Charmed: Destiny Romance (2 page)

‘Okay, let’s do it.’

‘Fine.’ She sighed. ‘Just let me put the sign on the door.’

Mel locked the door and posted up the hand-crafted notice that said, ‘Back in an hour’.

‘I’m Mel,’ she said, holding out her hand.

The guy took it. ‘Michael.’

His hand was big and warm and firm. No sign of dampness from the rain or nerves.

And another vision slammed into her. His hand, the very one she was holding, cupping her breast, his olive-brown skin against her pale flesh. He was stroking her with his thumb, and two of his fingers were playing with her nipple, scissoring it in a gentle pinch. Electricity surged through her body, his touch connecting straight to her clit. The pleasure was enough to send black dots swimming across her eyes.

‘Oh, my.’

Get a hold of yourself, girl!

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

Mel swallowed hard and searched for a cover story. ‘Yes. Um. Oh! I just realised . . . The card.’

‘What card?’

‘The archangel. Michael. Your name’s Michael.’

‘Yep. Pretty neat trick that. Unless they’re all Michael cards and you had a really elaborate set-up organised, just hoping a guy named Michael would walk in.’

He grinned and Mel’s nether regions went all aflutter again. This time, thankfully, there was no accompanying vision. It was just the healthy sexual response of a normal woman to a cheeky smile from a handsome man. A
very
handsome man.

She had no idea what this reading was going to be like, but she already knew what it’d be like after he left. Lonely and dull. As usual.

‘Our reading room is just through here.’ Mel gestured to the beaded curtain that led to the back of the shop. Might as well get it over with. She reached out with her mind, just the way she always did with new customers, to get a feel for his aura.

Nothing. Nada. His aura didn’t so much as spark.

She stopped abruptly, making him almost trip over her. ‘Uh, you wouldn’t happen to be wearing a crystal of any kind, would you?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Nope. Not really a jewellery kind of guy.’

Mel surreptitiously took off her green crystal ring. The ring was essential to prevent her from being driven mad by the inner voices of any human beings within a three-block radius. The crystal blocked most psychic energy, but as sensitive as she was, Mel still wore it for psychic readings in the shop. It stopped her projecting her own thoughts and feelings onto the other person, and had the handy side-benefit of making her less accurate in her predictions while she was wearing it.

Ring off, Mel sat it on the counter and reached out again with her mind to see if she could sense Michael’s aura. She instantly picked up on the anger of the cafe owner next door about a botched delivery, but from Michael? A generalised glow, that was all she got. No colours. No telltale shadows or quirks. She reached further, delving into his psyche to find out at the very least what had brought him into the shop. He obviously wasn’t a regular consumer of psychic services, so there must be some significant issue he was looking for advice on.

Nothing.

‘You’re sure you’re not wearing a crystal?’ she asked. She put on a smile – the one she’d practised and practised until she knew her face showed nothing but calm serenity. Such an ability was essential if you could read people’s minds.

‘Positive.’

‘Right.’ Mel led the way to the reading room. Her knees were trembling again, but for an entirely different reason than earlier.

This had never happened before. How on earth was she going to do a reading when her powers had seemingly vanished?

Michael followed the woman past a loud, beaded curtain into a narrow corridor, almost positive that this had been a very bad idea. He shrugged inwardly. He was here now.

They went by two rooms – one, a messy office, the second, a tidy kitchenette. There was a weird space where another room should have been but wasn’t – perhaps the result of some botched renovations. The next two rooms were mirror images of each other – a table covered in a spangly cloth, little tea-light candles lit all around the edges of the room. Two wicker chairs were set facing each other.

Mel gestured to the room on the right, and Michael followed, taking a seat. The chair felt too flimsy for his frame, but he figured he’d gone this far, so he wasn’t going to back out now just because of inappropriate seating.

The psychic, Mel, seemed a little rattled. Mind you, she’d been pretty weird right from the get-go. Pity she was into all this mumbo-jumbo crap, because she was damn hot. Blonde hair fell past her shoulders, caught up in a messy ponytail at her nape. Wide blue eyes – almost too blue to be real. A very kissable mouth. And her embroidered top brought to mind wild gypsies dancing around a campfire. Its scooped neckline also revealed the swells of some very delicious-looking breasts. Breasts with beaded nipples, he noted as she took her seat and the top pulled taut against the cushions behind her.

‘Now, Michael,’ she said, ‘what brings you here today?’

He managed to contain his eye roll. He didn’t believe in any of this shit. How had his sister managed to talk him into it?

‘I thought that was what you were supposed to tell me?’

‘Oh, yes. Right.’ She fumbled with a small cupboard behind her that Michael could have sworn hadn’t been there when he’d walked in. Seriously. How had it just appeared?

It was the dim light
, he told himself. His eyes were adjusted now, that’s why he hadn’t seen it before. Yeah. That explained it.

Mel withdrew a pack of cards from the mystery cupboard and offered them to him. ‘Um . . . Shuffle these.’

The cards were well-worn, with edges soft and furry from use. Impossible to shuffle properly. He did the best he could, while thanking his lucky stars no one at work could see him right now. In fact, it’d definitely be best if no one ever found out about this. It wouldn’t exactly be credibility-building for his clients to discover that one of Melbourne’s top financial planners got advice from psychics.

