“I didn’t mean show them my lab. I thought Inspector Galvan and I—”
Mr. Holbrook’s features brightened back to their usual ad-worthy charm. “Ooh, yes, I forgot you are on good terms with Inspector Galvan. Do you think he would be willing to do a demonstration in the training rooms or talk about what it’s like being an investigator?”
“I— I don’t know. You would have to ask him yourself.”
“I think I will. Galvan would be an excellent asset for this project. One of the heroes of the society showing people around, regaling those who want to become investigators with tales of daring. Yes, that is exactly what we need.”
Oliver opened his mouth to object when Holbrook cut him off. “And you’re also friends with Miss Jones, if I remember correctly. I saw she was on the sign-up list.”
“Yes, I’m taking notes for her.”
“Ah, that explains it. Well, write this down, Barlow. I think she would be the perfect person to give tours of the library since Mr. Reynard will be busy and Turpin is unsuitable. Also, tell her that I was thinking she and her sister might speak to any young ladies who might want to have a career at the society. And tell her to come see me at her earliest convenience, so we can get the ball rolling.”
Oliver carefully jotted down every word, but when he raised his head to ask Mr. Holbrook what his role should be, Oliver found him adding new names and roles to the board, none of which belonged to him.
Chapter Two
The Sun and the Moon
Felipe looked over his shoulder to make certain none of the librarians or other patrons were watching him too closely as he flipped through the library’s massive card catalog. With Oliver, Gwen, and Mr. Turpin otherwise occupied, it was the best chance he had to research the incident that had occurred during the All Hallows’ Eve party without too many questions. It had been several weeks since the party, and while Felipe had hoped he could dismiss the incident as nothing but superstitious nonsense or mischief, he couldn’t take the chance that it wasn’t, especially after the first half of the prophecy came true. All Hallows’ Eve had begun with one of the sybils spewing a prophecy about suns, moons, and towers falling at Felipe when he went to retrieve their costumes, and it had ended with Mrs. Van Husen reading his cards, scaring the shit out of him, and disappearing before he could ask more questions. Ever since, he had carried the death card around in his pocket along with the Receipt of Prophecy from the sybils. He had been meaning to see if there was any truth or deeper meaning to anything either woman had said, and as much as he didn’t want to know, he needed answers.
Flipping through all of the card catalog entries relating to cards and death, Felipe let out a frustrated huff. The only thing that was remotely close were mourning cards, and that certainlywasn’t what Mrs. Van Husen had used. Felipe wasn’t sure what the cards she used for fortune telling were specifically called. They had been longer and more narrow than normal cards with cups, swords, and other symbols instead of the usual suites, but perhaps, he didn’t need their name. Pulling open the drawer markedFo-Fu, Felipe flipped through the entries until he foundFortune-Telling by Cards. Beneath it was a laundry list of books relating to the subject. Luckily for him, the call numbers for all of the books were clustered within section 133. That meant they were probably all on the same shelf. He could easily pull a few books, skim them for anything that sounded familiar, and go from there.
Felipe had barely put the drawer back in order when a pang of anxiety jolted across the tether hard enough to make his hand tremble.Oliver’s meeting must be going well, he thought wryly as he pretended to straighten the cards until the feeling passed. Focusing on the tether, Felipe reached across it and tried to gently lower Oliver’s heart to his. While Oliver was perfectly capable of performing his job alone, meeting with people outside of that very specific context rattled him. As Felipe pushed the drawer shut, his gaze snagged on the amber and gold ring Oliver had given him, a companion to the one on his lover’s hand, and a small smile crossed his lips. Years ago, when he joined the Paranormal Society, he and Louisa had worn wedding bands for a time in hopes people would believe their charade, but once he realized no one at the society cared that he liked men, he had put it in a box and forgotten about it. He never expected he would wear one again, much less one from a man who loved him so dearly, and now, he couldn’t imagine taking it off.
