Carnival

by Kory M. Shrum

  And it took no time at all to get to New Orleans, did it?

  Why didn’t he tell me he was getting out? Why—But she knew.

  It was just like Terry to sneak up on her like this, and she had no doubt he was heading her way. If he could get a car, hitch a ride—and didn’t he have enough friends left to manage it—he could be down here…now.

  He could be here now.

  With shaking hands she searched her robes for her tarot deck. Grandmamie’s tarot deck. It reminded her of the way she used to search her pockets for cigarettes when her nerves were really bad, back when smoking had been the only way to relieve them.

  A ghostly moan circled the shop, and the flickering lights startled a scream from Melandra. Another high-pitched scream met it, the sounds twining.

  “Christ!” Piper exclaimed. Her hand went to her chest. “What the hell? It’s just me.”

  Melandra’s hands shook all the harder.

  “What are you doing?” Piper crossed to her, letting her backpack slip off her shoulder and hit the floor. Her face pinched with confusion. “Mel, what are you doing?”

  “I can’t find my damn cards. I can’t find them!”

  “They’re right here.” Piper pointed at the wrapped bundle on the glass, a rectangle of black velvet tied neatly with a piece of red ribbon.

  Melandra didn’t even remember removing them from her pocket, but she must have. She must have reached for them while she was still talking to Janie.

  Her hands shook so badly as she unrolled the cards that they spilled from the wrapping.

  “Help me,” she begged. She offered the cards to Piper with shaking hands. “Help me!”

  A calm came over the girl. It surprised Mel. Usually if someone acted hysterical it induced hysteria in others. Piper seemed to grow calmer, more patient in direct balance to Melandra’s outburst.

  That’s from dealing with her junkie mother, Mel thought distantly with that part of her still in control of itself. She knows what to do when the world is unraveling.

  Piper held Grandmamie’s cards in her hand—something she’d never been allowed to do before—and the look of awe on her face told Melandra she was well aware of it.

  “What’s happened?” Piper licked her lips. She tucked her blond hair behind her ear with her free hand, the cards grasped in the other. The silver rings on her fingers caught the light from the chandelier, sparkling. There was a small mole on her right thumb, and Mel found herself focusing on that. Right now, she’d take anything.

  “Mel?” Piper asked gently. “What do you want me to do?”

  “A three-card spread.”

  Piper shuffled the cards without having to be told. Over and over again they rolled between her nimble fingers while Mel grappled with the terror writhing inside her.

  Get on top of this, Grandmamie said. Get high so you can see that damn snake.

  Piper held out the deck, offering it to Melandra.

  Mel closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. She knew that old deck so well she couldn’t pick its cards with her eyes open. Every crease, every worn edge—she knew what they were. And if she was going to do this right, she had to blind herself to what she thought she knew.

  Grandmamie, she prayed. Help me.

  A feverish chill ran down her spine.

  Melandra’s fingers traced the cool edges of the cards. The feather-soft grazing of card after card after card, until a tremor of electric fire sparked in her fingertips. Then she pulled that card, laying it on the countertop only to begin trailing her fingertips over the rest of the deck.

  Tick, tick, tick, tick… Her fingernails caught on the edges.

  Another spark, a rush of heat up into her hand, and she pulled that card, too. The heat only deepened when she moved to the next card, so she pulled it as well. Just to be sure, she traced her fingers over the deck once more. But there was no heat on this pass.

  The cards were chosen.

  Melandra opened her eyes.

  Piper gathered up the chosen cards. “You want to flip it or me?”

  “You can do it,” Melandra said. It didn’t matter.

  Now that her eyes were open, Mel knew which cards lay before her. Every crease and blemish was recognizable, even when the cards lay face down.

  Piper caught the end of the first card—the one representing her past—and flipped it over. A man—half goat, half human—stared up at them with soft brown eyes. His head was cocked like a bird’s, quizzically with a hint of a mischievous smile playing on his candlelit face.

  “The Devil.” Piper looked up from its worn image to Mel’s face.

  “Go on,” Mel said. She sounded composed now, far more composed than she felt. Though her lips were still brutally dry, the desiccated skin rasping together as she spoke.

  Piper turned over the second card—this one representing her present circumstances—and saw The Wheel of Fortune. “A second major arcana card. This is some fated shit.”

  “The next one is major arcana too,” Mel said calmly. She knew that slight crease on the upper edge, that place where the black background had been worn away to show a bit of the card stock beneath.

  Piper flipped it over. Upon seeing the face, she shifted uncomfortably. “Death.”

  Devil. The Wheel of Fortune. Death.

  Sometimes the bills just come due, Grandmamie said. They just come due.

  She clasped her hands so they would not shake.

  “Mel, seriously. What the hell is going on?” Piper tapped the cards, looking from the ominous images up into Melandra’s face. “This looks…serious. Like, are you—”

  Mel interrupted her speculation. “Don’t you worry about it. It’s my concern, not yours.”

  Piper seemed not to hear. She was tapping the Death card. “Is this Lou?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Melandra said. Then with more certainty, “No, not this time.”

  Mel was relieved to find that the steel in her spine was holding. At least enough to get her out of this damn store.

