Audition - Skye Warren, Amelia Wilde Page 0,34
form the word and settle back into a placid expression.
Josh hovers a hand over the deck. I read his palm once. Now I read the rough skin on the backs of his knuckles. The scar where his index finger meets his hand, so faded it’s almost invisible. Guys like that—they always self-destruct. I wonder how quickly it can happen. Josh’s hesitation is the barest moment, and then his finger comes down on a card. He tugs it out from the line. Mamere darts out a hand and turns it faceup.
We all stare down at it.
“Your granddaughter read my palm,” Josh says into the silence, sounding almost cocky. “Does this card say the same thing?” The question is half addressed to me, half addressed to no one.
But I don’t say a word. The backs of my hands tingle with a strange energy.
Mamere frowns at the card. The illustration is of a tower standing tall against a black, starless sky. A yellow bolt of lightning crashes into the top of the structure, sparks flying away from the point of impact. The Tower means danger. It means upheaval. It means destruction. My heart beats faster than the lightning strike depicted on the card, hitting its mark again and again in rapid succession. Mamere shifts in her seat. The doctors have said her vision is as good as gone, but she meets Josh’s eyes anyway. “You’ve been living in this space a long time, haven’t you?” She raps a knuckle on the center of the card. “Very much alone.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dancer Raven Wilkinson was one of the first African American ballerinas permitted to join a ballet company. During the 1950s, she danced with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo under the condition that she pose as a white woman by painting her face.
Josh, present time
“No, no, no, Mamere. Let me make the tea.” Bethany disengages the older woman’s hand from the worn handle of the teapot with extreme gentleness and a laugh in her voice. “I came to visit you. I’ll make the tea.” In her grandmother’s kitchen the rusty edge of her voice falls away. Afternoon sunlight spills over tea towels embroidered with the outline of a crystal ball. I can still smell the spices of dinners past. On any other day, it would make me want to take a seat at the table and eat until I was sated. I can’t remember the last time I felt satisfied like that. Maybe never.
But today I want to get the hell out of here. That old woman’s knuckle on the tarot card stopped my heart between beats. I’m not the kind of man who holds with cards and crystal balls, but she didn’t need to tell me what that tower means. I felt the cold whisper at the pit of my gut. Same as when our dear old dad used to come home. You develop superhuman hearing when you live with a monster. A quarter-turn of the front doorknob was all it ever took to fill my veins with ice. One knock against that card, splayed on the table, had my defenses up. Bethany saw it—I know she did. Her eyebrows drew together. Her hand twitched as if to take mine. Unbelievable, that she would try to hold my hand when the truth was so evident, spoken aloud by Mamere.
Very much alone. Very much alone, crouched in the corner of my own closet. I give Liam shit about the baby bird. I use it as my own shield between me and what happened all those years ago. What’s still happening inside my head. It didn’t surprise me when Bethany’s grandmother named her dreams. Bethany is an open book, with all her defiance and sadness and fight right there under the surface. But when she flipped that tower card to the table—Jesus. Gives me chills. And the only thing I hate more than being at the mercy of some old woman with a deck of cards is being at the mercy of surprises.
But leaning against the doorway in the kitchen, watching Bethany, I can’t tear myself away.
I’ve never seen her in precisely this situation before. Her dark eyes are open, relaxed. She knows this choreography. It’s worn into her very bones by years and years of focused practice. The set pieces, I can tell at a glance, always remain in the same position. It was like this when I’d come throw pebbles at the window. Mamere must have been losing her vision even then. Keeping the