That’s how life was with Oliver Barlow. They had only been together for a little over ten months, yet Felipe couldn’t imagine a time when Oliver wasn’t a quiet, supportive constant in his life. He had gotten so much more than he bargained for whenhe asked Oliver if he would like to have lunch back in January. Felipe had been murdered, accidentally reanimated, found someone who loved him wholly, and ever since, everything in his life had changed for the better. He no longer threw himself into dangerous cases that took him away from the city for months on end. He no longer avoided his family for the most part. He no longer dreaded the stillness and quiet in his life. More importantly, with Oliver at his side, he no longer felt that aching loneliness that had driven him to run for so many years. It was still strange to live so slowly, but he found he was getting accustomed to listening to his body rather than riding roughshod over his needs. Felipe wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Inspector Galvan didn’t say no to hard cases or stop to nap or eat, yet he was becoming someone who did that more often than not. The man he had been for most of his life felt further and further away, but—
Before he could finish the thought, a singleI love youtug pulled the tether hanging beneath his heart. A huffed laugh escaped Felipe’s lips at Oliver’s timing as he sent a single tug back and strode out of the reference room before Oliver could have another attack of nerves. Inspector Galvan, Felipe, it didn’t matter who he was right now. All that mattered was getting the information he needed to keep him and Oliver safe in case the prophecy and cards held real power. Wandering around the first floor of the library, Felipe glanced up at the brass call numbers nailed into each shelf, but none belonged to the section he was looking for. He didn’t think the books he needed would be on the ground floor. It was the one he and the other investigators were most intimately acquainted with. The front desk sat near the entrance hall to the library, but fanning around it like spokes in a wheel were the reference books investigators most commonly needed for cases. The shelves were crowded with atlases, maps, information on the tides, New York history, directories, boundcopies of old newspapers, census records, and anything else the librarians thought they might reference often. He passed several investigators sitting at tables with case notes and notepads at the ready before cutting through the section dedicated to works of popular fiction. Gwen once told him that the head librarian kept those sections on the first floor because casual readers and the investigators always needed the most minding. Mr. Turpin wasn’t wrong, not that Felipe would admit it aloud.
Taking the winding iron staircase in the back corner to the next floor, Felipe wished Gwen and Oliver were around. They would have found the books he needed within minutes. As a librarian, Gwen knew every inch of the library and could probably levitate down whatever book he needed without looking up from her work; Oliver just seemed to have the uncanny ability to know where books were, even if they weren’t something he would need to look at as a medical examiner. Then again, Oliver said he had spent his early days at the society practically living in the upper levels of the library. Even now, he was prone to wandering interests. Felipe would find him in bed reading a book on horseshoe crabs or Ancient Minoan art for no other reason than it seemed interesting. Felipe hadn’t thought of the library as a place he could wander through. He had only ever come to gather information for cases, and then, left as quickly as he could. He read plenty of magazines for pleasure, but somehow, the rows of information had always been off-limits in his mind. As he skirted the line between professional and personal, he stuffed down a pang of discomfort that he was violating some taboo by wandering around the upper stacks.
The floor softly creaked above Felipe’s head as other patrons moved about unseen while an older woman flipped the pages of a large tome at one of the carrells near the wall. Felipe did a doubletake, thinking it might be Mrs. Van Husen, but when he looked more closely, he could see the white woman’s featureswere far rounder and her hair too dark a grey to be the lady with the lace bobbins and strange cards that he met on All Hallows’ Eve. Disappointment and relief warred in his breast at the realization, though he still half expected to turn a corner and find her waiting. As Felipe stepped out of the cluster of shelves, he found what he was looking for. Across an iron catwalk,130 to 135had been nailed into an island of shadowed shelves. Felipe took a step onto the catwalk and hesitated. Last time he had been this deep in the library, the shelves had rearranged themselves and trapped him. Mrs. Van Husen had blamed it on the energy from the All Hallows’ Eve party, but Felipe still distrusted it. The Paranormal Society hadn’t truly been his home until recently, and he wasn’t certain he could ever get accustomed to a building that rearranged itself on a whim.
