“Good enough. Come on in.”
“You sure?” Card looked and sounded easy as a summer’s day, but he gave off sparking little snaps of worry that echoed through the Crossroads.
“You need to calm down and let me do what I do best.”
“Kiss?”
Nope. I had not just heard him say that.
“What did you just say to me?”
He glanced over, took in my stance, and held his hands up in defense. “You’re an amazing kisser. I’m sorry. But you said what you do best. Obviously, I’m a little nervous here, and that was not the right direction to take the conversation, and you couldn’t have been talking about kissing.”
“Obviously.”
“Because obviously you were talking about...se...”
“Crossroads,” I growled, knowing he was doing this to rile me up. Or to dispel the tension. Could go either way with him.
“The best thing I do,” I said clearly, “is act as a Crossroads for people looking for help and magic. You, however, are about to run out of both those things from me if you don’t zip it.”
He opened his mouth, his eyebrows raised, like he was going to argue.
“That? What you’re about to say? Don’t.”
He shut his mouth. “It would have been nice.”
“I do not care.”
“It would have been sweet.”
“From that mouth?”
“It would have been honest.”
Oh, I had no doubt.
“I am holding your life in my hands,” I reminded him. “The life of your tree. Don’t make me regret that.”
“Crossroads,” the eldest Fate, Atropos, said as she stopped beneath my porch, “we need a word with that thieving seedling next to you.”
“Unless he agrees to talk, you’ll be speaking to me.”
Three faces turned to him, three sets of eyes, light blue to deepest midnight, waited. The Fates were beautiful. But in that beauty was a terrifying power.
The youngest wore a summer dress covered in flowers that bloomed on woven vine. She had pulled the curls of her hair back in a simple ponytail, a soft green ribbon holding it there. Her skin was smooth and dark as an autumn sunset.
The middle Fate’s face was sharper at jaw and cheek, the glint in her eyes hard. Her hair was darker, flowing in waves down to skim the waist of her blouse and broomstick skirt. A silver peace sign necklace glowed in the rosy morning light and brought out the rose undertones in her dark skin.
The elder Fate had on a black leather jacket over a deep red tank and matching red leather trousers. Her steel-gray hair was braided and gathered off a face transcending the beauty of her age to something that belonged on oil paintings and sculptures.
“Well?” I asked Card. “Do you want to talk to her?”
I figured he’d say yes. He liked the sound of his own voice, liked catching people in the clever twists and turns of negotiation.
If I were in his place, I wouldn’t allow anyone to speak for me, and certainly not someone with whom I had a dodgy history.
“No,” he said, surprising the heck out of me. “I’d rather you speak for me, Ricky. I trust you.”
