Apparently I passed muster, because Leila gave a nod, then said, “Your first isn’t until eleven-thirty.”
“Thanks,” I told her, and meant it. That gave me some time to take a few breaths and get myself together, to forget about Gideon and the Reptilians and everything else for a little while. The problems wouldn’t go away, of course, but I couldn’t allow them to take up too much space in my head, or I’d do a terrible job for today’s clients.
The room we psychics used at Crystal Vision was a small space carved out from the storage area at the back of the store. Some places just had a screen to keep the psychic and her client separated from the rest of the shop, but Leila always said that didn’t provide enough privacy, and I agreed with her. At least here, though the space was a little cramped, there was a door I could shut and close out the rest of the world.
The air here also smelled of incense, although not as intensely. A table with two chairs sat in the middle of the room, and the walls were draped with sari silks from India. More silk covered the table. In one corner stood an extra chair for those times when a couple wanted to get a reading together.
If I laid out the cards for myself now while I was waiting for my first client, what would I see?
I didn’t want to know. The flashes and visions I got from time to time were enough for me. I didn’t look down on the people who came to me asking about their futures, but I was content to allow my future to reveal itself to me on its own time.
My deck was one of the things I’d brought with me to the cottage. I dug it out of my purse, then idly shuffled the cards, letting my energy re-imprint itself on them after my long absence. A lot of the time I didn’t really need the cards, could allow the sensations and impressions I got from a client to filter into my mind and tell me what I needed to know, but people found them reassuring. They wanted a psychic who laid out the cards in the prescribed patterns, or looked at their palms. They didn’t want someone who seemed to be plucking their fortunes right out of thin air.
My first appointment was, thank God, a nice, normal woman in her early thirties who wanted to know if her upcoming relocation to San Diego for her job would be a good thing. Her family was all here in Arizona, and so on. But almost from the moment she sat down, I could sense the enthusiasm in her, the desire to try something different. She was experiencing doubts because of her family’s wanting her to stay in Phoenix, that was all.
So I laid out the cards, and explained that the patterns showed the upcoming change in her world as a very positive thing, and how she needed to listen to her inner voice and trust its guidance. I also hinted that a change in venue would bring about a positive shift in her love life as well. She beamed at that revelation — she was very pretty, with big green eyes and blonde hair, so I didn’t think it was stretching things to tell her that her love life was about to see an improvement — and at the end she gave me a twenty-dollar tip above and beyond the usual forty it cost for a half-hour session.
Yes, pretty good pay for someone not yet twenty-two and without a college degree, even with the twenty-percent cut I gave to Leila. Psychic powers didn’t have to be a complete burden.
After my sessions I always went out to the store to take a look around and see who might be lingering there, who might be working up the nerve to visit a psychic for the first time. The shop was fairly crowded, but I didn’t notice anyone looking particularly in my direction, so I went over to inspect the sign-up sheet Leila kept behind the counter. If the store was busy, I tended to be busy as well, although my most hectic times were later in the day, after people had stopped for drinks and were feeling a bit more adventurous.
Then I noticed a pair of dark eyes staring at me from across the store. Something about them seemed familiar, although I couldn’t quite —
Oh, my God.
There was a reason why those hooded eyes had seemed strangely familiar. Only the last time I’d seen them, they’d been a deep ruby color, rather than dark brown. As recognition flooded through me, I realized the rest of him was altered as well. That is, the green skin was gone, replaced by the equivalent of a nice, healthy tan.
Gideon approached me as I stood by the cash register, frozen in place. No one gave him a second glance, but why would they? He looked like a completely normal guy in his mid-twenties.
He stopped a foot or so away from me and said, “We need to talk.”
Somehow I managed to respond normally enough, even though my heart had started pounding away a mile a minute. “I’m working.”
“I can see that. But I still need to talk to you.”
Helplessly, I looked past him to see Leila sending a curious glance in our direction. Clearing my throat, I said, somewhat loudly for her benefit, “It’s forty dollars for a half-hour session.”
Gideon’s eyebrows went up for a second, and then he nodded in comprehension. “That sounds reasonable. Are you available now?”
“Yes,” I replied, marveling that I could sound so calm. “Come with me, please.”
He followed me back to the reading room and shut the door behind us. “Excellent solution,” he said, looking around. “Very private.”
“Gideon, what you doing here?” I demanded, now that I didn’t have to pretend to Leila that he was just another client. “And how can you look like — well, like that?”
“Oh, this?” He reached down to his wrist, where he wore what appeared to be a brown leather wristband studded with three silvery buffalo-head nickels. A press of the center nickel, and he became the Gideon I knew, with his greenish skin and ruby eyes. Another press of that same button, and the disguise was back in place. “Protective camouflage. A simple enough illusion, but a necessary one.”
“It’s — ” I had to stop myself there, because I wasn’t sure what to think of his altered appearance. Yes, he was, to use Callista’s word, a hottie, but I actually thought I preferred him the other way, which seemed to be a clear indication that I was losing my mind. “It’s very effective,” I finished lamely. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my first question.”
