The Fortune Teller's Daughter (8 page)

“It’s true
that my name is not the one on the invitation. It’s addressed to Corazon.
The
Corazon.” When he didn’t react, I exhaled, though the next words hurt when I
said them. “My mother. And she died two years ago.”

Alistair
Rook shot to his feet and before I knew what was happening the Magician had me
dragged out of the chair by my wrist like a disobedient child.

“You’re a
liar and I’ll see you thrown out myself.” 

“No,” I
gasped and twisted in his grip. “It’s true. I swear. You’ll break my arm,
please!”

The director
ignored us, his eyes going unfocused as he stared across the wagon. He fingered
the invitation, rubbed the letters that spelled out the name of the dead
fortune teller. It seemed to take all of his composure to sink back into his
chair, his hands visibly shaking.

“Let her
speak,” he said finally. “Please let her speak. To my knowledge Corazon did not
have children.”

“Well, I did
not appear by magic,” I snarled. “I assure you I am quite real and hers.”

The Magician
shook me loose and thrust me back into the seat he’d yanked me from. I rubbed
my aching wrist and frowned between the two men. The Magician breathed heavily,
hands drawn into angry fists. He paced, panting, growling under his breath.

Alistair’s
sorrow was obvious and catastrophic. He hid his eyes behind his hand for a
moment to collect himself. When he dropped his hand back to the desk top, his
eyes swam with unshed tears.

“What’s your
name, girl?”

“Serafine
Moreau.” I shifted uneasily when his eyes widened a notch. “I assure you I
belong to Cora Moreau.”

“Cora
Moreau
?”
The Magician stopped his pacing and something passed between the two men I
could not decipher. Alistair waved a dismissive hand as if to drop their silent
conversation.

“I believe
you, Miss Moreau. How old are you?”

“I’m
twenty-two, though I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”

“Twenty-two,”
he repeated and shook his head. “As long as the carnival has been dark. Tell me
what happened to her. If you can.”

Answering
him was harder than I expected. “She was strangled. With a length of rope he
left behind. He approached the tent, paid me his fee and went inside. A few
minutes later I heard her body fall into her card table.” I touched my
fingertips over my heart without thinking.

The Magician
retreated to the back of the wagon and sat down out of my view. I wanted to see
his reaction. I wanted to understand why her passing seemed to affect these men
so much when they hadn’t been in her life as long as I’d been alive.

“And did the
police catch this man?”

I shook my
head. The great mystery and the greatest failure of justice. “No. When I ran in
after her, he’d vanished. He must have gone under the tent.”

“You ran
in?” The Magician snapped. “When the man was still inside?”

“I wasn’t
thinking. I just…” I shrugged and sulked deep into the cushions. I hadn’t had
to tell this story since the police stopped looking for the man and everyone
stopped asking. That day at the market, in my mother’s tent…it seemed like a
very long time ago.

“But he’d
vanished,” Rook repeated.

“Yes.”

“Where was
she buried?” He touched her name on the invitation again.

“Buried?” I
laughed, but without much humor. “If you think I’d stick her in a hole in one
place for the rest of eternity, you didn’t know my mother very well. She would
never have forgiven me. Her ashes are in a box in my living room.”

“Forgive me,
of course.” Alistair stood. I saw now that he wore a three piece suit, a little
threadbare on the edges, but clearly expensive once upon a time. He ran a hand
down his tie before speaking. “Thank you for coming here tonight, Miss Moreau,
but I am afraid I cannot give you a job. I don’t hire outsiders. I have no jobs
for you.”

I stood,
startling both men. “You need a fortune teller.”

“A thing
which you are not. You’re a liar and a pretender. I need a teller of fortunes.
Someone with the gift. You have no gift.”

It sounded
so much worse when he said it that way.
You are a liar. You are a pretender.
The way he said it sounded like something I should be ashamed of even if I was
only following in my mother’s footsteps. Even if I was just trying to pay rent.
It hurt, like being struck.

“I can do
things. I have other talents.”

