Strange Fates (Nyx Fortuna)

by Marlene Perez

  “I could write down a simple spell for you to try,” Talbot said.

  “I think I can handle it,” I said. “Pretentious little twit,” I added under my breath.

  Ambrose heard my comment and laughed. “My son mistakes your lack of House allegiance as a lack of knowledge.”

  He went to the register and took a key off a large ring. “You can move in today if you want. The power is on and it’s furnished.”

  We shook hands and I was the proud tenant of the apartment above the pawnshop. The benefit of dealing with a sorcerer was that he didn’t ask questions, every exit and entrance in the building had been warded, and the rent was cheap. Of course, the contract was a tricky one, but nothing I hadn’t seen before.

  I was lucky, I knew, but sometimes I was suspicious of that luck. It wasn’t always good fortune when someone offered you something for close to nothing. Sometimes, there were strings attached.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Ready to take a look?” I asked. I was showing Elizabeth my new apartment.

  Elizabeth nodded, but she didn’t look especially happy. “Hey, it’s going to be great,” I said. “I couldn’t sponge off you forever.”

  “You aren’t sponging off us,” she said. A faint blush tinged her cheeks and she kept her eyes resolutely on the wall. “I told Jenny not to worry if I didn’t make it back tonight.”

  My heart started to beat in triple time, then slowed to normal when she added, “I wasn’t sure how long it would take.”

  We walked up the stairs until we came to the apartment. There were two doors, one marked 1A and the other 1B.

  “Which one is yours?” she asked.

  I held up the key, which had a number inscribed on it. “One-B. Let’s check it out.”

  The apartment was small, clean, and beige. It didn’t look like anyone had ever lived there iat least not anyone with a speck of personality.

  I showed her the bedroom. It seemed presumptuous of me to ask Elizabeth to go shopping with me for a bed for my new place, so I ordered one from a discount mattress place that Ambrose assured me wouldn’t be full of lice or bedbugs and bought a king-size bed. It had already been delivered and thoughts of what I’d like to do in that bed had been buzzing around in my head ever since. But Elizabeth didn’t seem to want to linger, so we headed back to the kitchen.

  “At least it’s clean,” Elizabeth said. “But why can’t you get a place closer to us? This side of town is the pits.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “This is the only place I can afford, and I can work at the pawnshop on the weekends to make rent.” The money I had in the bank needed to stay there.

  “I can help with—” Elizabeth started to say, but I shook my head before the rest of the sentence was out of her mouth.

  Dating a rich girl wasn’t easy, at least not for me. I had too much pride to let her support me, but apparently I did not possess many useful skills. Things were looking up now that I had a job and a place of my own, although Elizabeth didn’t see it that way.

  “It seems too good to be true,” Elizabeth commented. “You know what my mom always said?”

  “No, what?”

  “That something too good to be true probably is,” Elizabeth replied.

  “My mother said fortuna audax iuvat.”

  “What does that mean?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Fortune favors the bold.”

  Elizabeth dropped her eyes, but not before I saw a flash of panic in them.

  I changed the subject. “The kitchen isn’t bad,” I said. “Maybe I’ll learn to cook.”

  I opened a drawer and discovered a stack of take-out menus. I handed the menus to Elizabeth. “Are you hungry?”

  “Starving,” she said. “This place looks good and they deliver.” She held up a pink paper menu from a Chinese restaurant.

  “Sounds perfect,” I said.

  She took out her cell phone and ordered a bunch of stuff, gave them her credit card number and the address, and hung up.

  “You know, I invited you out,” I said. “You don’t have to try to pay for everything all the time.”

  “It’s just habit,” she said. “No big deal.”

  It was a big deal to me, but I decided not to press the issue. “Let me show you the rest of the place.”

  The tour took about ten seconds. The small dining room didn’t have a table or any chairs. I’d find some furniture at a thrift store or something.

  “At least the bedroom’s big,” Elizabeth said.

  The doorbell rang, saving me from thinking anymore about beds and Elizabeth in the same sentence.

  We spread out the food on the coffee table and ate sitting on the sofa.

  Finally, we leaned back, replete. “Were you expecting another thirty people?” I teased her, gesturing to several untouched containers.

  “Leftovers,” she explained. “Besides, I didn’t know what you liked.”

  “I like you,” I said. I leaned in and touched her face. She closed her eyes.

  “Make a wish,” I said.

  “Why?” she replied, but she kept her eyes closed.

  “You had an eyelash on your cheek,” I said. I held it up for inspection. “See?”

  She cracked an eyelid. “Okay, I’ll make a wish.”

  “No, you have to blow it away first.”

  She pursed her lips and I stole a kiss.

  Minutes later, we were stretched out on the couch, kissing as if our lives depended on it. I was pretty sure mine did.

  She unbuttoned my shirt, and the touch of her hands on my skin nearly drove me out of my mind. My skin went hot and all the blood left my brain and headed due south.

  She traced the scar from Brad’s attempt to kill me. “It must have been fate,” she said.

  Her words were like a bucket of ice straight to the groin. I sat up. “I don’t believe in fate.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” I said shortly. She tried to resume her exploration, but I moved away.

