Beth leaned in closer and stared directly into my eyes as though she could find the truth within them, which made me want to look away, but I couldn’t. Then she held her hands in front of me, her palms facing me like she wanted me to give her a high five, before moving them up and down and around in circles, bracelets jangling as she went. I looked at them with my eyebrows furrowed and my back pressed into the back of the chair.
“What are you doing?” I squinted at her. Beth had always been quirky, but this was new.
“I’m reading your aura,” she said. “But it’s not easy.”
“Beth.”
She ignored me.
“Beth!” I yelled.
She jerked her hands back and gave me a startled look. “Why are you yelling?”
“Because you’re talking about reading my aura, whatever that even means, and vampires and shifters. What the hell is going on?”
She laughed, her eyes crinkling at the edges as she looked around. “Hey, Marble!”
A cat, which appeared to be aptly named, as she was a calico with marbled white, brown, and orange fur, trotted over. “Yeah?”
I nearly fell off the chair. My head spun.
“Say hi to Emma,” Beth said to the cat. She said thattothe cat.
“Hi, Emma.” Marble looked me over in that haughty way only cats can manage. “She might pass out.”
Then Marble picked up one of her front paws and licked it before walking back across the front of the office and settling into the beam of sunshine that the dark tabby had been in earlier.
“She just talked to me,” I whispered. “That cat.”
Beth leaned forward. “Are you telling me you really don’t know?”
“That cats can talk?”
“Well, yeah.”
I shook my head. “Can they talk to everyone? Is that cat a special talking cat?”
Beth shook her head. “Sorry, no, it’s my powers. I can talk to cats, well animals in general, and they can talk to humans when I’m in the immediate vicinity. It’s my special witch Zoolingualism.”
It was like something in my brain burnt out, leaving nothing but smoke behind.
“I turned my ex-husband and his little bitch into toads,” I whispered.
Beth’s jaw dropped. “How in the world did you do that?”
I had no idea. “I think, if I’m not totally nuts and all this stuff really happened, I did it because I saved a little old lady from being hit by a car.”
Recognition dawned over her face. “Oh. Okay. Has stuff like what just happened been happening?”
My brain was still blinking like an empty word document waiting for someone to fill it, but that didn’t stop my mouth from working without my consent. “Someone cut me off in traffic and all their tires simultaneously and suddenly popped.”
Beth nodded sagely. “Yep. Hang on.”
She jumped up and hurried through the office into a back room, but returned quickly with a book in hand. She began scanning the text, occasionally licking her finger so she could move through the book faster, until she found the page she was looking for. “Here. I thought so. Wow. This is amazing. It’s so rare.”
She turned the book toward me and there was a picture of the old woman drawn on the page. Not just any old woman. The exact old woman I’d seen. A chill rippled down my spine. “That’s her,” I whispered. “The woman I saved from the car.”
Beth looked at me, her blue eyes wide and sparking with amazement. “You’ve become karma.”
