Chapter 1 #2
It was a ludicrous bluff, and they both knew it.
Sure, the pot was always decent, at least from where she was sitting, but it was no earth-shattering lottery ticket.
Not to mention that nobody in their right mind would make Dani the kingpin of anything besides a lavender oat milk latte.
But this bean curd dressed as an off-brand James Dean didn’t need to know that.
So she put on her best bull-about-to-wreck-a-crystal-shop expression and held her ground.
The boy broke first. “Ugh. Fine,” he said, “but only because I have homework to do, and I find this incredibly boring.” He reached below the desk and pulled out a giant tumbled aventurine, which he placed in front of her with disdain. “Put it on the rock.”
Dani laid her hand against the surface of the stone, which shimmered green in affirmation. Seams appeared in the blank wall next to the desk, a doorframe burning suddenly scarlet, like the unquiet ghost of a discontinued lipstick. The door popped open slightly in invitation.
“If I get in trouble for this, linchpin,” the boy threatened as she stepped past him.
“Oh, don’t be such a fucking Libra.”
Ignoring his gasp of outrage, Dani slipped through the door, then jogged up the red-lit stairs to the observatory.
The glass dome far above her head was black and starless, leaving the golden hides of the various telescopes and orreries around her muted.
The only source of light was the flickering of candles from the depths of the room, hidden by a great whirring machine whose purpose Dani had never discerned.
Soft noises rubbed together as she started toward it: the riffle of cards in practiced hands, the gentle fall of coins, and conversation flowing over them.
Gingerbread must have recognized one of the voices at the same time Dani did, because he chose that moment to abandon her, flapping around the machine and out of sight.
She followed him into the library nook, which was shaped like a bulb and capped by a smaller glass dome.
Curved bookcases lined the walls, and several round tables were arranged in the space between, only one of which was presently occupied, lit by halfway-melted tapers and strewn with cards, coins, bills, and trinkets.
The five people who sat around the table lifted their heads at the sound of Dani’s footsteps.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Dani said. “I was working on a paper at the library, and fell aslee—”
Gingerbread interrupted her with a deep wheeze from the arm of his mistress.
McKenna’s head turned slowly as Dani spoke, her hair like pale pampas grass moved by a deliberate wind.
Her eyes were huge and shrewd and hazel beneath the slope of her brows, her skin shimmering as though it were flecked with mica.
She was changeling-level beautiful, at once both cold and full of light, but a distant light.
McKenna had fairy blood in her, third generation, and it showed.
It didn’t help that she was a glamour witch, specializing in illusions and charms that could alter her appearance or others’.
She wasn’t wearing any such glamours tonight, though—she was pure, unadulterated McKenna, and her shark-fin nose crinkled at Dani’s pasty excuse.
But it wasn’t McKenna who spoke first; it was Geneva, the junior tarot major who ran the game and worked as a TA in Dani’s class on the Major Arcana.
She smiled at Dani cheerfully. “All’s well that ends well!
You’ve only missed a round and a half. Come on, get comfy while we finish up, then we’ll deal you in. ”
Dani obeyed, making a mental note to ask Geneva after the game if she had any sway over late assignments.
She took the empty chair on McKenna’s left and immediately felt the static of a familiar anxiety crackle across her skin.
The pile of coins and bills in the center of the table, the suspense taut in the air, the circle of faces around her …
they were all pieces of a scene she knew by heart, one she’d learned to dread by the tender age of five.
She was an old hat at cards, and every other game of chance—and she absolutely loathed them all.
They were the vestiges of a childhood she’d fought tooth and nail to be free of.
But achieving her lifelong dream of getting into the Leap hadn’t been easy; it was a prestigious, world-class university of magic, and only allowed a handful of students in on scholarship every year.
When she’d opened her acceptance letter during her break at the tapas restaurant she’d been working at, Dani had sobbed so violently that her manager sent her home.
She’d known she’d have to work her ass off to pay the half of tuition her scholarship didn’t cover, but she’d been working her ass off since she was a kid. She was used to it.
Yet the tips she was making slinging lattes just weren’t cutting it, and rent plus food plus her tuition payments added up to a hefty sum.