  “What do you believe in?”

  “Luck,” I said. “I believe in luck. And in survival.”

  “That’s a pretty grim outlook,” she said.

  “If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t trust anyone,” I said. It was a lesson my aunts had taught me well. After all, if you can’t trust your family, who can you trust?

  “Not even your family?” she said.

  “Especially not family.”

  “I trust my family,” she said. She looked like she was near tears, and I felt like an asshole for bringing my screwed-up family life into it.

  “I’m sure you have good reason to,” I said. Lame, but I didn’t know what else to say. I changed the subject. “Hey, we didn’t open our fortune cookies.”

  “They gave us a bunch.” She opened one and read the fortune before pocketing it. “Hmm, interesting,” she said, then popped the crunchy cookie bits in her mouth.

  “You’re not going to tell me what it said?”

  “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” she teased.

  I ripped open my fortune cookie. Your fate awaits. I stared down at the tiny writing. It was just a coincidence. “You first.”

  “Mine says If you lie down with dogs, you’ll get fleas,” she said.

  Maybe not a coincidence. I faked a yawn. “It’s getting late. I should take you home.”

  She gave me a puzzled look. “It’s barely eleven.”

  “It’s been a long day,” I replied. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “You didn’t tell me your fortune,” she said.

  “I don’t believe in that stuff.” I wrapped my hand around the cookie and crumpled it to dust. “I’ll get my keys.”

  “Fine,” she said. That was the last thing she said to me until we reached her place.

  “Elizabeth, I’m not used to relationships,” I said. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

  “Nyx, you just keep pushing me away,” she said.

  “I
don’t mean to,” I said. “There are things you don’t know about me.”

  “I thought that was the idea, to get to know each other.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it would kill me if anything ever happened to you.”

  She leaned in and kissed me softly. “Nothing is going to happen to me.” She slid out of the car and added through an open door, “I promise.”

  I wished I could believe it. I was putting her life in danger just by spending time with her.

  Back at my apartment, I opened the rest of the fortune cookies. The same message was repeated on every slip of paper. Someone was trying to tell me something.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Although his father had taken a liking to me, Talbot’s hostility didn’t ease up once I started working at Eternity Road. If anything, it only grew worse.

  He’d made it clear he didn’t like me working in his father’s store. Didn’t like me at all, in fact.

  “You’re late,” he said when I reported for work on Saturday morning.

  “Your clock is fast,” I replied.

  “Is not.”

  “Is too.”

  “I expect the two of you to get along,” his dad snapped.

  That shut both of us up for a second. Talbot finally gave me a smile, the first I’d seen from him. “Maybe you can suggest improvements on my security system. My wards didn’t hold when Dad was attacked.”

  I nodded. “I’ll do my best.” I wondered about the change in his attitude, but decided not to comment. He was prickly enough as it was.

  I put triple wards on all the doors and windows and then Talbot showed me how to use the cash register.

  “We’re strictly cash-and-carry,” he said. “No checks, no credit cards, and for god’s sakes, if a pixie shows up and wants to buy something on credit, the answer is no.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “You get a lot of pixies in downtown Minneapolis?”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said. “Now be a good little sorcerer and dust the office shelves.”

  I flipped him off, but did as he asked.

  It was a small room with a scratched metal desk in the center. Shelves lined the wall, which contained mostly old paperbacks and useless knickknacks. I saw one lovely agate amid all the junk.

  There were some cool relics of power in the office. Things I hadn’t noticed my first few trips in there, like a carving of the goddess Selene. I scanned the shelves more closely and found several interesting texts. I grabbed a book about the Fates, written in ancient Greek, and a dusty hardback with a lurid cover.

  I could tell that the author of the first book I found was full of crap. The one on the bottom, though, looked interesting. When I turned to the back to the author photo, I recognized a much younger Ambrose. There was a man standing next to him, his co-author I assumed, but much of the other man’s face was obscured by a fedora.

  Under the photo, it read Kaelin Pavo and Dr. A. M. Green. The bio was uninformative—like the names, a total load of crap they’d made up to sell books.

  It was fiction, but to me it read like a thinly veiled family history. Ambrose knew a lot more about my family than he’d let on.

  The story began at the engagement party of a young magical couple, Luck and Chance, who were happy and in love. The man’s best friend, a handsome young sorcerer, Charm, also loved his best friend’s beloved.

  Two men, both in love with the same woman. A familiar story, but this one had a twist.

  Luck was in love with both of the young men and seemed unable to choose between the two of them.

  Finally, in desperation, the young men begged her to make a decision, but Luck could or would not, so her sister proposed a contest of magic, a sort of sorcerer’s duel, to decide who would win the lovely Luck’s hand.

  The young woman had three sisters, and the four of them just happened to be witches. The witches, to be specific. And the Fates, being the Fates, could not resist meddling in their little sister’s affairs and so stacked the deck in favor one of the men.

  I remembered I was supposed to be working, not reading, and got back to work.

  I finished dusting and walked back to the front.

  “Ambrose, can I borrow these?” I asked. I held up the books.