At the sound of footsteps behind him, Felipe ducked into the shelves. The world around him seemed to dim and muffle, cocooning this section of the library as if he had stepped into a pocket of quiet.Even more queerness, he thought as he eyed the titles on the nearest spines. Swallowing against a dry throat, Felipe realized that every book was about the paranormal. He wasn’t superstitious or religious, but after working at the Paranormal Society for two decades and working for his family before that, the information within those books took on a new meaning. He had seen seances go wrong where mediums ended up possessed by something from the other side of the veil, and while a book on demons might appear antiquated and titillating to someone outside the society, Felipe had nearly been killed by one and knew the damage they could do. Perhaps, this was why the books on the paranormal seemed to be separate from the rest of the library. Felipe knew Mr. Turpin kept books with actual dangerous information in the special collections, but after a life of dealing with the repercussions from magic andmonsters, Felipe gave everything in this section a weight others might not.
Running his gaze over the sea of titles and call numbers, Felipe cursed himself for not writing down the information from the card catalog. Section 133 was filled with tales of ghosts, seances, divination, and demons all crammed together in a single oaken bookcase, but right at eye level, he found the shelf of books on cartomancy. The titles meant little to him, so he grabbed a handful and stepped out of the shelves to use one of the carrells near the far wall when he heard voices he recognized. Even with his back to him, he could pick out Antonio DeSanto’s mop of black hair as he chatted in a stage whisper with one of the younger investigators, and for once, Felipe wished Turpin was there to swoop in and tell them to quiet down or leave. If they spotted him at a carrell, there was a good chance one of them would ask what he was reading, and talking about what happened on All Hallows’ Eve with someone who wasn’t Oliver or Gwen was the last thing he wanted to do.
Felipe slunk back into the bubble of quiet with a silent sigh; he would make do. As Felipe tested the shelf ladder, he paused at a sudden pang of fear across the tether. On the other end, Oliver alternated between anxiety and dismay before settling into something sharp but grey that Felipe couldn’t place. When Oliver’s mood didn’t worsen or change enough for Felipe to barge in on the committee meeting, he perched on the rungs of the shelf ladder and settled in with the books piled on his lap. He flipped through the first book, but it ended up being less about cartomancy and more about when to use different forms of divination. He set the book on one of the lower rungs and moved onto the next. The second ended up being about Spanish playing cards and something calledSortes des Saints, but they didn’t sound like what Mrs. Van Husen used.
As he opened the cover of the third book, the breath caught in Felipe’s throat. Staring back at him from the title page was an etching of the death card. Without taking his eyes off it, Felipe reached into his pocket with a shaking hand and pulled out the card Mrs. Van Husen had left behind. On both cards, a knight in black armor rode upon a white horse, but where there should have been a face, there was a grinning skull. They were a match. Felipe brushed off the flush of fear blooming in his breast; this was what he had wanted to find after all. The first half of the book was devoted to the development and history of tarot cards, but that was of little use to him. When he flipped to the section on the cards’ meanings, Felipe swallowed hard. There were so many. He couldn’t even remember what cards he had pulled for past and present because the second Mrs. Van Husen showed him his future, he forgot everything else. Who would forget a future littered with swords and death?
Thumbing through the etchings of the minor arcana, Felipe found the blindfolded women who had preceded death: the two of swords and the eight of swords. Felipe carefully read each description twice. It was as Mrs. Van Husen had said: they signified indecision and choices that would either leave him free or a victim. That left only death. Turning to the section about the major arcana, Felipe read through the list of cards with growing dread. The priestess, the tower, the stars, the moon… he had heard them all before. He reached back into his pocket and fished out a slip of paper that had been folded and opened so much over the past month that it had nearly perforated. At the top it readReceipt of Prophecywith the date and time. Beneath the main text, it had been signed by Felipe as he had been the one to receive the prophecy, Eleanor Golding, who had delivered it, and Janah Patel, who had witnessed it. Felipe skipped the first half of the prophecy as that had already come true on All Hallows’ Eve and reread the latter part for the hundredth time.
