“And call Yvonne. Have her bring the cards.”
Ming pulled her lapels together and looked at me. Some of her old imperiousness seeped back into her eyes. “Forgive me. I have been remiss. Would you care for tea?”
“Thank you?” I said, not certain how to respond.
Cai walked to the swinging doors. In a single lunge, he swiped out with both hands and grabbed Rick and Aya by the throats. Fast. Faster than any para. Nearly vampire-fast.
“Put them away,” Cai said of their weapons, his voice as nonchalant as if they were standing at a bar having friendly drinks. “You’d be dead by the time you fired.”
Cai shoved and pushed both men back through the kitchen. I could hear their shoes sliding on the floor. We had known for a long time that Cai was far more than human. Cai’s strength, against two other paranormals who also had greater than human strength, was proof of that.
“When you ate the witches and the enemy Naturaleza, did you find their souls and give them back?” Ming asked.
Very few people knew I had helped the earth itself destroy agroup of vampires responsible for terrorizing the city of Knoxville with dark magic and a cursed deck of cards called the Blood Tarot. Just how much did Ming, with her vampiric, blood-sucking technique of “bleeding and reading” victims, know about that case?
“I don’t have anything to do with souls,” I said, still choosing my words carefully.
“I think you are more than you are aware.”
The door behind me opened and Yummy walked in.
Yvonne?
Yummy had a real name. Occam had dated her before me. He had to have known her name. Her name had to be in the records. I had never looked.
Yummy was blond with a swimmer’s shoulders. Or a boxer’s. Broad and strong while still being lean and hard. We were friends of a sort. She was smiling a weird smile, and if the hair on the back of my neck could stand up any higher, it would have poked into the ceiling.
In Yummy’s hands was an antique painted metal box sealed with two narrow leather straps.
TWO
“Sit,” Ming commanded her. “Watch,” she demanded of me.
Yummy pulled a small table between us and placed the tin box on top. It was about five inches by three by two, and was well-preserved beneath the thin straps, painted with a strange combination of coins, cups, daggers, a horse, pyramids, the Sphinx, and, in the background, a tower. Yummy pulled a small stool to the table and sat at its corner, removed the straps, opened the box, and lifted the lid to reveal a deck of cards.
The cards were old, the paper thick and heavy, the inks deep and dark on one side with a faint brown stain on one corner of each card. The pattern on the back was of a sword crossed with a stick, a cup to one side, and a coin to the other.
My eyes flew to Yummy’s and her smile widened, making her look more human than I had ever seen her.Tarot.
Was this aBlood Tarot? One of three left in existence in the entire world?
Unit Eighteen of the Psychometric Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security had been looking for the Blood Tarot deck that had been missing since the case Ming had mentioned. Well,Ihad been. It was my assignment, when I wasn’t on an active case, to find the one deck we had lost in the midst of fighting off a black magic working.
Rick LaFleur had a tattoo spell inked into his body with a Blood Tarot. His life and magic were bound up in it and by it.
“Yes, we found the Blood Tarot that you and your unit lost,” Yummy said through that strange smile. “No, I didn’t tell you. Yes, Ming thinks it’s at the center of what’s about to happen to us. No, I don’t know anything else.”
About to happen? Prophecy?There is no such thing asprophecy.Thought the woman who grows leaves…I shoved that all away and asked Yummy, “You’re a mind reader now?”
“Turns out I might be a lot of things,” she said, sounding both enigmatic and wry. Yummy’s hair was different, long blond streaks in it, and though she wasn’t dressed as oddly as Ming, she was wearing peculiar clothes—green and pink plaid flannel pajama bottoms, red and white striped socks with Santa’s face on the outer ankles, and a fashionably torn, oversized sweatshirt in a hideous shade of sunshine gold. Visible through the holes in the sweatshirt was a tight, stretchy, bloodstained T-shirt, some of the blood fresh.
“Shuffle the cards,” Ming ordered, pulling the edges of the purple fluffy robe over her knees. She had regained her imperiousness since drinking from Cai, but the robe, the wildly painted fingernails, and the long hair kept me on my toes.
Yummy shuffled the cards thoroughly and placed them in the center of the table. “Cut the deck,” she said to me.
“Ummm. No?”
Yummy’s eyes flew to mine, going wide with warning.
