Three of Swords

Rhys

"You're going to choke," Bia chided, a far more dainty eater despite the way cafe employees kept looking over to see if we were anywhere near clearing out to make room for the next round of hungry tourists.

"I can't even fathom the irony of dying by ham sandwich," I replied. Survived hanging upside down and a medically-induced coma just to choke to death on bread crust. What a life.

The cafe was too open, too exposed and I didn't want to be there any longer than we had to. As quickly as I downed my sandwich, Jane picked at hers.

"Stop playing with your food."

Bia really was more mother than future victim at the moment. Her tone was sharp, but her eyes were softer. She worried more about Jane's half-hearted lunch than she did about what peril lay ahead. I couldn't even say that if she knew the extent of it that she would act any differently.

Jane looked up to glare at Bia, but Bia was already looking beyond her out the window. The moment was brief before she went back to her lunch, finishing off her lemonade. Her subtlety was easy, seeing but not acknowledging. In her head, the gears must have been turning the same way she calculated where to stop that still kept us on route.

"You see that?" I asked, leaning further over the table.

Jane paused, looking between us for an answer. Her back to the window, she couldn't watch out the window for what changed and what stayed the same.

"What is it?" Jane asked, pointedly not looking over her shoulder.

"A man in sunglasses has been watching us for at least ten minutes." Bia shifted naturally, so perfect a mimic of her ordinary behavior, I hadn't even noticed her noticing.

He had clocked us earlier, though. At least since the library, that man had been keeping a measured distance. His neutral clothes kept him indistinct, dark jeans, gray jacket, but his stillness made him suspicious. 

That, and the fact that stalking was already a tactic in play. 

My fingers drummed against the table top.

"How hard could it be to lose him in the crowd?" Jane fed herself the tiniest bite of her sandwich.

"You could lose anybody in a crowd," I said grimly, "me, not so much."

Jane could hide behind a fire hydrant and get away unseen. She could blend in incredibly well when she wanted to, didn't attract attention until it was necessary. Her humbleness embodied her. It served our purpose, but I did not.

I never had a gift for invisibility.

Men in sunglasses would look for the same things I did: the pop of Jane's yellow hoodie under her military green jacket and the flash of Bia's blue top under denim.

My red flannel shirt definitely seemed to play more to an enemy advantage than to mine.

Jane tossed her tip money on the table next to her half-eaten sandwich and that was all the permission I needed to get up, get out of this showcase window advertising us to a spy.

Watch and wait, Natalie said. It worked better for watching birds than watching stalkers.

Bia fell back from her position as impromptu tour guide. Her expression cracked into uncharacteristic uncertainty before she took a deep breath and plastered back on a smile.

"Let's go lose him, shall we?" she said.

The best course of action was to curve back onto Essex, into the crowds that couldn't be so subtly cut through.

Throngs of people gathered around a reenactment, too enthralled to consider how grim it really was to watch history repeating itself without the real dread of either persecution or fear of the devil at work. 

"Doth anyone know the whereabouts of Bridget Bishop? We must banish the evil from our midsts," a Puritan inquired of the circle forming around him.

I had enough on my plate being implicated in 20th century witchcraft, let alone getting dragged into the 1600s witch hunts too.

Bridget Bishop and I came a little too close to having hanging in common.

"Here," Bia pointed, pulling Jane physically into one of the tents lining the street, the soft front wall already drawn closed.

Bridget would attract a larger crowd outside and we could hide on the other side of it away from prying eyes darkened by lenses.

"I'm taking lunch for another fifteen minutes." The man of the booth looked a little too much like Colonel Sanders, but wore a paisley vest that took the edge of the Confederate-era beard. He didn't even look up from his newspaper and coffee.

Bia lifted her chin defiantly, putting her hands on her hips.

Wait. No. We didn't need any more cards telling us why we could or couldn't make decisions. The tent wasn't a hiding place so much as it was being herded into a trap.

"Bia, don't," I whispered, faithless that Bia would listen. Nobody could tell her what to do.

