“You don’t wish to share with me?” she asked, trying to keep the pain from her voice.
He set the deck in front of her. “Not this time, love, if that’s all right.”
“If it’s what you wish.”
She broke the deck three times, so it sat in three piles before her. With a three-card spread, the first card would represent the past, the middle card the present, and the final card the future.
Mom took a card from the first deck, and laid it in front of Gideon. It depicted a full moon in a dark purple sky, shining above a few trees. Hidden in the very bottom corner of the card was a white wolf, right above the name of the card—The Moon.
The second card my mom flipped over was upside down, so it faced her, which meant it was in the reverse position. It showed a man draped in robes of gold and purple, holding a ball of lightning above his head—The Magician.
The final card she turned over, she saw it before Gideon did, and I heard her breath catch in her throat. It showed a skeleton in a black robe riding a white horse over a graveyard—Death.
Mom folded her hands before her, staring down at the cards. “Do you know what the cards mean, or shall I do the reading?”
“Do your reading.” Gideon leaned back in his chair. “I want to know what you’re sensing.”
“I’m not sensing as much as I’d like, but I’ll do my best.” Mom tapped the first card with her long fingers. “The Moon in your past represents a confusing, dark time. You may not have always understood your actions, and the world may have put a heavy burden on your shoulders.
“On its own, it means nothing negative,” she continued, moving her fingers to the next card. “But when paired with the Magician, it means that someone or something destructive is manipulating your choices, and you may pay a price.”
Her shawl had slipped off her shoulder, revealing the large sun she had tattooed on her dark skin.
“The Magician is a man of great power and talent, with the ability to cross between the spirit world and the world of humanity, but in reverse, it represents a blockage of that path,” Mom went on. “And if the Magician is not careful, he can lose everything that matters to him.
“Death, as you know, does not usually mean death,” she said, but she didn’t touch this card. She’d tapped the first two, but this time, instead, she pulled her shawl up around her again. “It simply means that something is coming to an end. It can be a positive, that the darkness and financial loss that have plagued us these last few months might be lifted.”
Gideon stared thoughtfully at the cards for a moment, then asked, “Do you get any other senses about what it all means?”
“It’s not clear, Gideon. There’s something … here.” She gestured widely around us, referring to Caudry as a whole. “I think that’s why my headache was so bad before I’d hardly even done any readings. There’s another energy fogging everything up.”
“So you can’t get a good sense of things?” he asked.
She shook her head grimly. “No. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s all right, love,” he brushed it off, and continued staring down at the cards.
“Do you feel it too?” I asked.
“What?” He looked up at me, as if he’d forgotten I was there.
“Mom said she’s feeling foggy. What about you?” I asked.
He leaned back in his seat again. “I’m definitely getting a weird energy here, but I’m not sure if ‘foggy’ is how I’d describe it.”
“Then how would you?” I pressed.
“Do you know what a divining rod is?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“My grandfather used to use one,” Gideon explained. “He swore by it, though he swore by a lot of things I’m not so sure of. He would use a stick branched out in the shape of a Y, and that would be the divining rod.
“Then he’d grab on to each end of the Y and walk into fields,” he continued. “The idea is that the rod would be able to sense water or metal or oil or whatever other worthy substance it was searching for.”
“Did it?” I asked.
Gideon nodded. “Sometimes, yeah, he did discover something of value. And sometimes it works like that for me.”
“What does?”
“It’s how I was able to find Lyanka.” He pointed to my mom, a small smile playing on his lips. “And all the other special people in the sideshow. I’d get a sense about them. Just something inside, and I knew that they were like me. Like us. So I’d ask them to join.”
I crinkled my forehead. “So you’re, like, a supernatural divining rod?”
“Something like that,” he said, then wagged his fingers in the air. “Except now, I seem to be getting false positives everywhere.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked. “Maybe everyone here is secretly supernatural.”