I take a long sip of the martini she handed me, searching for a little Dutch courage. The vodka burns on its way down my throat, but it takes only a moment for the fire to turn into a pleasant warmth. As it does, I settle myself on the couch beside Lily and reach for the tarot cards she always keeps in a basket on top of the coffee table. “It’s not about me.”
She eyes the cards. “So, there’s another person’s future you want me to tell you about?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Declan’s?” She sits up straighter, pulls the cards to her.
“No. Not Declan.” I pull the picture of Shelby out of my pocket and lay it on the table in front of her. Then I tell her everything that Nate told me.
She has tears in her eyes before I’m halfway done. Lily may talk a good game, but she’s the biggest softie in the book. Long seconds pass before she reaches for the picture of Shelby, runs her fingers over it once, twice. Then she sorts through the deck and pulls out the Sun card.
After laying it in the center of the table, she hands me the deck and tells me to shuffle.
“Why me? This is for Shelby.”
“Yes, but you’re the closest thing to a seeker we’ve got in this room, so you’re elected. Besides, you know more about Shelby than I do.”
“That’s not true,” I say, even though I’m already shuffling. “I told you everything.”
“You think you did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I set the cards down with a definite slap.
“You want me to tell you the future, right? I’m telling you the future as I see it, so shut the hell up and let me do my job.” She picks five cards off the top of the deck and lays them out on the table—two on either side of the Sun and one crossing it.
“This is the World spread,” she tells me. “It’s the best place to start when looking for someone that’s alive.”
I nod, but my head is still whirling with what she said—and what she didn’t. What did she mean about there being more for me to tell her? Am I missing something? And if so, what? I don’t know Shelby, don’t even know if it’s possible for me to do this. But if it is, and if there is something I’m not seeing, I better figure out what it is pretty damn quickly.
I want to pepper Lily with questions, but she’s already in reading mode. Her fingers linger over the Sun card for long seconds before moving on to the others. I don’t know tarot very well—I have always relied on Lily for this part of Heka—but the spread doesn’t look too bad to me.
None of the cards that I consider particularly menacing are there, at least none of the ones that normally pop up in my readings. I can only consider that a good thing since mine are usually so awful that I’ve made Lily stop doing them for me.
Still, I’m impatient. I want to know what she sees, but when Lily’s reading tarot, she can’t be rushed. The meaning of the cards mingles with something else inside her, some bit of foresight that allows her to get a really good grasp of the picture at hand.
“She’s alive,” Lily says after a minute. She’s touching the first card in the spread—the Seven of Pentacles. “But everyone involved in the situation is frustrated. Her parents are terrified, the cops baffled because they have no real leads. Even the people who have her—” She closes her eyes for a second, concentrating. “I can’t get a read on them, but they’re also getting frustrated. Little Shelby is more trouble than she’s worth. She cries all the time; nothing makes her happy. What are they supposed to do? If she doesn’t shut up, someone will hear her.”
A chill runs down my spine at the words, and the singsongy way Lily says them. Her body’s right in front of me, but I know that she’s gone far away. I want to scream at her to come back, to tell her that it’s dangerous, but she wouldn’t thank me for it. This is what she does—what I asked her to do. It’s not her fault that I’m suddenly filled with an overwhelming trepidation, a sickness in my stomach that warns me this reading isn’t going to end as well as I had hoped.
She moves on to the second card. It’s the Seven of Wands, the siege card that pictures a man defending himself against six other wands. “Whoever has Shelby is anticipating an attack. They will be the ones to start it, but whether they finish it is still up in the air. But their resolve is strong. They’re determined to make it through, to win, no matter what they have to do or whom they have to kill.”
The chill becomes a full-blown shivering. Dread starts in the pit of my stomach, a small ball that gets colder and more deadly with every second that passes. My palms and the bottom of my feet start to ache, and I know it won’t be long before I have to listen as my hopes for Shelby crash and burn around me.