I hated that
my voice sounded too much like begging.

“I don’t
need you. I am sorry. Please find your way out of the carnival, Miss Moreau.
Please do not come back.”

With that,
he tore the invitation in half and disappeared it beneath his desk.

The
Magician’s fingers wrapped around my wrist once more.

“No,” I
repeated stubbornly, desperation melting through my voice. “I was brought here.
The signs were left for me to find my way to you. That wasn’t an accident. The
dwarf, the orchid. You even sent a giant to make sure I’d get here!”

The carnival
director’s brows knitted and he glanced at the Magician. “A giant?”

“A
colossus,” I corrected. “I followed them. I’m here for a reason. You’re
supposed to give me a job.”

“Colossus,” he
repeated, but not to me. “No one told me he’d arrived. When you’ve seen Miss
Moreau out, find him.” Then, to me, he said, “I’m afraid fate has played a
cruel joke on you, Serafine. You’ll have to forgive its ugly humor. I wish you
the best of luck in your future endeavors, though if you are anything like
Cora, you will not need something so arbitrary as luck.”

“No, wait…”

“Time to
go.” The Magician manhandled me out the door onto the steps. This was not what
I’d imagined would happen. I was supposed to ask my questions, get answers,
stay with these people who were as close to family as my mother might have ever
had. They grieved for her loss as deeply as I did. These people were home and I
could not let them get rid of me so easily. I was meant to be here. I knew
that.

I twisted in
his arms so that he had me clutched against his chest or risk dropping me down
the stairs.

“Serafine,”
he admonished and squeezed my arms tight to stop me from fighting him. When I
was done pretending, I shoved from his grasp and tumbled off the stairs to the
ground, catching myself on my hands and knees.

He looked at
his empty hands as if not really sure how he’d managed to lose me.

“I had no
intention of hurting you. You did that to yourself.” He waited for me to get
up, to respond, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction. Finally he retreated.
“I am sorry. About Cora.”

I closed my
fist slowly in the dirt beneath me. I listened for him to clomp back up the
stairs and shut the door behind him. When I was sure I was alone, I crawled to
my feet, brushed myself off. My knee felt skinned, the heel of one hand, too.

I’d live.

I opened my
left hand and gazed at the object settled in my palm. My last card. The last
trick up my sleeve.

The
Magician’s key.

__________________

Time did not
catch up to me until my apartment door clicked shut and I sank my exhausted
body against it.

The aches in
my thighs and calves didn’t overwhelm me until I dropped the dead bolt and
fought the chain into its slider.

And it
wasn’t until I sought for the light switch in the dark did I really feel like a
lifetime had been collected from me at the gates of the carnival.

I flicked
the switch once. Twice. Three times.

Of course.
The electricity bill sat unopened on the coffee table taunting me. I’d had to
skip it twice in order to make rent.

I sighed and
pulled the buttons on my coat, each one more tedious than the last. Somehow I
shrugged out of it and left it to pile on the floor. Then my boots came off,
kicked randomly into the dark. I managed my socks and pants before collapsing
face first into my pillow and without opening my eyes I flailed for the
blanket, drew it up to my chin and huddled beneath it. I shivered from the cold
but also from something else, from bone weariness and emotional toil.

Behind my
eyelids blue and silver tents soared into the clouds. I could see a magician
with messy black curls creating roses in the palm of his hand with a mouth that
tasted like caramel apples. Around me danced beautiful courtesans and juggling
acrobats.

I could
smell popcorn.

It was all
there waiting behind my eyes. Real. Not real.

Whatever had
happened to me tonight, I’d face it tomorrow. Tomorrow when I knew the Magician
would come for his key and we’d deal. For a job. For answers.

*  *  *

Two abrupt
knocks yanked me from my sleep and I launched myself upright gasping for air I
couldn’t quite suck into my lungs, the taste of cotton candy thick at the back
of my throat. I couldn’t tell what time it was or where I was except to think
that
no
,
oh no
.
Not again
.

