5. Fortune Teller Aesthetic
CHAPTER FIVE
Fortune Teller Aesthetic
She was kind of bossy, this mysterious, sad witch. I followed her up the dark stairs to her ancient house.
The house was impressive. We stepped inside, and twin staircases flanked the entry hall, dark, ornate banisters curling along the curved stairs like the vines in her greenhouse.
A richly patterned wool rug covered solid oak floors, and damask velvet wallpaper coated the walls.
Numerous family portraits dating back centuries stood like sentries on either side.
Almost all their subjects had light strawberry-blonde or flaming orange hair like Lucia.
Her family.
Above the main fireplace hung the most recent.
Lucia sat on a red velvet chaise, younger, perhaps in her teens.
Her eyes were bright and her smile wide, which, based on my short time with her, was hard to imagine.
Her mother had the same red hair, although hers was pulled back into a tight bun, and they shared the same freckles.
Her mother’s other hand rested on the shoulder of a boy with strawberry-blonde hair.
He was smirking, and something about it set me off.
Lucia must have felt the shift in my mood because she glanced over, and I felt her stomach drop as her gaze landed on the portrait.
“Follow me.” She waved me through a narrow doorway, and I didn’t question it, especially when apparently my only other option was experiencing agonizing pain.
She led me into the kitchen.
It was…kind of a fucking disaster.
Everywhere I looked, small brown and green bottles glinted like beetle shells, and drying herbs and plants hung from every available surface.
The sink was full of dirty dishes. The black cat-bat creature from the greenhouse jumped up next to the incriminating pile and meowed, and I felt her flush with embarrassment.
“Sorry, I don’t have many guests.”
“I live out of my motorcycle. I’m not judging.”
And I wasn’t. If anything, I kinda liked that this bossy, uptight witch had a secret mess. Made her seem more human. She busied herself sorting through a pile of what looked like old mail, her embarrassment sitting at a low simmer beneath her skin.
It was kind of cute.
She found what she was looking for in the pile, an old Post-it note, walked over to the wall, and…took a rotary phone down, holding the receiver to her ear.
This girl didn’t have a cell phone? Or was this part of some witch aesthetic I wasn’t up to date on?
She held the receiver between her ear and shoulder and waved me over.
“I need you to talk to her,” she said.
“What? Why?”
She let out a long sigh, and that bone-deep sadness welled up. “It’s a long story.”
That sadness—it wasn’t even mine, but it felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest. What had happened to her? I’d had my fair share of heartbreak, and I’d never felt this way.
I’d ruined her ritual and broken her greenhouse. The least I could do was not make her feel like this. I took the receiver from her and held it to my ear as she dialed the number, the mechanism slowing clicking back after each digit.
Despite the late hour, the phone rang only once before the voice of an older woman came through.
“Lucia? I’m surprised to be getting a call from you, darling. Do you need me to come by?”
“Actually, ma’am, my name is Hawk, and I’m calling on Lucia’s behalf.” Years of customer-service voice snapped into place. It took a great deal of willpower not to automatically parrot my Acheron Delivery Services spiel.
I hadn’t expected the cackling laugh on the other end of the line.
“Well, don’t you sound handsome? And what, pray tell, are you doing at that nice young lady’s house at this hour?”
Was it possible to hear the waggling of eyebrows through a phone?
My neck heated, and Lucia raised her eyebrows.
“What is she saying?”
“Nothing.”
Her disbelief was immediate. “Then why are you feeling so embarrassed?”
Before I could even try to come up with a lie, the woman’s voice came through the receiver again.
“You still there, handsome? What does my girl need?”
“There has been an…incident, and Lucia said you might be able to help her?”
“I’ll be there in two beats of a bat’s wing.”
She hung up, and I set the receiver back on its cradle.
Lucia looked at me expectantly.
“She’s on her way.”
I knew this Gertrude lady was near because the creature I’d learned was named Mugen was circling the front door like a sentry, alternating between prowling with his back arched, flapping around the doorframe, and clinging to the walls while making an irritated yowling sound.
“Mugen, you’re all right,” Lucia murmured, trying to comfort the agitated creature. “I’m sure Gertrude won’t bring—”
As Lucia said it, gravel crunched beneath car tires in the driveway. I peered through the cut-crystal glass of the door to see an older woman with short, curly white hair climb out, a fluffy white dog yapping at her heels.
Mugen immediately let out an ear-piercing screech.
