Page 1 of Soothsayer

Chapter One

Sleep was an insidious thing, in my opinion. It was bad enough that the body required you to shut down—forcedyou to drop your defenses and make yourself vulnerable to any old person who happened by. To compound that insult by giving your subconscious free reign, letting it sort through its damage and parade all your internal conflicts, shameful desires, and unacknowledged fetishes through your head while you’re too out of it to resist…that was just goddamn sadistic. Whatever made us, whether it was the slow crawl of evolution or some bored intergalactic deity looking for laughs, it didn’t have a concept of mercy. When your own mind was made to turn on you while you were at your worst, you couldn’t deny the heartless humor of it.

Not that I had personal experience with that particular cosmic joke, but the things that filled my head when I slept were more than awful enough to make up for missing out on standing in front of a class of my peers butt naked or having fumbling, awkward sex dreams that left my sheets glued to my crotch.Instead of providing a distorted window into my own mind, I dreamed about the things I’d seen in other people’s heads. Not just their wants and desires?although those were bad enough?but their endings: how they were going to die, or worse yet, the things they were going to do on the way to that final end. I saw different things in everyone, but the one common denominator with my visions was that whatever I saw, it was true, and most times the truth wasn’t going to be what you hoped it was.

Those visions stuck with me and replayed in my mind night after awful night, unless I was smart enough to drink my mind blank before they could take hold. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option while I was staying with Marisol—she didn’t approve of alcohol and wouldn’t let me bring any into her house. I wasn’t about to risk staying in a hotel with no protections on it, so that meant I obeyed her rules. I slept on my belly with my hands gripping the pillow so tight they were curled into claws when I woke up, mouth sour with despair and eyes gritty with other people’s tears every morning.

This morning was particularly nasty, because the first thing I smelled as I blinked my way out of someone else’s oblivion was the heavy, smoky scent of sage and patchouli, underscored by the drifting funk of pot from the dispensary next door. The pot smell was the new norm since the laws had changed in Denver, but Marisol’s continual attempts to conceal it were a new and ever-changing torment. I groaned and pushed my face farther into the pillow. Maybe I could doze through the worst of it.

“Cillian!”

No such luck.

“Cillian Kelly! Get down here before your breakfast gets cold.”

Oh god, she’d cooked. There was no escaping her now. Marisol was accepting of a lot of things, but being late for a meal wasn’t one of them.

I pushed myself out of bed and staggered into the small attached bathroom, did my business, and tried not to mind the way the grinning Buddha print on the wall always seemed to stare at me. Who put a Buddha in a bathroom; that was what I wanted to know?but Marisol wouldn’t let me take him down. Every room in her house contained an “avatar” as she put it, and they were linked to her protection spells for the house as a whole. Those protection spells were part of the reason I stayed with Marisol to begin with, so if that meant Buddha got to watch me brush my teeth, well, I hoped the guy liked Colgate.

I pulled on a pair of sweatpants, exchanged my sweat drenched T-shirt for a clean one Marisol had given me that read “Namaste, bitches,” and headed downstairs. The tiny hall at the bottom landing had a door to the shop at the end, a sitting room on the right, and the kitchen on the left. I walked into the kitchen and collapsed into a chair.

“Coffee,” I begged. “Tea, bleach, anything to get rid of that awful smell.”

Marisol frowned at me from her spot by the window, where she was brandishing a smudge stick at the shop next door. “You think it needs some lavender?” she asked. “I thought the sage would do the trick, but maybe if I mix in something sweeter…”

“God, no,” I blurted. “Nothing floral, nothing sweet, and absolutely nothing that smells like food. I’ll never eat again.”

“It’s not that bad,” she scoffed, finally putting down the stick and opening up her oven. The aroma of fresh pancakes drifted out, and thankfully my hunger overrode my sense of disgust at the conglomeration of scents in the room. “Whole grain,” she said as she set a loaded plate down in front of me. “With some flax seed and a little bit of—”

“You can stop right there,” I told her, grabbing for the maple syrup that was already on the table. “Don’t ruin this for me with healthiness.”