“What am I doing here? I’d think that would be obvious. I need to talk to you.”
“Only talk?”
His mouth tightened. “Perhaps more than that.”
“Did your father send you to fetch me back?”
Without looking at me, Gideon pulled out one of the chairs from the table and sat down. “He gave me a chance to redeem myself.”
“For letting me go? Since when do you have to redeem yourself for doing the right thing?”
“In his eyes, it was not the right thing at all, but rather weakness.”
Since I didn’t want to remain standing and talking down at him, I took the other chair and sat down as well. “Well, I think your father has a pretty skewed view of the universe.”
Gideon frowned. It was fascinating to watch those same expressions of his play out on a face that was so similar to his own, and yet so different. Amazing what a change of eye and skin color could do to alter someone’s appearance. Ignoring my comment, he said, “I had to come see you here because our instruments could not pinpoint exactly where you were staying. Not at your parents’ house, or at the home of any of your friends here in Sedona. It wasn’t until you were out on the main highway that we were able to pick up your trail again.”
So everyone had been right about how Oak Creek would shield me from the Reptilians’ surveillance devices. Yes, I’d believed the stories — or at least I thought I had — but belief wasn’t the same thing as having someone basically corroborate the thing you’d been trusting in. “I’m staying at a safe place,” I said, tone neutral. A part of me was very glad to see him again, but I wasn’t so glad that I was about to abandon all caution.
“Here in Sedona?”
“What does it matter?” I countered. “I’m not coming back with you.”
Once again I saw that tension pull at his jaw, the strong muscles in his neck. “I could take you now,” he said, fishing something from
his pocket. When he laid it down on the tabletop in front of him, I realized it was the metallic device that activated the teleportation beam which had brought me back to Earth.
“You could,” I said evenly, although I felt my heart begin to race, and it took everything in me to keep myself from trying to bolt out of there, out into a public space where I wouldn’t be so vulnerable.
So much for me blithely declaring to my parents that the aliens wouldn’t have the nerve to zap me right out of the store.
“But I don’t think you will,” I continued, forcing myself to sound as calm as possible.
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, that’s not exactly the best strategy for winning hearts and minds, don’t you think? Forcing me to come back with you? That’s your father’s idea, not yours.”
His fingers tightened around the device and I stiffened, sure I was going to be surrounded by acid yellow light at any second and taken right out of the reading room. “Are you saying that I don’t want you back?” he asked.
“No,” I said. This time I did get up from my chair, but only so I could go around the table and stand next to him. He gazed up at me, eyes narrow. “I think you do…only not like that.”
A long pause. He continued to look up into my face, his own expression impassive. I’d been praying for one of those flickers of emotion, something to tell me what might be going on inside his head, but I couldn’t sense anything.
Then, very slowly, he stood as well, and reached for the device and slipped it back into his pocket. I didn’t dare let out a sigh of relief, only stood there in silence.
He was so tall. I’d noted his height before, but for some reason it seemed even more impressive now when he was dressed like any guy you might see walking down the street, in his jeans and sneakers and untucked black T-shirt. His biceps pulled at the sleeves, and for the first time I could see his forearms, see the dusting of dark hair, the muscles under the skin.
I wanted those arms around me. Not here, though. We were private enough for the moment, but if someone signed up for the one o’clock hour to have a reading, Leila would be knocking on the door if we lingered for too long.
Something told me I needed to be alone with him, though. Someplace where he could begin to understand why his father’s way wasn’t the only way.
“I found her,” I said softly, and Gideon’s unnaturally dark eyes narrowed.
“Found who?”
“Your mother.”
Oh, that got him. He stiffened, then crossed his arms as he stared down at me. “How could you possibly have found my mother? She’s been dead for nearly fifteen of your years.”
Well, that told me something. She’d passed away when Gideon was only ten years old.
As they had the night before, tears stung at my eyes. This time, though, I blinked them away. I knew that dissolving into a mess wouldn’t help matters at all, could very well make them worse. “I looked her up,” I said. “When someone disappears like that, it’s all over the news.” Or at least it used to be, I added mentally. Someone’s doing a pretty good job of covering up that kind of thing right now. “It might have happened a quarter-century ago, but the records are still there. Her name was Elizabeth Angela D’Onofrio, and she lived in Phoenix. She was twenty-four.”
“I knew that,” he said stiffly. “Except about Phoenix. She said she wouldn’t bother to tell me about where she’d come from, who her family was, because she knew she’d never see them again, and that I’d never see them, either.”
The barely masked pain in his voice was too much for me to bear. I didn’t stop to think. I only reached out and wrapped my arms around him, then drew him to me.
He resisted for a second, body rigid against mine, as if he was worried that his father would be able to see even this one small moment of weakness. But then a sigh escaped his lips, and he was pressed against me, arms tight around me, his hands tangling in my hair.
It had never felt like this before. Of course my ex-boyfriends had hugged me, but they hadn’t held on to me as if I were the only thing keeping them from drowning.
Maybe for Gideon, I was.
