement, she added another row—vertical this time—of four.
“All right now. Here we go.”
Walynda took a moment to study the cards, then suddenly stiffened and swept them up With a phony laugh, she said, “Whoops. You’re supposed to shuffle, not me.” As she handed the deck across the table to Arie, her hands shook so hard her rings sounded like castanets.
Arie accepted them warily and shuffled them a few times. They were bigger than usual playing cards and kept slipping through her fingers. The pictures were both interesting and a little frightening, so she turned them face down.
“Do you want me to lay them out?”
“Yes, dear. Just the way I showed you.”
Arie laid them out exactly as Walynda had. Not only was the layout the same, as far as Arie could tell, so were the cards. Exactly the same.
“Holy crap,” Walynda said in a very nonlilty voice. Out of the corner of her eye, Arie saw Chandra taking frantic notes.
“Is that supposed to happen?” Arie asked. The other two exchanged glances that fully answered Arie’s question.
Swallowing hard, she gathered the cards again, carefully shuffled for several minutes, spread them out.
Exact. Same. Cards.
The same reaction, too, as all three women gasped and pulled back from the table. Walynda swept her hand across the cards, blurring their order, then picked them up and stuffed them back in the
wooden box. She stood so abruptly her chair rocked back and almost fell over.
“I’m sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I have a headache.”
She shooed the girls over to the door.
“Walynda?” Chandra spoke for the first time in twenty minutes. “What just happ–”
“Nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about,” Walynda sang. “I’m just not feeling very well tonight. I’ve had a lot of readings this week, and my energy has been drained dry.”
As the girls cleared the threshold, Walynda called to Chandra. “Call me for an appointment, dear!”
In the next instant, the door swung shut, and they heard the click of a lock. And then another.
Chandra and Arie stood on the sidewalk and stared at each other.
“Well, that went well,” Arie said.
While Chandra ordered their coffees at the counter, Arie made her way to their favorite spot in Whelan’s: a small, round table near the white fireplace. She briefly considered ordering a Turtle Sundae. After the unsettling episode with Walynda, she deserved something sweet and gooey.
She sighed. Eighteen pounds since her visit to the Other Side. No ice cream.
When Chandra joined her with a couple of steaming mugs, Arie asked to see the notes.
Chandra scrunched her face. “I’m not sure we should do that. I mean, I know some things about reading tarot, but only enough to know that I don’t know enough. We should really—”
Arie waggled her fingers. “Gimme.”
With a theatrical sigh, Chandra pulled the notebook from her tote-size purse. Arie spread the notes on the table between them so Chandra could see.
“Okay,” Arie said. “There’s ten cards, right?”
“In this layout, yeah. She used the Celtic Cross spread. I think it’s the most common one. What question were you thinking of while she shuffled?”
“At first, I couldn’t think of just one. But then I figured out what to ask: Should I use my gift? Maybe I should’ve been more specific.”
“I don’t think the question was the problem. The whole thing is so weird. I can’t believe with a layout of ten cards, you picked the same ones over and over again.”
“Apparently, Walynda’s never seen that, either,” Arie said. “She looked at me like she’d seen a toad jump out of my mouth.”
“I don’t think freaking out your psychic is a good sign.”
“D’ya think?”
Arie leaned over Chandra’s notes, trying to decipher her friend’s scrawl. “So which one of these cards triggered the freaking?”
“You mean, as if pulling the same cards three times in a row wasn’t enough?”
“Yeah.”
Chandra sipped her chai tea and studied the page. Her finger trailed down the list. “Honestly, there’s enough here to freak me out, and I don’t even know exactly what I’m looking at. I can tell you what I know about a couple of them, but that’s not the point. It’s not just what cards are; it’s where they’re placed. Each spot tells you about a different time or circumstance in your life, so each card’s meaning can vary depending on your circumstances and where it was placed in the spread.”
“Look, I don’t know anything about this stuff, but even I saw the Death card. It was written right on there: Death. Some black knight dude riding on a white horse. Is that the one that freaked her out?”
“See, that’s what I mean,” Chandra said. “It’s not that easy. The Death card is really powerful, but it’s not about, you know, death. It’s about transformation. And, um, in your reading, it was placed in your distant past, not your recent. So it was talking about progressing from your old life to a new one. It means you had an attitude that was holding you back or a challenge that you faced in your past, and you grew from it. It’s probably not even about your NDE.”
“My mom would agree with the attitude-needing-changing part. So, which one would be about my recent past?”
Chandra tapped the number four card located at the bottom of the cross. She smiled.
Arie leaned over and looked. “Well, of course. I’m a Fool.”
Chandra giggled. “Nobody is going to argue with that. But when it’s placed here”—she tapped the notebook—“it’s a pretty cool thing. The Fool is the first step in a journey. He’s like, I don’t know, possibilities.”
“Possibilities?”