"Great, we just need a place to dodge our stalkers and we'll be on our way," Bia said. She had no problem telling other people to tolerate her. She refused to be apologetic when it came to necessity, and the tone echoed in my head. I'm so sorry.

I crossed my arms, an ineffective guard against the assessment of anybody else's gaze. Nothing hid me from view.

The psychic's annoyance fell away too quickly. His hand reached up to stroke his beard, contemplating hard about something in our faces, something in what we carried with us.

"How are cards and things supposed to tell you the future anyway?" Like she was a welcome guest instead of a girl intruding on a man's lunch break, Bia inspected a small display of paraphernalia.

"Tarot isn't the art of learning the future. It's for self-reflection. They are a window into how we see ourselves."

If I could have turned to stone, I would have in that moment. It might not have even helped. The man stood, approaching me calmly to pluck the card from the pocket of my shirt.

None of the cards from my deck had become so tattered. The one he held up had worn at the edges from constant handling, constant considering, constantly taking it places it didn't need to go. The Hanged Man. A warning, or a gift, from Natalie.

"For example..." The man answered for Bia's sake, certainly not mine. Nobody keeping a card that close to the chest needed to be told what it meant. "The Hanged Man. A man of indecision. A reflection of someone who never knows how to act, how to move forward."

I gritted my teeth, taking it back as the man offered it. A space existed where nobody breathed, waiting to hear me deny it. The only eyes I could meet were the psychics, but Bia and Jane both watched for something too. I could feel their expectation, their own interpretation of a fact. I didn't. I don't. If the man could predict what I would say, he didn't show it.

"I didn't ask to be psychoanalyzed," I said. Not by anybody. Not by Natalie or fair ground Tarot readers.

The psychic shrugged, taking it in stride.

"Alright. Make me understand me." Bia interjected, sitting down at the little table set up within the tent, slapping a twenty down on the table top. A stack of business cards revealed his name. Vincent Nye, spiritual guide.

Forgetting his lunch break, Vincent Nye settled back into his chair across from the far more willing candidate.

He placed the deck in front of Bia to shuffle. Jane inched gradually closer to me until her fingertips brushed against mine.

The cards always changed. That was a variable in the dreams, a moment that could dictate change. The art of the cards stared back at me, familiar and unknown at the same time. Unlike my deck, and the variations Deborah used in Cullfield.

"Enlighten me." Bia set the shuffled deck in the middle of the table.

The first card laid down depicted a king atop his throne, the sea churning around him, as if he sat on a stone pedestal in the middle of the ocean. In one hand, he held a goblet, and in the other, a scepter.

But it appeared upside down to Bia.

"The King of Cups is a diplomat, a trusted adviser. Reversed, however, the card suggests deception. Maybe there is someone you no longer trust, someone you worry may mislead you." Nye's hands, heavy with rings, swept back to the deck.

Bia wore a sober expression as she folded her hands in front of her, taking in the explanation wordlessly.

Her poise said more about her understanding than anything else had. I'd been wrong to underestimate her. She already had her suspicions, already questioned who to trust.

The second card slapped down next to the first and my heart dropped alongside it.

Three swords pierced through a heart while rain pelted down from a cloud in the background, just in case it wasn't clear it wasn't a great card.

"The Three of Swords warns of betrayal. This may represent a fear of a painful truth or feelings of isolation. This fear may be buried under the surface. It could be your intuition telling you something you don't want to admit."

Bia nodded slowly, uncharacteristically silent.

Jane squeezed my hand, a somehow blameless gesture that didn't crush my fingers in her grasp. It was sad, not angry. 

If distrust bred in Bia's heart, it was valid. It meant something else, though. It meant lost faith from one of the few people Jane needed to lean on. If Jane couldn't rely on me and she couldn't reach Bia, there was just an abyss. Free floating into a place that Natalie had existed in.

Nye didn't care about the intricacies threading us so delicately together. He laid down the last card.

The queen's throne rested on a rocky beach, waves lapping at her feet while she held an ornate lantern sort of thing, a cup to end all cups. She didn't look foreboding at all.

"The Queen of Cups, a loving protector and matronly figure. She accepts all, intuitive and nurturing. She is the queen of water."