But maybe he should ask about the stock market while he was here. It’d be really handy to know in advance what was going to go down in Greece . . .

He gave a little laugh that he covered by clearing his throat.
As if the woman sitting opposite him knew anything about predicting the future of the world economy!
Let alone the future of his personal life.

This was a ninety-dollar exercise in futility. But it’d get Annie off his back. And then she could help him convince the family he was ready to get back to work and stop all this stupid mucking around. Forced to take bloody leave. In June! The end of the financial year was just days away, and he could just picture his overflowing inbox . . .

‘Pick one,’ Mel said. She’d arranged the cards into three roughly equal stacks.

Michael pointed at the middle one.

She did some complicated arranging, which involved putting the various stacks on top of each other in a particular order, and then she began laying out the cards face up, in a grid-style pattern.

‘So, uh . . .’ she said, as she ran a finger across the top line of cards. ‘I’m guessing that your love life is a concern for you right now. Is that correct?’

She was a sweet girl, but she really needed to improve her act. For a start, sounding so uncertain wasn’t exactly the way to build confidence with your clients. Hmm. Perhaps, in its own way, giving financial advice wasn’t a million miles away from giving psychic readings.

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Oh. Um.’ She kept reviewing the cards. She looked very much like a tourist peering at a map in a different language – totally lost and unsure of how to remedy that fact.

Her roving finger halted on one particular card. The design was quite disturbing. In fact, many of the cards were unpleasant images – a young boy impaled with multiple daggers, a woman with an agonised expression trapped behind a cage of what looked like bamboo – but the one Mel had her finger on was definitely the worst. It showed a grimly grinning skeleton wearing a long black cloak, floating through a ravaged wasteland.

Michael didn’t need to be told —

‘Death,’ Mel said.

‘I gathered that from the healthy glow.’

‘What? Oh. You’re joking.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t have to worry,’ Mel said. She gave him a smile and he remembered all over again how blue her eyes were, even in the flickering candlelight of the room. He’d heard of eyes being described as ‘pools’, though he’d never encountered anyone in real life who’d made him think that. But that’s definitely what Mel’s eyes were. Not Olympic swimming pools. Not even ocean-rock pools. More like those waterholes in Mexico that go straight down to the centre of the earth.

‘The death card doesn’t necessarily mean death,’ she said.

That brought him back to the surface pretty quick. ‘Good,’ he said. He’d had quite enough of death for one lifetime.

‘It sometimes just means endings. That a period of your life is coming to an end.’

‘Right. Like what?’

‘Um . . .’

Mel’s finger continued to rove over the cards and her expression was beginning to verge on pained.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Michael asked for what had to be the twentieth time. She looked as if she was trying to do complex spreadsheets in her head and none of the numbers added up.

‘This isn’t working at all,’ she said under her breath. She cast her eyes around the room as if looking for inspiration. ‘Let me try something,’ she said. ‘I haven’t had to do this for a very long time, so bear with me.’

‘Sure.’

Mel sat back in her chair and closed her eyes. She put her hands out, palms up, and tilted her chin to the ceiling. ‘I call upon my guides. Guides please grace us with your presence. Grace us with your wisdom and insight. Guides please visit me. Now.
Please
.’

Michael shook his head. A juicy steak at Vlados. The DVD boxed-set seasons of Game of Thrones. A ticket in the members stand for the next Tigers game. A really good bottle of Coonawarra shiraz.

All things he could have bought with ninety dollars instead of this bullshit.

‘I implore you, guides. Please grace us.
Please?
’

Michael stifled another laugh. She sounded desperate.

‘No, thank you,’ she said.

‘Pardon?’ Michael said.

‘Not you,’ Mel said to him irritably before addressing herself back to the ceiling. ‘
You
. Go away if you’re not going to be helpful.’

Ah. This must be the bit where she faked talking to spirits or whatever.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ she muttered. She opened her eyes again and looked at him. ‘I’m trying to reach my guides to see if we can get someone on the spirit plane to manifest for you.’

Instantly, all the hairs on the back of Michael’s neck stood up. ‘No. Don’t do that,’ he said, before he’d even made the decision to say anything.

‘I don’t really have a choice.’ She closed her eyes again.

He could get up. Walk out. Call shenanigans on all this stupidity. But he didn’t. Part of him – the sucker part, clearly – wanted to see what might happen.

‘I have someone here,’ she said. ‘A woman.’

A woman
. Michael’s grip on the arms of the chair relaxed, but he shook his head at himself as he noticed that fact. It didn’t mean anything – this was all crap anyway.

‘She says that she loves you. And she watches over you and protects you. Especially when you drive too fast.’

Total crap. And he was an idiot for going through with this. You can’t
really
talk to ghosts. You can only pretend that you are and then say generic stuff like ‘watching over you’ and pop in a little fact that, based on probability, could be accurate. Michael was a twenty-nine-year-old male – it was a statistical fact that he was likely to exceed the speed limit.

‘I don’t drive too fast,’ he said, just to test her.

