Dark Star (3 page)

“I’m waiting,” she said, opening one eye to peek at me.

“Quiet. The mysteries of the universe must not be rushed,” I told her, but I finished my shuffling and began to deal.

The first card I dealt was number fifty. The Inverted Crescent. My readings always began with this card; it represented me and helped me to orient myself. I placed it in the center and drew the next card. Card fourteen. The Mapmaker. In readings for Tink, this one represented her.

The rest of the reading was a jumble.

No reading was ever perfect. My Knowings weren’t consistent, even with the cards. Proximity was a factor, as was my relationship to the subject; the bond of family was strongest, but friendship helped. Even then, Knowings came to me differently. Sometimes they came as images or impressions, sometimes in fragments and words—or just a sense, distant and indefinable. Gram told me consistency would come with experience, but so far, all I’d learned how to do was focus on a single subject, and I couldn’t even always do that. The cards helped. It wasn’t like envisioning the future, or listening to thoughts. It was about becoming attuned to everything around me: motion, silence, the curve of a hand, scents in the air. My Nav cards adjusted my frequencies. And this one was coming up static.

I bit my lip, frowning over the cards. This happened on occasion with Tink’s readings—noise I couldn’t sift through, little flashes in the dark, hints of almost-something that slid out of reach. Something secret. Something hidden. For someone so open and friendly, she could be annoyingly difficult to read.

This time, however, the problem wasn’t Tink. The problem was around us.

It wasn’t any specific person. There was no location I could pinpoint, no emotion I could name. It was broader than that. Friction in the air, tension I’d been too preoccupied to notice. For a second, my dream flashed before me—the city, a rush of color, the scent of blood—and then darkness. I shivered. I let my hands idle on my cards. I’d lost my concentration and couldn’t get anything at all from Tink.

“That bad?” she asked, wrinkling her nose. “What, does he have too many toes?”

Gideon paused in the middle of chewing his hamburger. “Is that a deal breaker?”

“Depends on how many.” She took a moment to consider this, then turned to me. “How many?”

I was no longer in the mood for the reading, but Tink was expecting something. I tucked my cards into my bag and shrugged. “Just the ten,” I answered. “Unless some have fallen off. That’s the problem—he’sundead.”

“That does seem to be going around,” Gideon remarked.

Tink threw a fry at me. “You’re hilarious.”

“Even worse? He has a summer job as a rodeo clown.”

Tink had a horror of rodeos. She refused to discuss it. She crossed her arms and glared at me. “Your cards told you he’s an undead rodeo clown.”

“With an unspecified number of toes,” Gideon added, grinning.

“I need better friends,” said Tink.

“You love us,” I countered.

Tink responded by giving me the finger. “I’m still asking him out,” she said. Then, with an exaggerated sigh, she went back to her magazine.

I turned away. My senses were still on alert. Taking a long breath, I tried to filter the chaos around me. The lunch room was loud, but the friction I’d felt was still there, beneath the noises. Here and there, I caught hints of it: murmurs, furtive glances. I twisted in my chair, scanning the room. There was definitely something going on. It was more than just the anxious, expectant air. Nearby, several students leaned in close across tables, speaking in hushed, excited voices. And—there. Clustered near the door, a group of freshman girls stood crying.

“Did something happen?” I asked, nudging Gideon with my elbow.

“Like what?” Tink looked up from her magazine, tilting her head as she surveyed the room. The chatter around us had increased in volume, and a small crowd was forming around the crying freshmen.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Hmm,” she said, leaning forward on her elbow and staring directly at the throng.

I shook my head at her. “You’re so subtle.”

Tink was never one to be out of the loop. After a moment, she jumped up and announced, “I’ll go find out.” With remarkable ease, she pushed her way into the crowd where a few of our friends stood whispering.

Once she left, Gideon asked quietly, “You all right?”

“I just have this uneasy feeling,” I said. Though I told him about my Knowings on occasion, this wasn’t one I could easily articulate.

“Something in your reading?”

“More like outside of it.”