  “Sure, as long as you bring them back,” he said. “While you were dusting I had a brilliant idea.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “Nyx, do you like billiards?” Ambrose asked.

  “You mean pool?” I asked. “Sure.”

  “Good, it’s settled.” Ambrose’s beaming smile went from his son to me.

  “What’s settled?” I was not following.

  “You and Talbot will get to know each other over a game of billiards after work,” Ambrose said.

  “Dad,” Talbot started to protest, but Ambrose stared him down.

  I hesitated. Even if Talbot and I survived the game without one of us braining the other with a pool cue, I was leery. I hadn’t had a friend in over a hundred years, and even then I hadn’t revealed my true self to anyone.

  I didn’t want to endanger Talbot’s life, but the burden of a solitary life was crushing me. He was the son of a very powerful sorcerer. A son of the House of Zeus. The most powerful witch family there was, besides my own.

  The Fates would sacrifice him without a second thought if they thought it would hurt me. The three current sisters of Fate had been in power a long time. It was time to take my revenge and end their reign.

  What they lacked in numbers, they made up for in concentrated power. Nobody knew how, but every five hundred years or so, the old Fates stepped down and the new ones took over. The power of all the Fates before them was transferred to the new Fates.

  I wasn’t concerned with nameless, faceless future Fates. These were the Wyrd Sisters I wanted. My childhood tormenters, my mother’s sisters. My mother’s murderers.

  Why hadn’t their daughters taken over already? The Fates were not immortal. They were witches, not goddesses. They aged and died, although much more slowly than mortals.

  “Never mind, it was a dumb idea,” Talbot said. I’d been silent much longer than the question warranted.

  “No,” I said. “It’s a great idea. I want to.”

  We ended up at the Red Dragon. I gave him a wry grin. “Where your only ID is the color of your money.”

  “You’ve been here?”

  “Been here, stabbed here,” I told him. “In fact, it’s where Elizabeth and I met.”

  “What was she doing in a place like this? She doesn’t strike me as the usual Red Dragon clientele.”

  I shrugged. “Slumming, I guess.” But Talbot’s question hovered at the edge of my brain as I racked the table. What had Elizabeth been doing at the Red Dragon?

  Talbot took a shot and missed. “Care to make it interesting?”

  I knew I was being hustled, but I wasn’t sure how. “Why not? Twenty bucks?”

  He snorted derisively. “I said interesting, not insulting.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Loser has to dust the old man’s collection,” he replied.

  “You’re on.” Ambrose had a small collection of figurines in his office.

  “Everything,” he said. “Even the stuff in our apartment.”

  “Why do I feel like I’ve just been scammed?”

  “You know, when we first met, I thought you were an asshole,” Talbot said. “And a liar.”

  “You were right.”

  We grinned at each other, in complete agreement for the first time.

  I leaned in to take a shot and when I looked up, my glance fell upon the last person I expected to see at the Red Dragon. Naomi was standing there in a short black velvet mini dress and long leather boots.

  I swore, loudly. “What’s she doing here?”

  Talbot looked up and gave a low whistle of appreciation. “You know her? Introduce me.” He didn’t take his eyes off her.

  Naomi had already made her way to the
bar in search of some refreshment.

  I sighed. “C’mon,” I said. He followed me through the bar. We arrived as she ordered two shots and downed them.

  “You planning on driving home like that?” I asked.

  Naomi shot me a dirty look. “Mind your own business, Nyx.”

  “Careful or I’ll tell him to make it a Shirley Temple. Now give me your keys.”

  “You two sound like brother and sister,” Talbot said.

  The comment was too close to home. “Hardly.”

  “You’re both drinking,” she pointed out.

  “We walked here,” I told her.

  Naomi grabbed Talbot’s beer and took a swig, then spit it out. “This stuff is nasty.”

  I glanced at Talbot. “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Nyx here seems to have forgotten his manners. I’m Talbot. And you are—?”

  “Leaving,” I said, firmly. “I’m taking you home.”

  She dug her heels in, which is when I noticed that the shots hadn’t been the first drinks she’d had. More like the tenth. “You don’t know where I live and I’m not going to tell you.”

  “You sound like a five-year-old,” I told her, exasperated.

  She cuddled into Talbot and looked up at him. “I guess I’ll have to go home with you.”

  Talbot and I exchanged looks, his hopeful, mine no way in hell. “We’ll have to take her to my place to sleep it off,” I finally said.

  The denizens of the Red Dragon didn’t even blink at the sight of two guys escorting a loud, obviously intoxicated girl out of the bar.

  As we walked, Naomi leaned drunkenly against Talbot. “You’re cute.”

  I watched with interest as he blushed. Most sorcerers from the House of Zeus fancied themselves ladies’ men, probably because Zeus himself never met a female, mortal or goddess, that he didn’t like. But Talbot didn’t know what to make of my cousin.

  Naomi stumbled and went down. Talbot picked her up. “She passed out,” he said. He carried her without complaint. The tender expression on his face made me nervous.

  “She’s a Fate,” I warned him. “A mini one, anyway.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s not the mom I have to worry about, anyway. It’s her father.”