Dreams of Shreds and Tatters (7 page)

“There—” Liz swallowed the taste of salt and metal, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “There’s no change.”

“Oh.” Antja lingered on the threshold, hands shoved in the pockets of her black leather coat.

“Come in,” Liz said, stepping back from the bed. She slipped the ring—cool again now—into her pocket.

Antja eased the door shut behind her, mauve lips pursing. “Your nose...” She pulled a tissue out of her purse and handed it to Liz. Her accent was thicker than Rainer’s.

They both looked down at Blake; Antja broke first. “It’s terrible, seeing him like that. Almost worse than Alain.” She flinched as she said it. Liz knew better—bad as this was, it could be worse.

“I wish I knew what to do,” Liz said, words muffled in tissue. If she’d been alone she might have sobbed. Instead she drew a deep breath, waiting for her heart to slow, for her stomach to stop its nauseous sway.

“Me too.” Antja’s eyes closed, a weight of fear and fatigue visible for an instant beneath her careful poise.

Liz lowered the tissue. The dizziness had passed, but the smell of blood and air freshener threatened her uneasy equilibrium. Something between fear and jealousy settled heavy in her stomach. She didn’t want anyone else to see Blake like this, didn’t want anyone else to risk that black abyss.

“We can’t do much here but worry. Would— Would you like to get some coffee, or something to eat?”

Antja hesitated, dark eyes veiling. Then she smiled. “Yes. I’d like that.”

R
AIN DRUMMED AGAINST
Café Al Azrad’s red awnings and fell in shining ribbons to the sidewalk. On the patio, Rae huddled against the wind, but it crept in between the buttons of her coat, through the weave of her scarves, ran icy hands up her legs. But even freezing, she was glad to be out of the apartment.

She shuffled her cards, concentrating on the bright colors of the suits, the flutter of glossy cardstock. The familiar motions soothed her, help clear the lingering cobwebs of paranoia. All week she’d startled at shadows, seen faceless strangers in crowds, felt people staring wherever she went. If she was going to go crazy cooped up in the apartment, she didn’t need to be crazy outside, too. But today the only thing giving her goosebumps was the cold.

Shuffling kept her fingers warm, but she’d long given up on making any money today. No one wanted their fortune told in this weather. Even the inside of the café was nearly empty. The owner let her give readings on the patio, and sometimes Rabia or Noor gave her free coffee and baklava. The idea of something hot and sweet was tempting now, but her appetite still hadn’t returned.

Cards slapped cold and slick between her fingers. The Tower and the Hanged Man surfaced every time she paused, but she couldn’t make sense of either of them.

No one would tell her what happened at the cabin that night, only that Alain was dead and Blake was in the hospital and someone had warded their apartment to keep people from snooping. Something was spinning around her, circling in, but she didn’t know what it was. She glanced up, eastward, but saw only the sharp lines of skyscrapers and condos blurring in the haze.

The door opened, shaking light across the glass, and a tall, darkhaired woman stepped out. “Tell your fortune?” Rae called, more on principle than out of any real hope. The woman turned and Rae flinched: angry, roiling colors surrounded her, crackling around her hands and jaw. The auras were worse than ever. Stephen was probably cutting the mania.

The colors faded as the woman took a step closer, leaving only a cranky-looking stranger. Rae had seen her before, coming and going, talking to Rabia and Noor, but didn’t know her name.

The woman frowned down at the cards. Her hair was cut in a blunt bob around a square jaw, baring the strong lines of her neck. Coat and sweater muffled her shoulders and folded arms, but her hands were hard and scarred. Not pretty, far too strong and arresting for
pretty
, but striking all the same; Rae wished she could ever look that strong.

“Do you really believe in this stuff?” the woman asked, tapping one short, thick nail against the table.

Rae had heard that question often enough. By now it was easy to smile instead of sighing or rolling her eyes. “It’s symbolism. You apply the meaning of the cards to your questions, and maybe they help you see things you wouldn’t have thought of. It’s not real magic.”

“No. Real magic is nothing to fuck around with.”

Rae had heard that before, too. Either from concerned churchgoers worried about her soul, or from wannabe sorcerers convinced that they knew secrets no one else could fathom. Now she did sigh. “So I hear.” She glanced at the window and saw Rabia staring at them from behind the counter.