“You really need to talk to a medium about this. Pulling the same cards three times in a row—that’s majorly significant. But there are aspects of this layout that I couldn’t even begin to explain.”
The tightness forming behind Arie’s eyes told her another headache was brewing. She worked at massaging it away with her fingers.
“Look,” Chandra said, “do you want me to find another medium? I’ve heard about this one lady—”
Arie flung her hands up like a traffic cop. “No. Let’s just put it away for now.”
Chandra reached for the notebook, but Arie stopped her.
“I’ll keep it.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Several days went by without another BioClean job. One top of everything else, Arie’s financial troubles were crushing. At the rate she was going, she wouldn’t be able to keep herself in coffee money, much less groceries or rent, if she ever wanted to live on her own again. She needed another job.
Even though she knew it would irritate him, she started scanning Grumpa’s newspapers as soon as he set them down. He accused her of putting the sections back in the wrong order on purpose to aggravate him.
There weren’t that many jobs she was qualified for. And the ones she was, like waitressing or second-shift factory work, would have meant coming home after dark, which after being knifed in a parking lot and left to die, she wasn’t ready for. And maybe never would be.
And that wasn’t the only thing preying on Arie’s mind.
Finally, one night, after tossing and turning for three hours, she gave in. Flicking on the lamp, she sat up in bed and grabbed her laptop from the nightstand. While she waited for it to boot up, she padded over to her dresser and retrieved Chandra’s notebook from her sock drawer, where she’d felt compelled to hide it. It wasn’t that she thought Grumpa would prowl through her room; she just hadn’t wanted to be reminded of it.
But ignoring it wasn’t working either.
Arie entered “tarot” into the search engine and got approximately thirty bazillion hits. She clicked the top one.
Ten cards in the Celtic Cross. Chandra had been right. This particular spread seemed pretty common, and interpreting it depended on a lot of variables, including the question Arie’d chosen. She should probably have been more specific than “Should I use my gift?” but it was what it was. Also, according to the website, there were no bad cards. Just misunderstood ones, Arie supposed.
She took a deep breath and read on.
The first card Walynda, and then Arie, had placed stood for the present. The High Priestess. Cool. But what did it mean?
A Major Arcana card, whatever that was. Arie read the description and realized it wasn’t going to be as easy as plugging in the card and getting a readout of its meaning. According to the website, this card was “veiled in mystery.”
No shit.
The High Priestess seemed to be about the unconscious, the “Inner Voice”—which, for Arie, usually sounded like her mother nagging. Somehow, Arie couldn’t picture her mother as “a gateway to realms beyond human comprehension.”
One thing did ring true, however. The High Priestess was supposedly a sign that a decision had to be made, that Arie’s intuition was sending her a message.
Well, yeah.
She sighed and moved on to the second card: the Tower. It was in the spot indicating an “immediate challenge.” As far as symbolism went, this card looked scary as hell. Lightning smashing into a phallic tower, and people jumping headfirst to the cliff below.
No bad cards? Right. Arie’s immediate challenge looked like Armageddon.
It was
supposed to signify a dramatic change. Okay. That made sense. Being attacked, dying, taking a spin around heaven, and then returning with the ability to read memories in blood would seem to qualify for that. But was that the immediate challenge the cards meant? Because that had already happened.
Uh, boy. Arie read on.
Third card: Death. Distant past. Why would death be in the distant past? Arie would have thought it would be more recent or, given the nature of her job, future circumstances.
Fourth card: the Fool. And that was the card representing the recent past. Reading about the Fool made her feel a smidge better. The card didn’t mean she was as dumb as a box of hammers. It meant innocence or untapped potential. Arie could picture herself as untapped potential. Her teachers had always talked about her potential. Of course, that was because they were trying to find the silver lining in her failing grades, but still.
Fifth: the Four of Swords indicated the best outcome. Of the reading? Of her life?
Arie’s stomach rumbled. Prophesy made her hungry.
The Sword card meant something about rest and recovery. Okay, that could be good. So far, Arie liked this card best.
Sixth. More than halfway done. Page of Sword—lots of swords. Arie didn’t know what that meant. It had been laid in the immediate future slot. It stood for confusion, learning about her powers, and battling evil.
Shitshitshitshitshit.
Arie forced herself to finish up the last three by promising her Inner Voice and whoever else dwelled inside that she would find something good to eat as soon as she was done.
Seven, eight, and nine were the Seven of Swords, Two of Cups, and Ten of Wands, respectively. The dude on the Seven of Swords was stealing a bunch of swords and running away. Running away . . . Arie’s usual approach to problems. It was supposed to stand for factors affecting the situation, but Arie couldn’t figure out how stealing swords would be helpful.
Two of Cups: a relationship. That could be cool. The memory of a certain pair of delft-blue eyes made her shiver. But she soon discovered it might not mean a new love. It might mean learning to love herself.
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