Finally, Bia glowed.

"That's more like it. Queen of water. That's my game."

Oh, the implications of wanting to betray the Queen of Cups. For all the creeping toward the edge of the future, it could have been worse. The cards always changed and the fan across the table top lacked some of the players I was too used to seeing.

"Have you ever dealt The Tower?" I asked.

"Twice," Nye answered, "is that why you're nervous? Are you afraid of seeing The Tower in your spread?"

I shook my head. "No. I was just curious."

Jane searched my face for an answer I wouldn't willingly give her.

"Thanks for the lovely queen and stabbed heart. We're probably all clear now." Bia drew herself up, taking one last look at her cards.

"Elaine Delafosse still has space in her session tonight. She's a medium." Nye stopped us before we stepped outside the tent. Jane froze in front of me, turning on her heels before I could crash into her. A chill accompanied the goosebumps rising over my skin, but I kept my mouth shut.

"What makes you think we'd be interested?" Jane barely managed not to stutter.

"I thought you might want to talk to someone as badly as they would like to speak to you."

Jane faltered, a question undoubtedly on the tip of her tongue. Was there any doubt who would want to talk to Jane? What would Jane do to have Natalie give her familiar brand of guidance?

Before she could form another question, I pulled at her hand and gently tugged her away.

It was for the best. If Vincent Nye would recommend Elaine Delafosse's mediumship session, he wouldn't be able to tell Jane anything more. That fell into the realm of somebody else's talents.

"Did you know?" she whispered.

Natalie felt like a fever dream. The more I thought about her, the more it tainted how she had been. I couldn't reconcile how I knew Natalie better from one coma than I did from an entire childhood of classes together. I was just an expected guest in her purgatory living room, the visitor she showed her vacation slide show to, but instead of the tropics, I got Natalie's greatest hits. Cullfield on the verge of crumbling.

Whatever veil had been thin enough there had never existed for me again. I had my own questions for Natalie, and she hadn't been there to answer me. She wasn't there to tell me how not to lose my goddamn mind.

"She's dead, Jane. Natalie can't help." I looked her over, taking in that blind hope and giving her nothing in return. If I could give Jane a different truth, I would, but it wasn't there to give.

"You can't tell me that." She shook her head.

"Well, I hope for her sake she didn't die alone just to see the future from the afterlife."

God, I hoped that wasn't the fate she doomed herself to.

Jane considered that, but her arguments fell silent. The street was too public a place to talk about eternity.

"What's The Tower?" she asked instead.

"Do tell," Bia added, falling back to our pace.

"Sudden change, usually destructive. Death, major illness, end of relationships, job loss. And upside down, it's just slightly less mediocre. A little less pain and suffering," I replied.

"Cheerful," Bia drawled, "that's all well and good anyway. I got my heart and my king and queen."

"The heart had three swords through it," Jane said.

"Could be worse." Bia shrugged.

Bia said that as somebody who hadn't lived through her cards before.

"Wait, where are we?" I stopped dead in the middle of the street, people nearly bulldozing into us as a result. Matching up silhouettes of streets was too much like trying to fit in puzzle pieces, but trying to remember the spaces from memory.

It didn't look like an especially significant intersection. On one corner, a little grassy patch hosted a statue of Samantha from Bewitched on a broomstick, a weird kind of pop culture nod in a town with plenty of real, dark witch history.

"Essex and Washington." Bia pointed out the sign on the corner. Behind it, an army surplus store. 

"This is the corner you saw in your dream?" Jane asked too quickly, sounding completely incredulous.

"Yeah..." If dreams were forthright about why they were important, they wouldn't be so hard to follow.

"I'm starting to gain a little confidence in you. Army Surplus is the best stop we've hit so far." What didn't make sense to me or Jane seemed to make sense to Bia. "I wonder if they have dive knives. I kinda want to get one."

If we were supposed to hit the army surplus store, what exactly were we supposed to be preparing for?

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A/N Now, the question is, who do you think Bia distrusts the most, if her card spread is to be taken seriously?