“Go upstairs if Snowflake bothers you that much!” Lucia swatted at the cat-bat, but he flew just out of her reach and landed on the curtain rod nearest the door.
A knock sounded. Lucia opened the door and gave a small wave.
“I’m here, darling. We will get this sorted right away, and this handsome young man is going to explain to me everything about himself and why he looks like he lost a fight.”
“I did,” I said, ignoring the first part—and the fact that the fight had been with a window.
Gertrude patted my cheek on her way past, which nobody had done since I was nine, and steered her little white dog inside with her foot. Mugen made a noise from the curtain rod not dissimilar to a teakettle.
“Now.” She dropped a carpetbag on the hall table and turned to Lucia. “Yes or no, darling. Are you hurt?”
Lucia shook her head.
“Is anyone else hurt?”
She glanced over at me and motioned to my forehead, which ached but wasn’t actively bleeding anymore.
Gertude walked over to me and grabbed my face without invitation.
“Not too deep. You have that yarrow poultice I like?”
Lucia nodded.
“Good. Then go fetch that while Hawk explains the situation to me.”
It was strange, seeing Lucia so silent. Almost meek, which…well, was very different from how she’d been with me. I thought about how I’d needed to call Gertrude, how this older woman was asking her questions that only required a nod or shake of the head to answer.
Like she couldn’t speak…or wouldn’t.
But before I could ask about it, Gertrude was suddenly very close to me.
“Tell me what happened.”
“Um…well, I was scheduled to deliver something to Lucia, and she was in the middle of a ritual, and her um…candles exploded and I lost control and crashed through her greenhouse and broke her magic flower, which apparen—”
She cut me off. “She attempted the ritual? Alone?”
I had a feeling those were rhetorical questions.
Gertrude looked me up and down. “And you ‘broke’ the flower, so I assume the two of you are now bonded.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Whatever I expected her response to be, it wasn’t the wicked grin that highlighted the wrinkles around her eyes.
“Very interesting.”
That was unnerving.
“Ma’am, if I may ask, why isn’t Lucia speaking to you?”
The grin vanished in a flash. “I assume she can speak to you, correct?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She let out a soft sigh. “Lucia carries a particularly nasty curse, which twists her words so that no one can understand her.”
“So you can’t understand her?”
“No one can. Well, no one except you. But that’s enough from me on that. The rest isn’t my story to tell. More importantly, what are the effects of this bond you two now share?”
“Well, I can feel her emotions, and it’s painful to get more than about twenty feet away from her.”
Lucia walked back into the hall, a poultice in her hand. She gave me a weak smile, then held it up to my forehead. I winced as it touched the cut, and she winced right along with me.
“It will help it heal faster, I promise,” she said, barely above a murmur, like it was a secret between us. “Sorry, I didn’t think to make it for you before.”
“That’s all right. There was a lot going on,” I replied, meaning it. The more I learned about this situation, the more I realized I had majorly fucked up tonight.
She shifted her hand to let me hold the poultice, and our fingers brushed as I took the warm, damp fabric from her.
She looked away, but I still felt the butterflies in her stomach and the heat, which then echoed in me as I watched red flush up her neck and over the tops of her breasts, just barely peeking out of the black lace dress she was wearing.
She let out a small gasp and peered back up at me. I knew she could feel that I was admiring her, but that only made her more turned on, the red spreading faster under her adorable freckles, which led to me—
Gertrude let out a loud cough.
We both took a step back, and that rising heat quickly shifted to embarrassment. We turned to the old woman.
Gertrude looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked at Lucia. Then, very carefully, back at me.
“Very interesting… Okay, both of you, to the parlor now.”
Gertrude waved her hand, and we followed her as if she were the one who lived here.
I walked into the parlor through a molded archway.
If the foyer was Victorian Gothic, the parlor was mystic fortune-teller chic.
Heavy burnt-velvet curtains were drawn across the windows, a celestial pattern peeking out in thinner sections of fabric by the porchlight outside.
Two reupholstered couches sat around a small round table that held a tarot deck and a crystal ball.
Slightly more disturbing were the numerous corkboards surrounding the couches.
Each was covered in pictures, hand-written notes and drawings, and various graphs and horticultural charts.
Red thread connected various pieces, and Post-it notes in every color covered the entire thing like confetti.
At the center of this massive web was a Daguerreotype photo of a massive white flower, labeled Moon Queen.