Chapter Twenty-One
CHAPTER
Twenty-One
KEVIN HASN’T TURNED on the lights.
The Hanged Man is the first to notice, as he’s the first to arrive.
He’s usually the first for things: first to fall into sinkholes; first to get divorced, though of course the others don’t know; first to have a joke savagely turned on him.
One of Lady Fate’s more private amusements, he thinks grimly.
First, but only for the terrible things in life.
The Hanged Man hangs around for five minutes, then another five.
He’d arrived early, ahead of the expected thunderstorm forecast for later that evening.
The sky had looked like a days-old bruise, and knowing his luck—knowing Lady Fate, that pernicious bitch—he would probably become the first of them to be struck by lightning.
So he’d come half an hour before the meeting, and let Lady Fate stretch out her hand to some other unlucky bastard.
Ah, Lady Fate.
As an apprentice, the Hanged Man had fallen into the river and drowned, before the then-owner, Marmaduke, had hauled him out to give him the kiss of life.
It’s why he can hear the river constantly, like an itch against his eardrum: painful, but impossible to scratch.
It’s probably the only reason why he’s at this table at all—because Lady Fate, in her capricious mercy, had let him live, giving him an errant gift as she did so.
Later, when Marmaduke transferred the bookshop to him, the Hanged Man saw Lady Fate inspecting the ink as it dried on the contract between them.
Watching him swallow glass after glass of the river, until his stomach was painfully swollen with its silvered water, while his thoughts twisted and snapped with its power.
Observing quietly as he’d tried out his first true reading, laced with magic—a gift she hadn’t thought fit to give him in his initial drowning.
It had seemed like a blessing at first, the way such things often do.
But now, he sees Lady Fate everywhere. He’ll be drinking in some bar, letting off steam, and Lady Fate will be there, sidling up to a drunk, but with her eyes on him.
His driver takes him to the airport, or to some business lunch, or back to the bookshop, and Lady Fate smiles at him, a ghost in the rear-view mirror.
The other day, he was on the goddamn toilet, and there she was, winking at him in the reflection on his phone.
And holding out that skull, like it was made for him to wear.
Lady Fate’s other name, her older name…
When had he become like this, twitching at shadows?
And more importantly, where is Kevin?
It’s not his job to turn on the lights, but he’s always doing things that aren’t his job.
Once, they were long, tapered candles, and it would have been the Fool’s job to light each one of them, or risk dismissal.
But then everything would have been grander, richer, in that dizzying heyday.
Another complaint he would offer up, if anyone would listen.
The Magician might have, if he was still alive.
If Chiron was still alive.
Angrily, the Hanged Man reaches for the light switch. The lights flicker on, sputtering orange weakly. The Hanged Man steps into the room—and stops.
The room was blue. Now, it’s red. Red with Kevin’s fine curls, red with the mask pulled to one side, red with the blood frothed around his mouth. Red with the cavity of his chest blown wide open, his own heart placed delicately in his clawed, outstretched hands.
Lady Fate smiles at him coyly from the shadows.
Just as the Hanged Man throws up—he’s certainly the first of the seven to do so on these sacred floors—Temperance appears in the doorway, his eyebrows severe behind his mask.
If it wasn’t for the single, uneven breath he takes at the sight of their Fool outstretched like a spitted pig on their table, the Hanged Man would never suspect that Temperance is anything but dispassionate at the scene before him.
Temperance waits for the Hanged Man to finish throwing up before he speaks. The Hanged Man wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve, looks at Kevin, and gags again.
“Please,” Temperance says flatly.
“I can’t—if you—” He can’t get more than a few words in without gagging again, so he stops talking.
Temperance observes the body for a while longer, while the Hanged Man tries to do anything but.
He can feel Lady Fate’s weighty gaze on him, the glint of the skull in her hands.
He glances at Temperance, wondering if they can both see her this way, in glimpses that suggest a fine-boned woman, tall and beautiful.
But Temperance is silent, all attention on Kevin’s corpse.
There is a quiet but definitive drip of blood from the table.
“What the hell happened here?” Temperance asks finally.
What do you think? the Hanged Man wants to say, but can’t, on account of the gagging. But luckily, he’s saved from having to try.
“I believe,” the Empress says, appearing behind them, “we have a murder on our hands.”
Later, the Hanged Man will remember her words differently, though they mean much the same thing. He will recall this and hear her bored tone, see the pop of her hip, the casual tilt of her eyebrows. In his memory, however, she says, looks like we’re at war again.
He is, of course, the first one to figure this out.