Marisol rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t be such a baby.” She added boiling milk into the two cups of coffee she’d poured, spooned sugar into both of them, and then sat down and pushed one over to me. “Eat fast. We need to get your spread done before I open the doors. You slept late,cielito.”

I glanced at the clock. It was almost nine, which was very late for me. “Weird,” I said before taking a bite. They might be whole grain, flaxy, and, hell, vegan for all I knew, but Marisol still managed to make them delicious, light, and soft with just a hint of sweetness.

“Mmph,” I groaned around my bite.

Marisol smiled. “Even my Tavo liked these pancakes. You’re a lot like him, you know.”

Yeah, I knew. Half the reason Marisol was letting me stay with her was because I reminded her of her estranged son, Gustavo, whom she hadn’t seen since he left for college ten years ago. The other half was because she was best friends with my mother, and hosting someone else’s kid was the sort of thing best friends did for each other. She and my mother had met when they were both young, Mom on the run with me and Marisol on a break between trips to India.

How they had become friends I didn’t really know. They were as different as shadow and light: my mother small, thin, and worn with the weight of her ability and the burden of caring for me; Marisol curvy and robust, of Puerto-Rican descent, and unhindered by the expectations of others. She had been careless and carefree, always laughing, dancing, and gently mocking. She had been an archetype, a goddess, and the world had been a jewel that was rightfully hers to wear.

The years had changed Marisol in all the expected ways, and some unexpected ones. She’d kept the curves and the dark curling hair, but she laughed less these days. Tavo’s estrangement had been a blow to her, and it had taken along time for her spirit to recover. Helping me was somewhere between a privilege and a penance for her, but she was kind to me and understood my situation in a way unique to those who had a similar gift. Hers was nowhere near as strong as mine, but she was getting better with practice, and I gave her plenty of that.

I also brought her a lot of business, but that was strictly under the table. Marisol ran a metaphysical supply shop on East Colfax in Denver, which meant the store that made up the front half of her building was full of incense, CDs of Gregorian chanting, lots of the little god statues that she favored, and more esoteric books and sigils and charms than you could shake a stick at. It was a custom blend of Buddhism, Eastern mythology, Catholicism, and bullshit, and Marisol ran it all with a smile on her face. That there was some truth to it didn’t mean I had to appreciate it, though.

Marisol pushed a strand of silky hair out of her face and grabbed her worn tarot deck, turning it from edge to edge before putting it down again. She tapped the top card with her fingers a few times, a one-two-threelentandotempo, and then switched it up, moving her fingers faster,precipitando, like the beat of an overworked heart.

“You’re fidgety today,” I said after I swallowed. “What’s up?”

“Strange dreams,” she replied a little absently. “At the time they felt like a premonition, but I don’t remember them well. And that pollution from next door isn’t making it any easier to concentrate,” she added darkly.

“What kind of premonition?” I asked. Marisol’s ability with telling the future was like most gifted people’s: inconstant, uncertain, and loaded with so much metaphor you barely knew what to make of it. That didn’t make the things she saw false, just unreliable.

“Something about you,” she said. “Bad enough that it woke me out of a sound sleep. Could be nothing worse than a richpendejocoming in to get stock picks from you today, or it could be something else.”

Lots of things could fall under the category of “something else.” I’d only stayed with Marisol twice before, but she’d seen the bad results of one reading I’d done. It turned out the shrinks were right: serial killers wanted their skills to be acknowledged. I’d been a test for that man, and I hadn’t been savvy enough back then to keep the truth off of my face. I’d spoken lies to him, told him he was going to die an old man surrounded by his loving family—complete crap, and he’d known it. He’d left with a polite thanks and a grim, pleased determination in his mind to make me his next victim.

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