The woman bared her teeth in what might have been a smile. “But you haven’t listened yet. I wouldn’t try too hard to look beneath the skin of the world. It’s ugly down there.” She turned away before Rae finished flinching.

Rae grabbed for her cards like a security blanket, but her hands were shaking and she fumbled the deck. Cards sprayed across the damp table and sidewalk and she cursed. By the time she knelt to retrieve them, the woman had vanished down the sidewalk.

Footsteps clicked on the pavement as she groped under the table for the Five of Cups, paused beside her. “Rae?”

“Antja?” Rae caught her elbow on the metal chair as she straightened. Antja Schäfer always left her feeling awkward and clumsy—too much grace and poise and not enough left for anyone else.

“Hello.” Antja paused by the table, a shorter girl beside her, shiny boutique shopping bags hanging from both their arms. For an instant Rae’s vision swam and there was a third shape beside Antja, a shadow where no shadow should be, but she blinked and it was gone.

An awkward silence settled between them. “How have you been?” Antja finally asked.

Confused,
she wanted to say.
Scared
. She swallowed it for the stranger’s sake and settled for “Okay.” An unspoken
considering
hung in the air.

“Will you be at the service?”

“Of course.”

The other woman shifted her weight and Antja blinked. “Excuse me. Rae, this is Liz. She’s a friend of Blake’s.”

The woman stepped forward, raising a hand in greeting. Her cheeks were red, ash-blonde hair damp and wind-tangled beneath her stocking cap. Her eyes flickered toward the scattered cards and her chapped lips tightened. The Tower and the Hanged Man lay face up again.

“Do you want your fortune told?” Rae asked, trying for a smile. It felt crooked on her face. Their eyes met and she felt that spinning sensation again.

Liz’s answering smile looked just as strained. “Maybe some other time.”

Antja waved, and the two of them stepped into the warmth and light of the café.

Rae gathered her cards and wrapped them haphazardly in a silk scarf. Clouds scraped the rooftops, thick and swirling. Shadows lengthened. Time to go home. Behind the lowering sky the star was rising; its pull surged sharp in her blood.

As she rose movement drew her eye, a flutter of black in the corner of her vision. Darkness gathered in a doorway across the street, thicker than the afternoon gloom. It flickered as she watched, from a low crouching shape to a tall gaunt figure leaning in the alcove. She couldn’t see its face, but she felt its attention.

The deck carved lines in her palm as her hands clenched. She couldn’t see its face because it had none: no eyes, no nose, no mouth, just slick blackness. It had no aura, either. Or at least no colors—a nimbus of emptiness surrounded it, devouring any light that got too close.

Rae stared, frozen, unable to move or look away until a cluster of office people emerged from the next building and broke her line of sight. When they passed, the shadow-thing was gone.

She almost bolted for the café, for the safety of light and company. But if she went in, she’d have to come out again, and it would only get darker and colder.

She shoved her cards into her pocket and wound her scarf around her neck. Her umbrella unfolded with a snap. Keep to the light, catch a bus home—she could do that. All of a sudden her stuffy apartment didn’t seem so bad.

W
ITH HIS SARTORIAL
obligations fulfilled, Alex lingered in the shelter of a bus stop studying the map. The Museum of Anthropology sounded like a good way to pass a few hours, but Liz’s misgivings had started to spread—he couldn’t shake the sensation that someone was watching him. A black-coated figure had moved in the corner of his eye one too many times, never mind that half the people he’d seen in Vancouver fit that description.

The darkening sky and lingering ache in his chest made the decision for him. After a detour at a liquor store, he made it back to the hotel with a bank of clouds spitting sleet at his heels. He couldn’t feel his hands or feet, but a glass of Chartreuse remedied that. The green fire also chased away the headache that had followed him since yesterday. He nursed a second glass while he waited for Liz, the muted television casting flickering shadows against the walls.

Something was bothering him besides contagious paranoia, but he couldn’t decide what it was. No, he decided, he did know: he didn’t trust Morgenstern. The man’s charisma might work on Liz and hospital staff—and maybe on Blake, to judge from the sketches— but Rainer reminded him of people he’d known years ago, who he’d left behind and tried hard to forget. The magnetism, the attraction that even Alex couldn’t dismiss, though it raised his hackles.

