Page 78 of A City of Smoke and Demons
She sobered instantly.
‘This is hard, sitting here like this and not touching you. I really want to touch you.’
‘Sometimes, I want you to touch me, and sometimes I can’t stand the thought of it—but I also can’t stand the thought of you touching someone else.’ Analise dropped her eyes back to her bowl, picking up her spoon and poking at the remains of her porridge. ‘The truth is, I’m scared.’
‘I’m scared as well,’ he admitted, making her glance at him in surprise. ‘I’m scared because I’m exceptionally skilled at fucking things up, and I don’t want to fuck this, whatever it is, up.’
She was silent for a moment. ‘The mark on your shoulder—you truly don’t remember meeting the Devil somewhere?’
‘No. But’—Ezra shook his head—‘I must have, mustn’t I?’
Analise sat back and tapped her fingers on the edge of her cup, her expression thoughtful. ‘What if someone could help you?’
‘Like who?’
‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe Charles has got some ideas—a potion or something.’
Ezra laughed. ‘I am not eating or drinking anything that comes out of that lab.’
‘Talk to Jem, Ezra.’
The seer was younger than Ezra expected. As soon as Jem told him about her, Ezra conjured an image in his mind of a wizened old woman, hair the colour of snow and lines like trenches on her skin. But the woman who walked into the dark and empty front bar to meet him after midnight was fresh-faced, not much older than him.
Her name was Sybil, and according to Jem, she could pull the past from someone’s head.
Sybil swept into the room in a flurry of dark skirts and jewellery, her strawberry-blonde hair bundled artfully on top of her head. People must either pay well for her services, Ezra thought, watching her approach him, or she’d been born into the wealth she clearly displayed.
She didn’t speak, striding over to the table and arranging herself on the chair opposite him. He could smell her perfume and the pearls that dripped from her ears shimmered in the lamp light.
He didn’t know much about seers and their magic. People spoke about how seers, like mystics, read tea-leaves or palms, used crystal balls or interpreted what they saw in flames or water. Some used the tarot. But Sybil carried nothing with her—no cards, no cup or tea pot, no bag containing a crystal ball or other paraphernalia. She didn’t ask to inspect his palm, either. She didn’t say a word.
Ezra cleared his throat; sharp blue eyes met his. He opened his mouth, but she held up a delicate hand. Her palm was tattooed with a decorative eye.
‘Don’t speak,’ she commanded, her voice low and husky. ‘I cannot know anything about you or what you seek to know.’
‘Then how can you help?’ Ezra challenged.
Her lips twitched. ‘You don’t believe in my gifts. That’s fine. You will,’ she added with such certainty a shiver ran down his spine. ‘It is not your future I will be showing you, but the moment that began to shape it.’
She laid her hands on the table between them, tattooed palms up, and Ezra understood he was to place his hands in hers. All he wanted when he fled the Gendarme was to be able to disappear into the crowd, to get lost in the sea of humanity that flowed through the city. But it’s impossible for a hunted man tonot leave a footprint. He’d been lucky, so far, that they hadn’t found him. The moment he left the Gendarme was the moment all the opportunities of his life became lost to him, replaced with the smoky oblivion of opium and the crunching of knuckles against flesh.
Is that where he was going, Ezra wondered? Into those moments lost to his memory?
‘Are you ready?’ Sybil asked.
Ezra took a deep breath, and lay his hands over hers. He wasn’t sure she was going to be able to do anything to help him. Most seers were charlatans, their visions vague and designed to be twisted to fit any individual and any situation.
Sybil closed her eyes and then, Ezra could feel her inside his head, sliding through his mind like water. He instinctively tried to pull his hands away at the intrusion, but she closed her fingers around his.
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t fight me. Let me show you the thing you don’t want to see.’
Ezra swallowed. His heartbeat slowed, his stomach rolled, and a chill washed through him.
‘Relax,’ Sybil whispered. ‘Remember.’
The past tumbled back on itself.
Opium brought oblivion. It was grey, its edges tinged with red. Purgatory, Ezra decided. This must be purgatory. He was conscious, but not, completely untethered. It was wonderful.
