He held out a hand, and I passed the cards over. He turned the pack around a few times, concentrating. “It carries an enchantment.”
“A friend had it done for me as a birthday present, a long time ago. It’s . . . a little eccentric.”
“Eccentric?”
I took the deck back. I didn’t try to do a spread—that was just asking for trouble. I merely opened the top and a card popped out—thankfully, only one. Otherwise, they tried to talk over each other.
“The Moon reversed,” a sweet, soothing voice told me, before I shoved it back into the pack.
“Was that . . . it?” Pritkin asked, looking a bit nonplussed.
“It doesn’t do regular readings,” I explained. “It’s more like . . . like a magical weather vane. It gives the general climate for the coming days or weeks.”
“And what kind of weather can we be expecting?”
“The Moon reversed indicates a pattern or a cycle that is about to repeat itself.”
“A good cycle?”
“If it was, I sure as hell wouldn’t see it,” I muttered.
That got me a cocked eyebrow.
“I don’t see the good stuff,” I explained briefly. “Anyway, the cards can be read a number of different ways. But normally the Moon reversed points to a dark time, like the dark side of the moon, you know?”
“How dark?”
“That depends. From a personal standpoint, it often indicates a time of deep feelings, confusion, long-buried emotions coming to the surface—”
“And from a larger perspective? A national perspective?”
“People with dark purposes, order moving into chaos, wars, revolutions, riots.”
“Fairly dark, then,” he said drily.
“Usually,” I admitted, before adding the standard disclaimer. “But tarot is an indicator, not an absolute. Nothing about the future is decided until it happens. We create it every day by the choices we make, good or bad.”
Pritkin’s lips twisted cynically. “But so does everyone else. And not all of them are striving for the same things, are they?”
“No,” I said, thinking of the war. I picked up my Coke and took a sip before remembering that warm Coke tastes like battery acid. I set it down again.
“There’s a calendar on the fridge,” I commented, after a while.
Pritkin didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know how they got it to stay up there. I mean, it’s stainless. Nothing sticks to that stuff.”
He drank beer.
“But it’s there. And I see it every day. Right after I get up, I go get a Coke or whatever, and it’s—” I licked my lips.
“The coronation.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
Sort of. In fact, it was a lot of things: problems learning about my power, the refusal of the Senate or the Circle to take me seriously, the lack of any useful visions about the war and now the fact that someone was trying to kill me. Again.
But the coronation would do. It had become a symbol for everything, the whole damn mess coming to a head, the fast-approaching day when I, Cassie Palmer, would be presented as the seer of seers to the supernatural world. Which would probably take one look and laugh their collective asses off.
Not that I blamed them. Two months ago—a little less, actually—I’d been a secretary in a travel agency. I’d answered phones. I’d filed stuff. I’d picked up the boss’s freaking dry cleaning.
On my days off, I worked as a tarot reader, because a couple of bucks an hour over minimum wage doesn’t pay the bills. Only that hadn’t paid them all that well, either, because people didn’t like my readings. Nobody really wanted to know the future; they wanted reassurance, hope, a reason to get up in the morning. At the time, I hadn’t understood that; I’d thought forewarned was forearmed.
Now I understood why I hadn’t had too many repeat customers. Now I’d have liked a little reassurance myself, even if it was a lie. And I really, really didn’t want to see tomorrow.
Ironic that it was my job now.
“It’s a formality,” Pritkin said firmly, watching my face. “You’ve been Pythia since your predecessor’s passing.”
“Technically. But I haven’t really had to do anything yet, have I?”
He frowned. “You haven’t had to do anything?”
“Well, you know. Nothing important.”
“You killed a god!”
I rolled my eyes. “You make it sound like I dueled him or something. When you know damn well we flushed him down a metaphysical toilet.”
Pritkin shrugged. “Dead is dead.”
He tended to be practical about these things.
Of course, so did I when the creature in question planned a literal scorched-earth policy, starting with me. But that wasn’t the point. “I just meant that no one’s expected me to do anything as Pythia,” I explained. “But the coronation is coming up, and you know as soon as it’s over . . . and I can’t even age a damn apple!”
I started to get up, but that hand tightened on my foot. I wanted to pace, needed to let off some of the nervous energy that kept me from eating half the time, kept me from sleeping. And just when I told myself I was being paranoid and everything would be fine, something tried to drown me in the goddamned bathtub.
But I didn’t get up. Because then I’d lose that brief, human connection. A connection that shouldn’t have been there, because Pritkin wasn’t the touchy-feely type. He touched me in training, when he had to, and grabbed me in the middle of crises. But I actually couldn’t recall him ever touching me just . . . because.
I sat back again. The damn balcony wasn’t big enough for pacing, anyway.
“And yet, from what Jonas tells me, you shift with more alacrity than Lady Phemonoe ever did,” he said, using Agnes’s reign title. “And the power is the power. If you can use it for one application, it would seem logical—”
“Yeah, except it doesn’t work that way. At least not for me.”
“It’s only been a month, whereas most heirs—”
“Train for years. And that’s just it. I don’t feel like I’ll ever catch up. And even if I do, nobody is going to listen to me!”
“And why not? You’re Pythia.”
“No, I’m some kind of . . . of trophy to be fought over. At least that’s how I’m treated. So if I do get a flash of something, something useful, something important, who the hell is going to pay attention?”
“The opposition, apparently. They seem to insist on paying you a great deal of attention.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“And you don’t find that strange? If you’re so powerless?”
I shrugged. “I’m still Pythia. Killing me would—”
“Would what?” he demanded. “Say they had succeeded tonight. What would it have gained them? When the power leaves you at your death, it simply goes to another host, probably one of the Initiates. There’s no gain for the opposition there; in fact, they might have reason to view it as a loss. For the moment, the Initiates are probably better trained.”
“Thanks,” I said, even though it was true.
“Then the question remains: why you?” he asked, leaning forward with that sense of pleased urgency he always got when debating. I tried not to take it personally; Pritkin just liked to argue. “Why are they still concentrating on you?”
“Why have they been for the last two months?” I countered. “Apollo—”
“Was focused on you, yes. But only because he had to be. He wanted to use your pentagram ward as a direct line to your power. It was the one thing that would allow him to break through the barrier and exact revenge on those who had banished him.”
I unconsciously rolled my shoulders, stretching the skin between the blades, where my ward had sat ever since my mother put it on me as a child. The big, saucer-shaped thing had never been pretty, and had somehow ended up lopsided and droopy, like something a tattoo artist had done after a late-night bender. But it had felt like a part of me.
It didn’t now. Ever since Apollo’s attempt to find a way back into the world his kind had once misruled, everyone had been freaked out about it. They were afraid I might be captured with it on my body, allowing our enemies to use it to drain my power. So it remained in a velvet case on my dressing table, like a discarded piece of jewelry.