Luis felt a deep resonance at the words. What she said was something he might say to someone else. But there was something wrong about those words being spoken to him, something somehow backward. The cotton in his head kept him from fully connecting to why that was, and he fell asleep trying to figure it out.
Claudia felt restless and her mind kept churning over recent events. To give her hands something to do, she fetched the Tarot deck in the wooden box, along with the paperback she had bought that explained the Elder Races Tarot. She flipped through the paperback desultorily, but she had already read about the Major and Minor Arcana, and at the moment she wasn’t really interested in reading the rest.
Instead, she opened the antique, painted box and pulled out the hand painted deck. As she did so, she thought back to the strange way she had acquired it.
A couple months ago in January, while she was wintering in New York, a slender woman had stopped her in the street. The city was still recovering from a major blizzard in late December. The streets were heaped with great mounds of dirty snow, and leftover Christmas and Masque decorations dotted shop windows.
She and the woman had been walking past each other, just two bundled-up pedestrians among hundreds of thousands in the frigid, snowbound city, when the woman turned suddenly and took hold of Claudia’s arm.
She didn’t think the other woman realized how dangerous that was. Claudia spun but managed to check her instinct for violence. She got an impression of dark, gold-tipped corkscrew curls, a warm, brown complexion in a thin, intelligent face, and hazel eyes behind wire-rim glasses that widened at her fast reaction.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “You’re probably going to think I’m crazy, but…” Claudia tensed as the woman reached in her dark leather purse, but all she pulled out was the Tarot box. She thrust it into Claudia’s hands. “These want to come to you. I don’t understand why. I’ve had them for years.”
“What are you talking about?” Claudia asked. She turned the box over in her hands, opened it up and saw the deck inside.
“The cards,” the woman said. She gave Claudia a smile that seemed embarrassed. “They’re opinionated.”
“Are you telling me these are magic?” Claudia asked. If they were, she couldn’t sense it. Torn between fascination and caution, she nearly shoved the deck back into the strange woman’s hands and walked away.
“Not really,” said the woman. “They have a spark of Power but they’re not spelled, and they’re not harmful.”
Claudia raised her eyebrows. “How did you know they wanted to come to me?”
“They pulled toward you. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
“And just what exactly do you think I’m supposed to do about it?”
“I don’t know. Whatever you would normally choose to do.” The woman started walking backwards, talking as she went. “I’m sorry to shove them at you and run, but I’m late to meet my fiancé. I guess if you need money, they should be worth a fair amount if you take them to the Magic District. I paid several thousand dollars for that deck over ten years ago… Oh, I really have to go—good luck to you.”
Disturbed and intrigued, Claudia had gone to the Magic District to get the box and its contents appraised. Two different magic users confirmed what the woman had said, that while the antique deck had a spark of Power, it wasn’t dangerous. It was also quite valuable and would be worth between eight and ten thousand dollars at auction. The third person told her the deck was dangerous and offered to take it off her hands for fifty bucks. Yeah right.
She decided to keep the deck. Despite its value, its previous owner had been willing to give it to a total stranger in order to honor the Power that was soaked into the cards. She supposed she could hang on to it for a while to see what happened. She could always sell it later.
Since then she had fallen into the habit of playing with the deck whenever she was idle. Shuffling and reshuffling the cards gave her hands something to do while she thought. Once or twice she had tried setting out one of the card spreads from the paperback, but she didn’t have the learning or aptitude for reading a card spread.