The sun, the moon, and the priestess will come together to decide our fate. Not tonight. No, not tonight. Soon. But if the sun refuses to rise, the tower will fall. Darkness will descend and doom us all.
Felipe could practically recite the prophecy from memory, and he often did, turning it over in his mind during the quiet hours of the night. If the first half hadn’t come true, he would have chalked it up to being a prank or just enough empty, dramatic phrases thrown together to sound ominous, but after what happened, he couldn’t deny that it had come true. Still, he didn’t believe in fate or divine providence. He refused to believe bad things happened to good people for any other reason than chance, but this was less about fate and more of a warning. He had protected Gwen and Oliver through everything that happened in Aldorhaven, and he wasn’t about to let harm come to them now. Back in October, in the first prophecy, he and Oliver had been the sun and the moon. He assumed that was literal because of their costumes, but what if it had a deeper meaning? Felipe eyed the table of contents suspiciously. The sun, the moon, the tower, the high priestess, and of course, death were all cards in Mrs. Van Husen’s deck. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
Turning to the section on the high priestess, Felipe skimmed the main meaning of the card. The high priestess symbolized the balance between the physical and unseen, intuition, seeking greater knowledge, and delving into the mysteries of the universe. Once the author went into the meaning behind the artwork, Felipe moved on. No one on All Hallows’ Eve had been dressed as a priestess that he could recall, but maybe, it wasn’t meant to be a literal costume this time. Felipe rubbed his temple and grimaced. This was why he hated dealing with the sybils. At least with Oliver and Gwen, they said what they meant.
He skimmed the next handful of pages, but none of the cards were any of the symbols mentioned in the prophecy. When he turned the page and found death staring back at him, Felipe drew in a long breath and tried to force back the current of fear threatening to overtake him. He didn’t want Oliver to sense it on the other end of the tether and worry about him. His pulse hammered uncomfortably in his throat as he locked eyes with the grinning skull. For most of his life, he hadn’t feared death in any way that mattered. He had survived bullets, blood loss, demon attacks, being eviscerated, and things he didn’t dare think about again. There were even times he welcomed death, but now, its specter loomed around every corner. While Felipe wasn’t certain he could die on his own, he knew Oliver could, and that haunted his nightmares far more than what lurked in his memories.Oliver. The tether hung heavy under his heart at the thought of losing him. Death was life’s one certainty, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing Oliver. When he turned over the death card and reacted poorly, Mrs. Van Husen told him it wasn’t a literal death. Felipe refused to believe her without additional proof. They had had too many close calls recently.
Steeling himself, Felipe counted to three and forced himself to read the entry.Death is often the most feared card in the major arcana due to its fearsome grim reaper and placement as unlucky number thirteen. Drawing Death in any circumstance rarely signifies a literal death no matter what sensationalist literature or plays proport. Felipe relaxed a fraction.Death traditionally means the end of a cycle, the end of a relationship, or a spiritual death, but no matter what, Death signals a monumental change for the one who draws this card. Death may appear when the old must die in order for the new to rise from the ashes. To die is to change or to transform, but rarely is death really the end.
“The one certainty in life is change,” Felipe murmured under his breath.
“Yet some things never change. Do they, Inspector Galvan?”
Felipe jolted upright to find Mr. Turpin scowling down at him less than two feet away. Turpin moved like a goddamn cat. Felipe almost never heard him approach, and after what happened before they left for Aldorhaven, he wasn’t sure if the head librarian merely had light feet or if the old man was something uncanny. At the moment, he looked and sounded human as he gave Felipe a world-weary look and drew in a breath as if trying to contain something biting. With the papers in his hand, Turpin tapped the brass sign fastened above Felipe’s head that read,No sitting, swinging, or tomfoolery.