  “I’m going back to bed,” Melandra said, gathering herself up with all the strength she had.

  “We just opened.”

  “My head hurts, and I didn’t sleep well last night. You run the shop until I come back down, okay?”

  If Piper wanted to argue, she swallowed those protests as Mel mounted the stairs to her apartment slowly, aware that Piper’s eyes were fixed on her back.

  That’s why Mel kept her head high and her steps measured.

  It wasn’t until she closed her apartment door and collapsed against it that she allowed herself to cry.

  4

  Piper stared at Mel’s apartment door for a long time after it snapped closed. She’d never seen Mel so upset before. She considered the woman’s personality synonymous with cool and collected. Hell, just last year they’d been kidnapped by Russian mobsters and Mel had acted like it was an inconvenience rather than a very possible ending to all their lives. An inconvenience.

  “What the hell just happened?” she whispered to the empty store.

  Piper realized now as she gathered up the cards that she’d built Mel up in her mind. Up until this moment, the woman had been almost godlike. She’d idolized nearly everything about her: her independence, her business savvy, her take-no-prisoners attitude, the way she saddled up and handled whatever arrived on her doorstep like a woman with a pen and a to-do list to obliterate. Given Mel’s proximity to King and Louie, this to-do list might include anything from dirty cops to murderous criminals—oh, and let’s get another case of Nag Champa in by Wednesday.

  She was amazing.

  But the woman who had risen from the stool just now had been shaking.

  Mel—shaking.

  “What the hell just happened?” she whispered again. She flipped through the cards, trying to make sense of what she saw. She lifted the first closer to her face as if to read it better.

  The Devil.

  This could be read any number of ways, of course. It
could be self-deception. Or it could be a literal person who messed with someone’s head or got people into trouble. Either way, it was definitely viewed as a negative force. Piper was pretty sure that Melandra had asked for a past-present-future spread, though she couldn’t be certain. There were a lot of ways to throw down a three-card spread. But assuming this was a past-present-future reading, did that mean someone from her past was coming back around? Was this person going to fuck with her?

  Piper considered the card beside The Devil—The Wheel of Fortune.

  She often thought of The Wheel of Fortune as the karma card.

  Change. What comes around goes around.

  This notion melded with her interpretation of The Devil. A troublesome person coming back around for…what, exactly?

  It didn’t explain the blind fear that she’d seen in Mel’s face or the way that she’d practically fled from the shop with all that bullshit about a headache.

  Okay, maybe she had a headache, but Piper wasn’t stupid. What had scared her? What could stress her out so badly to trigger a migraine? They’d survived shootouts, and what in the world could be worse than a mob boss threatening to kill them all while a gun was pressed to her head?

  Piper sighed and lifted the third card.

  Death.

  Her thumbnail traced the dark hood covering the bleached-white skull. In all honesty, this card used to freak Piper out. That was before she’d come to associate it with Louie. That was a pretty morbid outcome on its own, wasn’t it? She wasn’t supposed to look at a card and think, Oh, hey! I think my good friend Louie is going to get up to some shenanigans again. Better check on that girl.

  She did want to check on Lou. It had been a couple of days since she’d heard from her. Carnival week had sort of washed over them like a tsunami wave, carrying all of them out to a sea of sleepless nights and harried days. King had cut her hours back as much as he could so that Mel could get the extra support in the shop. But this chaos would continue until the first Tuesday of March.

  She sighed, regarding that whitewashed skull again, noting that it resembled a mask. Carnival. Masks. People pretending to be what they aren’t…Lies masquerading as truth.

  Secrets surfacing.

  In essence, the Death card was another card about change. Lying beside The Wheel of Fortune and The Devil, it suggested some serious shifts in Mel’s life.

  If Piper was being honest with herself, it had been a quiet year. Oh, she’d been busy as hell with her two jobs, moving into her new apartment, and resuming classes—all while trying to hold together something that looked like a social life.

  But busyness aside, the year had been blessedly free of drama. As long as she ignored the guilt-laden texts from her mother.

  Regardless, this spread certainly suggested their momentary peace was coming to an end, because while it hadn’t been for her, Mel was family.

  Mel was family.

  Whatever the hell was about to go down, Piper wasn’t going to let her face it alone.

  “It was fun while it lasted,” she murmured, turning the cards over as if the images offended her.

  The lights in the shop flickered and the chandelier moaned, but Piper didn’t notice either, still engrossed in that terrible memory of Mel shaking as she demanded Piper read her cards.

  She was so afraid. So, so afraid. But of what?

  “Why can’t people just tell me what’s going on? God, use your words,” Piper groaned.

  “As a rule, people are poor communicators.”

  Piper’s gaze snapped up and her heart dropped. All the air left her in a single whoosh.

  Dani smiled, pushing her hair behind her ear and flicking her eyes down. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Piper said reflexively. “What are you doing here?”

  And why do you look so damn good?

  Dani was wearing a low-cut white blouse that contrasted against her skin. Her jeans were tight to her hips. Her dark hair was longer than Piper remembered and fell over the front of her gray woolen coat. The diamond solitaire hanging from a thin, almost invisible wire kept drawing Piper’s eyes to her chest.