Gideon didn’t press the issue. I picked at my food, waiting for Tink to return, but I didn’t have much appetite. The disquiet wouldn’t leave me. That was a problem with Knowing: sometimes I couldn’t turn it off, even when I wanted to.

By the time she returned to our table, Tink had lost her usual cheer. If I hadn’t been alarmed before, I would have been now: she’d gone from sunny to somber in the space of a few moments. Her face was pale, her eyes lowered. She slid back into her seat, not speaking, and began fidgeting with her book bag.

Gideon and I exchanged a look.

“Tink?” I asked.

What happened then wasn’t like Knowing. My senses didn’t clear; the fragments didn’t align; that friction remained just at the edge of my focus, like sounds heard underwater. Instead, I felt a pinch of dread in my stomach at the look on her face, the way her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. She spoke softly, but her words sliced through me. I knew what she was about to say.

“It’s Kelly Stevens. They found her.”

Her body, Tink meant. They’d found her body.

Kelly had been in the grade behind us. I hadn’t known her well—I’d spoken to her maybe twice, and for the life of me I couldn’t recall what our conversations had entailed. But she’d been pretty and popular, and when she’d gone missing in July, all of the local news networks covered the story. She had disappeared somewhere in the stretch of half-light between seven and ten p.m. one hot summer night. A slender silver sandal was found near a park bench, straps twisted, scuffed with dirt. Nothing else.

They’d searched the entire metro area and the woods north of her home, checked nearby lakes and the river. The Cities united, holding candlelight vigils in the steamy blue twilights that lingered in late July; there’d been nothing like it since that string of murders the year before I was born. No trace had been found of her. Rumors but no suspects. Kelly had simply vanished. She’d fallen into the blank haze of the relentless summer heat.

And now she’d been found.

“Where was she? Do they know what happened?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but something—some morbid curiosity, maybe—pressed me to ask. None of us had really believed they’d find her alive, not after all this time, but it was unsettling to have suspicion become fact.

Before Tink could answer, something else caught my attention. Another twinge of Knowing, brief but potent. A girl had paused by our table. I turned, and for a moment she met my gaze. She looked as though she might speak, and then her eyes flicked past me. She hurried away.

Iris St. Croix, the new girl in school. I wondered, briefly, if she’d known Kelly. I didn’t think so. She’d only transferred to Whitman at the beginning of the year. But then again, maybe she had: the sense I’d gotten from her was vague, confused, but strikingly sad.

I watched her go. She was short, and her dark hair so long it reached her hips, though not in a messy way. The sweater she wore was at odds with the unseasonable heat. But there was something else that made her stand out.

At her throat, she wore a necklace I hadn’t seen before, but with a symbol I knew. A pendant with the triple knot. It was the sign of the Astral Circle, Gram had told me. I knew it for another reason.

It was the symbol printed on the back of each of my Nav cards.

A cop was standing at my front door when I got home from school.

I’d seen Detective Wyle before, and I recognized him even before he flashed his badge at me. He stood half hidden in the shadow of ivy that hung over the lattice, tapping his foot against the stone walkway. I studied him as I approached. His face was carefully blank, but there was a certain tension in his stance. Other details, I’d noted before: the fading sunburn on his forehead, the worry lines around his eyes. He was maybe forty-five, a few years older than my mother; good-looking, for an older guy. He had that dark and mysterious tortured-soul thing going for him, which normally would’ve made me think he might be a good match for my mom. She tended to date men who were terminally boring and thus unlikely to think her anything but quirky. It always ended badly. But Detective Wyle also wore a wedding band, so that was out.

Plus, the last time we’d seen him, he’d threatened to arrest her, which was probably a better indicator that they simply were not meant to be. Mom might not have the best taste in men, but she had a healthy sense of self-preservation.

“Hey, kid,” the detective said when I reached him. “You live here, right?”

Since I’d dumped lemonade in his lap the last time he’d interrogated my mother, it seemed unlikely he’d forgotten me. I rolled my eyes, stepping past him to unlock the door.

“You gonna invite me in?”

I shrugged, turning on the light in the entryway. “You have a warrant?” Inside, the hall smelled like orange peels and socks, a sad case for a house built with the grand, imposing feel of a Victorian mansion. Mom must have been gone most of the day, and the house had been closed up, hot air thickening.

