Chapter 6
Weeks turned into months with the usual steady grind.
Leena sat at her desk in the Sacramento house working through another tarot reading, cards spread in the familiar pattern under the desk lamp.
The client’s questions were the same shape she had seen a hundred times before. Love. Money.
Whether something already broken could still be fixed.
She moved through the spread with practiced care, noting the positions and the way the cards talked to each other, but part of her attention stayed half elsewhere.
No one ever fucking listened.
Not really.
They paid for the reading, nodded along while she spoke, then went right back to doing whatever they had already decided to do.
The cards could show the structure of a problem with painful clarity and people would still walk straight into the same wall.
She had learned not to take it personally most days. Today the irritation sat closer to the surface than usual.
She was halfway through typing the written portion of the reading when a notification popped up in the corner of her screen.
An email.
The address looked unfamiliar, not one of her regular client contacts or the usual spam that filtered through.
She almost ignored it. Then the subject line caught her eye.
The San Jacinto.
Leena went still. The cursor blinked on the half-finished sentence in front of her.
She stared at the notification for a long second before she clicked it open.
The message itself was short. No long explanation.
No attempt at casual conversation.
Just enough to make the origin clear and the sender’s identity almost certain.
She read it once, then again, the quiet of the room suddenly more noticeable than it had been a moment earlier.
Could it be Elias?
The thought arrived fully formed. The bar in Austin.
The long conversation at the end of the counter. The Tower card left face up between them.
The controlled way he had listened and the even shorter way he had spoken.
Months had passed without any contact. She had not expected any.
Now an email carrying the name of that bar sat open on her screen, and the possibility settled over her with a weight she was not ready to dismiss.
She leaned back in the chair and looked at the message again, the tarot spread still unfinished beside the keyboard, the ordinary irritation of the afternoon already replaced by something sharper and far less familiar.
Leena did not reply right away.
She sat with the email open and studied every part of it with deliberate care.
The sender address looked ordinary enough at first glance, but ordinary meant nothing these days.
Spam had gotten better at wearing normal clothes.
Phishing attempts arrived dressed like old acquaintances and half-remembered nights.
She had learned not to trust the first impression of any unexpected message, especially one that carried the name of a bar from months earlier.
She copied the address and the few lines of content into a separate window and ran the usual checks.
Link scanners.
Header inspection.
The slow, practical steps that had become automatic whenever something landed outside the expected pattern of client emails and routine correspondence.
Nothing obvious lit up.
No malformed links.
No immediate red flags in the routing.
That did not make it safe. It only made it less obviously dangerous.
She leaned back in the chair and stared at the screen a while longer.
The unfinished tarot reading still sat beside the keyboard.
The ordinary irritation of the afternoon had drained away, replaced by a sharper caution.
If it was Elias, the message was short enough to match the way he had spoken that night.
If it was not, someone had done a careful job of aiming at a memory she had not shared widely.
Finally she opened a reply window. She kept the response as stripped down as the original message had been.
Can I help you?
She looked at the three words for a moment, then added the signature she used when the work required a certain distance.
The Sorceress
She sent it before she could second-guess the decision, then closed the email and returned her attention to the cards still waiting on the desk.
The room felt quieter than it had a few minutes earlier.
Whatever came back, if anything came back at all, would arrive on its own schedule.
Until then she had a reading to finish and the usual weight of people who paid for guidance they had no real intention of following.
Later that night Elias sat in his truck with the engine off and the windows cracked against the lingering heat.
The house waited a short distance away through the windshield.
He made no move to get out.
The cab stayed quiet except for the soft tick of cooling metal and the occasional sound of a car passing on the street.
He turned the phone over in his hand once before unlocking it and opening the message thread again.
Her earlier reply still sat there in its short, clean form.
Can I help you? Signed The Sorceress.
He read it one more time, then began to type.
The words came slowly.
He deleted the first attempt and started over, keeping the message as stripped down as the one she had sent him.