So when Geneva had, one day, casually mentioned she was looking to fill two spots in her game, Dani had reluctantly enlisted herself and McKenna in the monthly la ruota, but with stipulations only the two of them knew about: They wouldn’t dominate every single round, they would use their winnings only for necessities, and they would never, ever let anyone in on their little secret.
McKenna, after all, was the only person at Fox’s Leap who knew about Dani’s ability. It was the kind of thing that tended to make assholes out of perfectly good friends—or family members, for that matter—so now that her life was in her own hands, she liked to keep it to herself.
But McKenna was different; she was the only person Dani had ever met who remained unaffected by her ability to inspire oversharing. She guessed it was McKenna’s fairy heritage that buffered her. Or, equally likely, the girl had just been born without a filter.
Right now, however, McKenna said nothing to her, just turned her gaze back down to the seven cards in her hand as she considered her next move.
Dani greeted the other players with awkward eye contact: Adrian, the Nordic cultures major; Katya, a mage specializing in tech; and a woman who had never played with them before.
Dani froze as she recognized the newcomer.
Her shaved head, sharp features, and impeccably weaponized Louboutin sense of style were unmistakable.
Professor Silva, a visiting adjunct in the oneiromancy department downstairs, had been a guest lecturer for a few sessions on nightmare interpretation in Dani’s Intro to Oneiromancy class, and while she hadn’t given the impression of being particularly straitlaced, she didn’t miss a trick in the classroom—which was enough to give Dani pause.
The professor laughed when she saw the blood drain from Dani’s face. “You can relax,” she said, her Italian accent a soothing lilt. “I’m not here to crash your party. I’m just here to play.”
“She’s with me,” Katya added in her usual annoyed tone, like it tried her patience just to be here. She had pale silver hair cut at a slant on one side, shaved to a tight fade on the other. “She’s cool.”
“La ruota is one of my favorite games,” Professor Silva said. “It’s a pity more people don’t play it.”
“I don’t know if I would call it a pity,” McKenna said, tossing a card into the discard pile and drawing another. “It’s not a particularly forgiving game.”
“Ah, well, it isn’t meant to be,” Silva said with a smile. “The medieval Italian nobles who invented it didn’t want just anyone to be able to pick it up.”
“You know its history?” Dani asked. She’d been curious about the origins of the game, having never played it before, even with her parents, but it seemed quite obscure.
“Of course.” Silva turned her attention to Dani, her gaze friendly.
“I come from a long line of Italian oracles, most of whom specialized in tarocco. I grew up watching my grandmother play this game. She tried to teach me, but I was never particularly given to it—plus, she was a terrible crone who leeched the joy out of everything.”
The color of a pomegranate seed flooded Dani’s consciousness—the shade of Silva’s unexpected admission. Everyone at the table laughed, including Silva, but hers was a nervous laugh, companion to the stunned look on her face.
“Mi scusi,” the professor said, touching her lips lightly with two fingers. “I’m not quite sure where that came from.”
An uneasy feeling crawled into Dani’s stomach as the pomegranate faded from her mind.
While many of the intricacies of how her ability worked remained a mystery to her, she’d noticed certain unignorable patterns over the years.
The colors, for one, seemed to be connected to the emotions of whoever she was talking to, with the usual associations—shades of red for anger and annoyance, green for jealousy, and so on.
But they only showed when the person was actually speaking; nonverbal signs of her ability left her mind color-free.
She’d also ascertained that her ability was more likely to work on someone she was interacting with directly, though there didn’t always seem to be a rhyme or reason for when it triggered.
She could go a whole conversation with one person without it ever activating, or she might be peppered with colors in a group setting when she wasn’t even talking.
Typically, what people blurted out were the truths behind white lies or unfiltered, brutal honesties, like what Silva had just said about her grandmother.
No one had ever told Dani their deepest, darkest secret upon meeting her—at least as far as she knew.
Over the years she’d learned to roll with the randomness of it all.
Either way, it wasn’t something she wanted the professor to take an interest in, so she busied herself with adjusting the chain on her necklace, an amethyst pendulum she’d worn for years.