  “The sign says open,” Dani said with a half-smile. “Have my reading skills deteriorated?”

  Piper bristled. Don’t come in here and act cute with me. “I thought maybe you came by to pretend to be into me again—you know, so you could milk me for another story.”

  Dani wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I did that, didn’t I?”

  Piper settled onto the stool. Act cool, she told herself as she tried to strike an indifferent pose. Just play it cool.

  “So are you here for a story?” Piper asked, tapping her fingers on the glass.

  “No, I have some information for King.” Dani pressed her lips together.

  “Do you?”

  “He’s working on a case for the assistant DA.”

  “I know,” Piper scoffed. She knew about every case coming across their desks.

  Dani shifted her weight. “I’m just delivering the goods he asked for.”

  Piper felt like someone had punched her in the guts. “What?”

  Dani shrugged. “I went by the office to drop it off, but it’s locked up. His cell phone is turned off, so I thought I’d see if he was here.”

  Piper’s mind was trying to wrap itself around these details.

  Not only was King still in contact with Dani, maybe he’d been in contact with her all year. And how hadn’t Piper known?

  “He was called in for a consult with the NOLA PD this morning,” Piper managed, feeling a little better that she knew something Dani didn’t.

  Dani extended an envelope toward her. “I can leave the information with you.”

  “If it’s so top secret, how do you know I can be trusted?”

  Dani snorted. “Take it.”

  Piper didn’t, and Dani put the envelope on the counter with a sigh. Piper looked at it, then up at Dani. “I’m sorry, how is this the first time I’m hearing about you working with King?”

  “Because I’ve been avoiding you.” Dani pushed her hair behind her ears again.

  Piper laughed. “Why would you avoid me?”

  Because I was the one who visited you in the hospital every day after you got tortured. I was the one that asked Lou not to kill you even though you were going to run your little journalist mouth about her to the press. And I wasn’t the one who pretended to fall in love with you just for some stupid information.

  “I feel pretty shitty about what I did.”

  Piper scratched the back of her head. “Well, it was a shitty thing to do, so…”

  Dani’s cheeks flushed.

  The overhead chandelier moaned, flickering again.

  It was the door chime, announcing the arrival of six very hungover-looking women. They were bleary-eyed and yawning.

  Piper greeted them as her job required before turning her gaze back to Dani.

  “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call you back.” Dani spoke softer now that they weren’t alone. “I should’ve, but I…I have my reasons.”

  The pitiful fact was that Dani was as beautiful as ever, and Piper was the first to admit that beautiful girls were a personal weakness.

  Against her will, something inside Piper softened. “I’ll give this to King.”

  She reached out and took the envelope, moving it to her backpack on the floor.

  “Thanks. I know it’s safe with you.” Dani turned, took a few steps toward the door.

  That’s it, I guess, Piper thought. Am I just going to let her go?

  Before she could decide, Dani whirled back around. “Do you want to have dinner sometime?”

  The words came out in a single rush.

  Piper snorted. “Dinner?”

  I was sucking your face off in that closet last year, we shared a near-death experience together, and now you want to act like we’ve just met?

  “I want to talk more about everything that’s happened—well, after Dmitri—but you’re busy right now a
nd I need to get back to The Herald anyway. We could do a drink if you’d rather—”

  “Dinner’s fine,” Piper said as the chandelier moaned again. Three more customers stumbled across the threshold, laughing. And so the rush began.

  Dani glanced at the customers. “How about The Praline Connection, tomorrow night? Eight o’clock?”

  “Okay.”

  “Please come,” Dani added with a sad smile, backing toward the door.

  Before Piper could reply, two of the girls approached the counter, blocking Dani from view.

  Piper plastered on a grin that she didn’t feel. “Just the skull candles today? And a voodoo doll keychain! Excellent choice.”

  She glanced at the door one more time as she accepted the customer’s credit card, but Dani was already gone.

  5

  Lou sat up in bed. Only it wasn’t her bed. She ran a hand over the coverlet and surveyed the room. Before her was a large window, rounded at the top, reaching all the way to the floor. The curtains covering it had been pulled apart, framing the Arno River. Guessing by the light, purple in its iridescence, it was nearly twilight in Florence. Laughter carried up to the room from the streets outside.

  There was a small desk against the wall—no note on it—and then the bed she sat in, which was pinned between the stairs leading to the lower level of Konstantine’s apartment and the bathroom on her right. All was quiet except for the noise carrying up from the city itself.

  She was alone.

  She ran a hand over the covers beside her again, as if trying to divine the answer to the question circling her mind. Was he here when I slipped into his bed?

  It had happened a lot this year—her tendency to lie down in her bed, in broad daylight, with every fluorescent bulb in her apartment turned on just in case—and still wake up in Konstantine’s bed.

  Her ability to shift through shadows had always been dependent upon the darkness itself. She couldn’t transport herself in daylight. That was a fact. So why hadn’t she been able to keep herself in her own bed?

  Or maybe it’s not about the light at all, a little voice chided. Maybe it’s about being where you want to be.