‘She says you’re a bad liar and that she knew it was you who ate all the Tim Tams that Christmas, too.’

‘Grandma?’ he said with a gasp. Too late, he wished he could take it back. This was exactly what happened. These fakers got you to reveal tiny pieces of information that they then used to trick you into thinking that they knew all about you.

Mel smiled, her eyes still closed tight. ‘Oh, she misses you. And she’s sad.’

‘I thought people were supposed to be happy in heaven.’

‘It’s more complicated than that. And
she’s
not sad. She’s sad for you.’

‘No reason to be sad for me.’

‘She says you’re a liar again,’ Mel said softly. ‘She’s a feisty one, isn’t she? She says your father is very proud of you. Even if he never says it.’

‘Great.’ Michael picked at one of his fingernails. The reading was getting stupid and that guess about his dad was
way
off base.

‘And that Annie only wants what’s best.’

Huh? Annie?
He must have mentioned her when he’d first walked in. Yeah. He’d probably said that his sister had referred him here. Yeah. That’s what happened.

There was a long moment of silence. Mel seemed to be having an inner conversation. Her head bobbed occasionally, and her face twitched into smiles and grimaces. One thing was for sure: she was great at faking concentration. He’d never seen someone appear so focused.

Then her whole body stilled. She was so motionless that Michael wondered for a moment if she’d had a stroke. A single tear emerged from under her eyelid and rolled down her cheek.

‘Oh, Michael,’ she said. Her voice was a broken whisper.

‘What?’ Michael asked despite himself. The hairs on his neck were sticking up again – as were the ones on his arms. And legs. In fact, his whole body felt simultaneously freezing and boiling. He wanted to leap up, run out of the room, but was rooted to the spot.

‘You have to stop being angry.’

Michael opened his mouth but no sound came out. Her voice. It sounded so strange. So full of grief and pity.

‘You couldn’t have done anything for him, even if you had been there. He only wanted what was best. He wanted to look out for you, protect you. Let you enjoy your life. His one last gift. Don’t be angry with him for that.’

He swallowed, hard. Fought desperately for a rational explanation. She’d Googled him. Annie had set him up. There was a . . . a . . . spy network that was working to infiltrate the company and . . .

‘You need to move on. Get your focus back. What happened with the John—’

A rushing sound had filled Michael’s ears. ‘I’m outta here.’ It took a huge effort, but finally he unfroze, pushed out of the chair and tore out of the little room. The corridor’s bead curtain clattered noisily in the silence of the empty, brightly lit shop, eerie now that the evening gloom had fallen outside. It took him a moment to work out the lock on the front door, but then he had it open . . .

‘Wait! What happened?’ Mel stumbled out into the shop, blinking in the harsh fluorescents.

‘What happened? You fleeced me. Well done, you.’

‘What? No. You need to explain. I don’t remember what happens when I —’

He didn’t allow her to finish, and half wondered if he’d broken something when the crash of chimes followed him down the street.

Mel slumped against the door and put a hand up to still the chimes, still jangling from Michael’s violent exit. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog of the trance she’d been in. And, as always when she’d been forced to contact the other side, as the fog slipped away, it was replaced by a killer headache – the kind that required a dark room and soft clothes. Her throat ached, too – like she was on the verge of tears.

Voices began to crowd in.

Bloody rip-off, eighty dollars for a T-shirt.

Should I cook sausages or chops for tea? It’s not like he’ll care either way.

Wow, she’s gorgeous. Will I try the ‘angel’ line or the ‘You’re not that pretty’ line?

I need to sell thirty-five tablecloths if I want to have any hope of making the rent this week.

For a moment, she couldn’t figure out why her normal protections weren’t working, then she remembered she’d taken off her ring.

She gingerly made her way to the counter, found the ring and slipped it back on.

There. At least that removed some of the clutter from her head. It still pounded though, and that was only going to get worse.

Looking around the shop, she decided to leave the ‘back in an hour’ sign up for a little longer. It wouldn’t hurt – and it wasn’t like she was in a fit state to serve customers anyway.

A mound on the counter caught her eye and she realised Michael had left his jacket behind. She grabbed it and headed for the shop’s little kitchenette.

Collapsing into a chair and dumping the damp canvas jacket on the table beside her, Mel wished she had Aunt Gertrude’s skill at telekinesis so she could magic-up a cup of tea. But Mel hadn’t ever attended any ‘magic movement’ classes. By the end of their final year at magic academy, most witches had specialised into one or two particular abilities. For Mel there had been no option – with her natural abilities, she was destined for the life of a psychic-seer and she’d been put into specific, one-on-one classes right from the start.

There was a lot to learn in being psychic – not just knowing the future and how to read minds, but how to deal with the fact that you
could
. How to protect yourself from knowing everyone’s thoughts, and how to stop your thoughts influencing others. And you had to learn the restrictions you’d have to live with for the rest of your life – full-blown psychic-seers were registered and monitored by the Magic Council and their interactions with the non-magical world severely constrained. They were forbidden from having long-term romantic relationships outside of the magical community. The risk was too high that if a psychic-seer became intimately involved with a non-magic person, their skills would be revealed.