Sorceress. Leena?
I need three one-card readings pulled.
A.
B.
Or C.
Which is best for me.
He looked at the lines for a long moment after he finished. No extra explanation.
No attempt to soften the request or fill the space with conversation.
It matched the way they had spoken that night at the bar, direct and without decoration.
If she was going to answer at all, she would answer this version of the question.
Elias sent the message and locked the phone.
He stayed in the truck a little longer, the house still waiting beyond the glass, the controlled stillness he carried through most of his days settled back over him.
Whatever came back would arrive on her schedule. Until then he sat with the dark and the quiet of the cab, in no particular hurry to cross the short distance into the life that waited on the other side of the front door.
Leena stood at the counter waiting for the water to finish heating when the notification arrived.
She glanced at the phone, wiped her hands on a towel, and opened the email.
The subject line was the same short thread as before.
She scrolled to the new message and read it through once.
Sorceress. Leena?
I need three one-card readings pulled.
A.
B.
Or C.
Which is best for me.
Her eyebrows rose before she could stop them.
This man’s insane, she thought.
The kettle clicked off behind her.
She did not reach for it right away.
She stood there with the phone in one hand and the quiet of the kitchen around her, reading the lines a second time as if the extra pass might make them more reasonable.
Three unnamed options.
No context.
No explanation of what A, B, or C even referred to.
Just the blunt request for three single-card pulls and a decision about which one was best for him.
She set the phone down on the counter and finally poured the water over the tea bag.
The familiar scent rose with the steam while the message sat open a few inches away.
Months of silence, then an email from the San Jacinto, then this.
The man either trusted her far more than made sense or had a strange idea of how these things worked. Possibly both.
Leena leaned against the counter and watched the tea steep, the dry disbelief still sitting in her expression.
She would answer.
That much already felt decided.
But she was going to let the tea finish first, and she was going to take her time deciding how much rope to give a request that arrived with so little attached to it.
Leena let the tea steep longer than usual while she turned the message over in her mind.
When she finally picked up the phone again she typed without rushing.
The tone came out exactly as sharp as the thought behind it.
I’m not a circus trick.
Nor a parlor trick for the amused.
Maybe a Magic 8 Ball would be better suited.
She read the lines once after she finished.
They matched the irritation that had risen the moment she saw his request sitting there with no context and no explanation.
Three unnamed options.
A demand for single-card pulls.
The assumption that she would simply perform on command.
She had spent enough years dealing with people who treated the cards like entertainment.
She was not interested in adding another one to the list, even if the sender was the man from the San Jacinto.
She hit send and set the phone face down on the counter.
The tea had gone the deep color she preferred.
She lifted the mug, took a first careful sip, and stayed where she was in the quiet kitchen.
Whatever he did with the reply was his business.
She had drawn the line clearly enough.
If he wanted something real he would have to come at it differently.
If he did not, the Magic 8 Ball suggestion could stand as her final word on the subject.
Leena carried the mug into the other room and sat with it, the phone left face down on the counter behind her.
She drank the tea slowly and without expectation.
The reply she had sent was sharp enough that silence seemed the most likely answer.
Most people did not enjoy being told they had treated the work like a circus act.
She had meant every word of it.
Halfway through the cup her phone lit up and began to buzz against the counter.
She let it go for a second longer than necessary before she stood and walked back.
The screen showed an incoming call from a number she did not recognize.
The area code stopped her short.
512.
Austin.
Wtf, she thought.
She stared at the number while the phone continued to buzz in her hand.
Email was one thing.
An actual call from an Austin number, arriving not long after she had shut down his request, was something else entirely.
She did not answer right away.
The tea sat cooling on the counter behind her.
The quiet house offered no opinion.
Leena watched the screen until the call finally stopped.
The notification for a missed call remained.
A moment later the phone buzzed once more with a voicemail alert from the same 512 number.
She made no move to listen to it yet.