“It’s not that kind of visit. I just need to speak with your mother.”

“With or without handcuffs?” I turned back toward him. He’d gripped the side of the door, holding it open.

He gave me a bland, unamused smile.

I smiled right back. “She’s not here right now.”

“When do you think she might be home?”

“Late,” I said. Although, since she’d told me not to leave after school, there was every chance she’d pull into the driveway and prove me a liar at any moment.

“I can wait,” Detective Wyle said.

I hesitated, wondering how difficult it would be to annoy him into leaving. I looked at him again. Wedding band—on. But he’d twisted it at least twice since we’d been standing there. He looked as though he’d skipped shaving that morning. His clothing was somewhat wrinkled, too, and he seemed tired, a little worn out.

“Don’t want to go home, huh? What, did your wife kick you out?”

“You’re a detective, too?” He scratched the stubble on his chin and gave me a hard glare, but I figured he was just trying to intimidate me.

I shrugged again. “Fortuneteller,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. You can come in if you let me give you a reading.”

I expected that to send him running for the hills, but I must have underestimated either his need to talk to my mother or his desire not to go home, because I found myself leading him into the house, past the stairway, and into the sitting room. I told him to have a seat on the sofa while I found him something to drink. The air conditioning was broken—again—and the heat was heavy around us. That orange-peels-and-socks smell lingered.

Detective Wyle watched me suspiciously. “That’s staying in the glass this time, right?”

I set the lemonade in front of him. “Only if you use a coaster. I’ll get cranky if you ruin Gram’s table.” I dropped my book bag to the floor and knelt on the carpet across from him, reaching for my Nav cards. The news about Kelly had rattled me, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to focus, but the motion of shuffling soothed me. I took slow breaths, feeling the texture of the cards, the edges worn by long years of use. I glanced up at Detective Wyle. I wasn’t sure what exactly I hoped to see, but if he was planning to harass my mother, I wanted whatever advantage I could get. Inconsistent though my Knowings were, a reading might give me something.

Or fail miserably, as my reading for Tink had. I couldn’t be certain.

“How does this work?” he asked. “Is that a tarot deck?”

“Nope. My own cards. Gram gave them to me. You just sit there and daydream about sending bad guys to jail or something. You can think of a question if you want.”

He grunted.

“What’s your first name, Detective? It helps.”

He hesitated, his fingers tapping the table. He was a big man —tall, broad-shouldered, fit—and he seemed out of place on the dainty floral sofa my mother had placed in the room. Like an action figure in a dollhouse.

“Mickey,” he said.

I laughed. “Mickey. Really? Never mind—we’re sticking with Wyle.”

He smiled, but he hadn’t touched his drink. He probably thought I’d poisoned him, or that drinking pink lemonade in a room decorated with pastels and paintings of fruit might ruin his tough-guy image.

“You gonna open a window?”

“This works better if you don’t talk,” I said, but I stopped shuffling to oblige him. I rose and tugged both of the far windows open, pausing at the sill to breathe. A cool wind pushed in, the sound of traffic, the rustle of birds taking flight.

Detective Wyle shifted slightly when I turned, though his expression didn’t change. He’d been scanning the room, I realized. Working his way across the walls, the bookshelves. Nothing in it was wrong, out of place—no black pants or dark hoodies laying around, nothing that might hint of mysteries tucked behind the doors. But I shivered. He was searching.

I returned to my cards. “Okay, Wyle. I’m going to lay out ten cards, and they’ll tell me all your secrets.”

“I must not have many secrets,” he said.

“I’m just that good.”

I knelt, finished shuffling, and set down the first card. Card fifty. Inverted Crescent. Good. I placed it in the center and laid out the rest of the cards.

I began at the top, taking another long breath and focusing. Card one, Compass. Card eight, The Witch. Card sixteen, The Beggar.

I frowned. In readings, the Compass card was always my mother. And this I got a sense of: the cooling twilight; a woman in black; a face in profile, the slope of her nose; light refracting off water. A single star shining. The Witch and The Beggar. Someone searched for and unseen.