Rainer reminded him of Samantha.

His hand closed on the cool plastic of his inhaler. His chest had ached since they’d visited Blake’s apartment—the pain reminded him of Samantha, too. Every attack, every albuterol hit, every round of pneumonia. The weakness in his lungs was congenital, but ever since that disastrous night in Boston seven years ago, it had been close to crippling. Or would be, if he let it.

He let go of the inhaler and fished a two dollar coin out of his pocket. It winked in the lamplight as he walked it across his knuckles.

He tried not to think about Samantha, normally, or to think of her only in the simplest terms. Sometimes that worked. He’d been young and stupid, reckless, gotten involved in a relationship that only a seventeen-year-old could have fallen for and ended up hurt. These things happened.

But the other things, the things he remembered in scattered flashes—the chalk circle on the hardwood floor; Samantha’s voice rising in an incantation; the writhing, luminous shape that answered... Those things didn’t happen. She’d told him they hadn’t, after all, when she finally visited him in the hospital. Embarrassed, not meeting his eyes as she invented a story about a gas leak, about mold in the walls. And even then, knowing she was lying, knowing that she’d used him and something had gone wrong, though the details of why and how were lost to him—even then he had wanted to believe her.

He’d been stupid and gotten hurt. So had Blake. Maybe for the same reasons. Alex could sympathize, but that wasn’t enough reason to get involved.

But maybe Liz was. And—though he could never admit it to her—the mystery piqued his interest. What the hell had Blake gotten himself mixed up in?

Ice rattled against the windows by the time Liz returned, damp and flushed and weighed down with shopping bags. His second glass was nearly gone.

“I was starting to wonder what happened to you.” The bi-metallic coin flashed between his fingers.

“I ran into Antja at the hospital.”

“And you had to perform some sort of ritual shopping exercise?”

Liz wrinkled her nose at him as she carried the bags to the bedroom. She returned coatless and barefoot; the dark blue carpet swallowed her footsteps. “Ritual shopping exercises are a good way to learn about someone.” She nudged his legs out of the way and sat down on the couch, tucking her feet beneath her. Second-hand chill soaked into him. Her eyes were brighter than they’d been this morning. Maybe it was only the cold putting color in her cheeks, but he felt a futile jealous pang that someone else had managed to cheer her up.

“And?” he asked, pulling himself upright. He flipped the coin one last time and caught it before reaching for his glass.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted with a shrug. “She was close to Alain, and I think she feels guilty about whatever happened. Rainer is paying Blake’s hospital bills, but she doesn’t want to talk about that. I can’t exactly tie her to a chair and show her the instruments.” Her smile faded quickly. “But she’s upset. And scared.” A familiar sympathetic frown creased her forehead. “I think I need a drink.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

She filled both their glasses and settled next to him again. “Now what?”

“We could call the police.” It didn’t seem a helpful suggestion, especially with their penchant for trespassing, but it needed to be said.

She paused, glass half raised, and chewed her lip. “I don’t want Blake in any more trouble than he might already be.”

He arched an eyebrow. “What if he did something to warrant it?”

Her jaw tightened, and he cursed his absent tact. She rolled her glass between her palms; the liquor glowed green-gold. “Hurt someone, you mean? Pushed his boyfriend into a lake?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t. He wouldn’t.”

Pressing the subject was a singularly bad idea. But the words welled up when he opened his mouth. “Can you be so certain? A boy is dead, and that’s all we really know.”

Her agate eyes narrowed. “I know Blake.”

There was no arguing with that look on her face. And as much as he wanted to distract her from silence and guilt, he wasn’t willing to pick a fight to do it. “Fine,” he sighed. “But you might be doing them a disservice by not calling the authorities. What if someone else pushed them into the lake?”

From her sideways glance he thought she knew exactly which someone he meant. “Let’s see what happens at the gallery tomorrow. We need more data.”

It was hard to argue with that. “Fair enough.” Another swallow of Chartreuse lined his throat with warmth. He didn’t want to argue. He just wanted to be warm for a while, to not worry. If he drank enough, the gears in his head might stop grinding so furiously. “We can stay up all night worrying about this, or we can watch the monster movie marathon on cable and worry tomorrow.”