He didn’t weep, though. He only stood there for a long time, clinging to me. I didn’t say anything, because I knew that wasn’t what he needed right then. And he didn’t try to kiss me, because I think he knew the time wasn’t right for that, either.
Finally, though, he let go of me and stepped back a pace. With a shaking hand, he lifted a curly tendril of hair away from my face, watched as it sprang back into a corkscrew when he let go of it. “Your hair is amazing,” he said quietly. “It is so very alive. Just like you.”
The tears threatened again, but once more I pushed them back. “You’re alive, too, Gideon,” I told him. “You can make your own choices.”
“I can?” Then he shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”
“Maybe it can be.” I hesitated, then said, “I need you to trust me.”
His lids dropped, hooding his eyes, and he wouldn’t look at me directly. “Trust is not something that comes easily, I’m afraid.”
“I know.” I reached out and took his hand. His fingers were cold. Nerves, or was his body temperature lower than the average human’s? “I’m going to ask a lot of you, Gideon, but it’s only because I know you have the strength to do the right thing.”
“The right thing?” He frowned then, although he didn’t try to pull his hand from mine. A bitter laugh, and he added, “I’m not sure you know me as well as you think you do.”
“I know you let me go, that first time.” I tightened my fingers around his, hoping that some of my warmth might penetrate his chilled flesh. “And if you’d been really intent on carrying out your father’s orders, you would have already taken me away from here. You wouldn’t be standing here and talking to me.”
“I — ” His shoulders drooped slightly, and yet I could still sense the tension in his body, the way he seemed like an animal ready to startle at the slightest sound. “I’m not sure I can be what you think I can.”
His doubt worried me, but I couldn’t let that shake my resolve. He’d spent his whole life trying to live up to Lir Shalan’s completely unrealistic expectations for him, of trying to be what he never could, because his heart wasn’t cold. Gideon might have done his best to stamp out the gift of humanity that his mother had given him, but no one who was completely lost to compassion would have let me go, risking his father’s wrath and so many other complications.
“Will you try, though?” I asked. “I said earlier that I need you to trust me, and I do. I want to show you something.”
A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “That sounds…intriguing.”
I had to hope so, but I didn’t want to play my hand just yet. What I did know was that we needed to get out of there, and so I had to figure out how best to do that gracefully. The last thing I wanted to do was leave Leila in the lurch while uptown Sedona was swarming with spring-break tourists.
“Can you wait in here for a minute?” I asked, and Gideon nodded, although he looked slightly confused.
“If you need me to.”
I flashed a grateful smile at him and said, “I’ll be back in just a minute.”
Then I slipped out and went to find Leila, who had just finished putting away the cash register receipt from her last sale. Good. At least she wasn’t occupied with explaining to someone how the magnetic vibrations from quartz crystals worked.
“Hey, Leila,” I began, and she looked up from the register, big blue eyes curious.
“Done with your twelve-thirty so soon?”
“I — ” Right, she thought Gideon was a client. I should have picked up on that, but his sudden appearance here had really rattled me. “Um, sort of. Something’s come up, though. I don’t think I can stay for the rest of the afternoon. Is there anyone who can take over my shift?”
“Well, you’re in luck, because Shelli called not five minutes ago, asking if there wa
s any way I could get her some extra hours this week. That jerk of an ex of hers conveniently ‘forgot’ to send her child support again, and she’s at her wit’s end.”
“Oh, wow, I’m so sorry about that,” I said, and I meant it. Shelli was about five years older than I, and would have been pretty if she didn’t look so tired all the time. Raising a child on your own wasn’t easy, and having an unreliable ex just made the situation that much more difficult. “Then please tell her she can take my shift, and all the rest of them for the weekend, if she wants them.”
“She’ll want them, I’m sure. She said she would be able to get Tina in daycare if she could get a shift, so that part’s handled.” Leila’s expression grew rather sly. “Does this ‘business’ of yours have anything to do with the young man who took the twelve-thirty appointment?”
“Um…sort of.”
She chuckled. “Well, have fun. I don’t know where you found him, but I’d be wanting to take the weekend off, too, if I had someone who looked like that to share it with.”
Heat flooded my cheeks, but I managed to nod. “Sure. I mean, thanks, Leila. I’m glad you’ll still have someone to cover the shift.” And someone who needs the money a lot more than I do, I thought.
Leila seemed to agree. “Shelli will be thrilled. And relieved. Just give me a call on Monday so we can get your schedule for next week figured out.”
I promised that I would, and hurried back to retrieve Gideon from the reading room. He was still standing, but was turning over the cards in the tarot deck I’d left on the table one by one, appearing to study the different faces and figures on the cards.
Normally, it really wasn’t a good idea to let someone else handle your tarot deck, because their vibrations could get mixed up with yours, and your readings might be muddy for a while until you could get things sorted out. Right then, however, I didn’t bother to say anything, only gathered up the cards and slid them back into their box, then slipped the box into the little velvet pouch I used to hold them. Gideon watched his procedure with open curiosity on his face, but he didn’t ask why I took such care in how the cards were stored.
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