Silence
stilled my apartment. A growl of thunder rattled the window panes while rivers
of rain blotted the street outside. I could smell the damp in the walls. Neon
lights from a bar across the street undulated a pattern of color across my
living room floor. Red. Green. Red. Yellow.

It was
thunder that woke me, not someone knocking at the door. I pressed the heels of
my palms into my eyes and rubbed them awake. Water. I’d grab a glass of water
then go back to sleep.

I kicked
free of the blankets, but when I went to stand I bumped the edge of the coffee
table with my knee. Half my tarot cards slid free and tumbled onto the floor.

“Damn.”

My mother
would have considered this a bad omen, a warning from the cards that something
was about to happen and my attention was needed
immediately
.

I never
prescribed to such superstations. Cards didn’t have magic of their own. They
weren’t imbued with supernatural energies. I’d bought them in a bookstore at a
mall, for crying out loud. And yet…

A prickling
sensation climbed my spine. I knelt to collect the cards, then spotted the last
just out of reach beneath the table.  I stretched to retrieve it, the slick
texture making it hard to grip, but finally I dragged it out from the shadows.

The
Magician.

I jerked my
hand away and scrambled to my feet. The card fluttered back to the floor face
up in a pool of street light cast from the open window.

The broom
hanging in my kitchenette slid free and struck the linoleum like a cannonball.

Broom
falls
, my mother’s voice in my head warned.
Company’s coming
.

“Oh,” I
breathed and clutched the pile of cards against my knotting stomach. “Oh crap.”

“
Serafine
.”

I flung the
cards and shot for my apartment door without even looking towards the voice.
The husky voice I recognized intimately.

The voice
that should not have been inside my apartment.

I threw the
deadbolt and yanked the door, but it stuck on the chain.

His hand
shoved the door shut hard enough to crack the frame and I screamed once. His
other had gripped my wrist and spun me to face him.

It was over
like that, a half second to catch my breath and then I was pinned, the wood
cold against the back of my knees. He pressed my captured hand to the door
beside my head and I stared into an unfamiliar face I knew quite well.

As my
thoughts raced through a million terrible ideas, one realization filtered
inappropriately to the surface.

This was the
Magician, without his mask and face paint and he was as handsome without his
armor as he had been with. Thick black eyelashes framed his stony grey eyes and
the familiar dark circles of an insomniac.

A curl of
black hair, shiny in the dim light, hung over one eyebrow. He had warm colored
skin, eyes slightly narrowed and overhardened by time and a lot of anger. He
looked European, the way they looked in movies, romantic and distant and
unamused.

“Serafine,”
he repeated with mock charm and sugared, terrifying sweetness. “You have
something that belongs to me. Return it to me right now or I will turn you into
something small and reptilian and then feed you to something large and mean. Do
I make myself absolutely clear?”

“Very.” I
swallowed. “It’s just that…”

“No. The
key.”

“I can’t
give it to you.”

Wrong
answer. Fury lit his grey eyes and for one terrible moment I thought he’d let
it smother his reason. One by one he peeled his fingers from my bicep and
leveraged his hand on the door so that I was caged within his arms. I swallowed
and searched his shadowed eyes for some hint of the man on stage, of the one
who’d almost kissed me behind the tent. The man who created magic.

“Where,” he
exhaled slowly, “pray tell, is it?”

 “I hid it.”
He tensed immediately and I put my free hand to his chest to stop him. Through
his shirt I could feel his pulse racing out of control. “Wait! Before you turn
me into something awful, hear me out. Please.”

“You’d
better be very good at convincing me to spare you.”

“I knew
you’d come,” I rushed on. “I hid it so you’d have to listen to me if you ever
wanted it back. I belong with the carnival. I was supposed to find you. You
take me back with you and I’ll give you back your key.”

For a moment
the fury evaporated into incredulity. He pulled away, took two big steps back.

“You’re
blackmailing
me?”

I fidgeted.
“Not exactly.”

“For a job I
can’t even give you?”

“You have
sway. Your opinion clearly means something to--”