Chapter 1
The guys were no more than twenty or twenty-one.
Boys, she thought when she saw them, even though she wasn’t much older, just twenty-three herself.
They were probably students at Georgia Southern, or the University, maybe fraternity brothers.
Definitely C students. They had average written all over them.
But they had money, that much she could see, just from the way they were dressed.
Vineyard Vines shorts, Sperry deck shoes, and crisp oxford shirts they probably sent out to be laundered.
Even though they looked freshly showered, their eyes were watery and red, and they still smelled of the previous night: tequila, sweat, and sex.
Somehow, they’d made their way down to the southern part of Savannah’s historic district, blocks from the tourist epicenter nearer to the river.
She might as well snag them before somebody else did.
She asked them to sit and, in the time it took them to man-spread on her green velvet settee in her anteroom, she’d assessed their auras:
Stupid. Shallow. Cruel.
She’d seen that last part immediately, that they were bullies, the minute the taller of the two had opened his mouth to ask if she “had something—wink, wink, ha, ha—extraspecial for them.” She understood the clumsy double entendre.
Filthy cockroaches, she thought. Hiding in dark places, scuttling in the daylight, allergic to real, authentic human contact.
She envisioned herself stomping them into a smear of guts with the thick soles of her well-scuffed combat boots, over and over again.
Then, thinking of Edie, she amended the fantasy, and instead imagined Litha discovering them, snatching them up in her sharp teeth, and gently batting them around for hours with her hypodermic-sharp claws before finally crunching down on each, a late-afternoon treat. She smiled at that.
She took their credit card information and did the readings. Gave them her very best. Okay, eighty-five percent of her best. They ended up paying two-forty, but not after sniggering throughout both readings, as well as making more unfunny sexual jokes.
Afterward, though, she didn’t know what came over her.
It wasn’t anger necessarily or resentment of the boys.
It was more that she was tired. Tired of holding back.
Tired of playing nice. Tired of trying to make her grandmother proud.
As she opened the door, she stopped the first young man with a hand to his chest.
“You’ve broken your mother’s heart,” she said quietly to him.
He froze, looked down at her hand, then back up at her. Fear flickered in his eyes.
“That’s why she searches,” Ingrid said. “It’s not your father’s fault. It’s that she’s lost her child.”
His face seemed to melt, and in the way his eyes softened, there was a brief glimpse of the child he must’ve been at one time. She saw his innocence, his eagerness, his loving side. But then the curtain closed, his face hardened again, and he pushed past her.
Out on the sidewalk, Ingrid could hear his friend asking what she’d said. He didn’t answer, just turned around and shot her a look that felt like bullet fire.
“Fucking bitch,” he said to his friend, then spat on the ground and walked away.