For a second, Daphne looked stricken, but she covered it up so quickly, April wondered if she’d imagined it.
“Yeah,” Daphne said softly, then started swimming for the shore. “We probably should.”
April sat onthe porch late into the night, her sketchbook open on her lap.
As it turned out, Ramona’s engagement news paired with rage painting and topped off with kissing her ex’s ex—again—was excellent creative fodder. All that angst and turmoil, the lust and the panic and the loneliness. An artist’s dream, really.
She shook out her hand, achy from the sketching of the last couple of hours, the side of her palm coated in graphite. She was left-handed, so any work with a pencil—a marker, paints, anything, really—always left her hand and fingers a mess.
Her sketchbook was a mess too. A beautiful, feverish mess, full of smudged pencil and bits of eraser peppering the pages, but she already had five full sketches. They were rough—just outlines of what she’d do in the final medium, which would be pencil and pastels on thick textured paper, but they were there.
They existed.
She flipped back to the first drawing—the Fool. In the sketch,she’d drawn a young version of herself, no tattoos at all—not yet, at least—a beatific smile on her face, her eyes lifted to the sky, while one foot stepped off the edge of a cliff. Behind her, a hand reached out to grab her shirt and hold her back but couldn’t quite get to her. Beyond her, a city gleamed. Above her, a sky full of stars sharing space with a blazing sun. In her mind, the colors she planned and the way it all came together in the final product were dreamy and ethereal. Uncanny and wild and strange and even a little silly.
Just like her.
She flipped the page to the Magician, then the High Priestess, followed by the Empress and the Emperor. Each illustration was her, each one depicting classic tarot imagery blended with her own story, her own journey.
She smiled down at her work, her fingers already itching to get started on her final products, which would certainly take some time. Right now, though, she didn’t have the materials she needed, and she wanted the full picture first, all twenty-two biographical—evolutionary—Major Arcana sketched out and ready.
She sat back in the chair, resting her head against the back. She felt good. She felt empty and full all at once, that blissful, exhausted sensation she got when she created something she truly loved, something that made her feel alive.
Made her feel like she had a purpose.
“Finally,” she whispered to herself, her eyes on the sky above. It was fully cloudy now, the stars hidden from view, but she knew they were still there, fixed and steady while the world turned. She knew she should take a break and go to bed—Daphne had been asleep for hours—but she felt anything but tired right now. She felt motivated and driven and inspired, and she never wanted it to end.
She flipped a page, ready to start on the Hierophant, but her pencil hovered over the blank page. She had a plan for this stage,this card about knowledge and external systems, about breaking free from the expected and the orthodox.
But suddenly, she saw a flash in her mind, a vision for the next card in the set. It wasn’t her original idea for this card, but she couldn’t stop seeing it—a recent memory—and maybe she simply needed to release it, expunge it, before she could move on.
She flipped the page and her pencil started moving before she even made a decision to draw. Soon, she was looking down at Mirror Cove and two people in the lake. One was her, of course, tattoos and bare shoulders, her hair slicked back and her lashes spiked with water. The other person had damp lavender curls and lovely collarbones, her fingers soft on April’s face. Their heads were close, a kiss either just about to happen or already experienced. Or both.
April stared at the image.
The Lovers.
She blew out a long breath and ripped the page free from the wire rings, bits of torn paper dangling in the air. She was about to ball it up, toss it in the recycling when she went inside, but instead, she folded it once and slid it inside the folder attached to her sketchbook’s back cover.
Then she flipped back to the Hierophant and started to draw.
Chapter
Eighteen
Daphne jolted awake.
It was still dark outside, and April’s bed was empty. She stared at the messy covers—April never made her bed—and felt a swell of panic before she spotted April’s outline sitting on the porch, the warm amber light next to the front door beaming down on her.
She relaxed, but only slightly, as her phone was having the equivalent of a heart attack on her nightstand. She grabbed it, realizing too late that it was simply vibrating with a phone call, a rare occurrence for the device.
Elena.
Daphne tensed, the name flashing across her screen causing a wild range of emotions. She clicked the side button for some silence, but Elena’s name continued its broadcast, right under the numbers2:08 a.m.
She frowned, a different kind of panic moving her finger without her permission, and before she knew it, she’d answered the call and had the phone pressed to her ear.
“Elena?” she said. “Are you okay?”
