3. Chapter Three

Chapter Three

T he alley behind the store was just wide enough for a decent-sized truck to drive down its cracked concrete. It was tufted here and there with surprisingly green weeds—it had been a wet summer so far. I leaned against the brick wall, tapped a cigarette out of the pack, and pulled my lighter out of my pocket. The burn of the smoke in my lungs soothed me a little, distracting my mind with nicotine and giving my hands something to do that wasn’t crawling after fistfuls of imaginary coins.

I smiled to myself and shut my eyes, tilted my head back and blew the smoke toward the sky. It could have been worse. Once I’d read a murderer who liked to decapitate his victims with a butcher knife. I hadn’t trusted myself in the kitchen for a fucking week after that―cutlery kept finding its way into my hands without me realizing it.

Sometimes I had to remind myself that it wasn’t me who was ruining these people’s lives. They had managed that all on their own. I was just the one bringing it home, and even that wasn’t really on me. I didn’t seek people out. They came to me, and I told them what I saw, and what they decided to do with it was their own business. How they reacted was out of my control.

Charles Donovan Klinger would be dead before the month was out. I saw how he did it—I saw his wife’s pill bottle and his last fifth of Crown Royal, something he couldn’t drink without thinking about his business partner. I hadn’t seen this stuff the first time around, but looking deeper meant more knowledge for the both of us, all details that neither of us wanted to know.

“Fucking prick.” I opened my eyes and looked up at the clear blue sky. Colorado had ridiculously blue skies, even through the smog of downtown Denver. They were the sort of blue that made you wish you could fall up and keep going, because it looked so much nicer up there than down here. I had drowned in a woman’s mind once, and in the end, everything had been blue, a dark, malevolent blue that eventually faded to black. Nothing like the sky.

God damn it. I banged my head hard against the brick and then immediately thought better of it—I was still wearing my hat. I took it off and checked it for damage, resolutely not thinking about drowning. Drowning always made me think about him , and I wasn’t going to do that today; I fucking wasn’t. I propped the fedora up on my fist and turned it in a circle, making sure it was still hat-shaped and didn’t appear like a moron had been smacking it into a brick wall. It had held up to my inadvertent punishment, thankfully.

I needed to get out of here for a while. Marisol wouldn’t wonder if I didn’t come back for a couple of hours, or even the rest of the day. As far as the Ace of Cups and its promise for a new beginning went, well, it could hunt me down. I wasn’t going to wait around for it. I took a final drag of my cigarette, ground it down in the empty flower pot Marisol had set out here for me—she didn’t approve of littering—and headed toward the end of the alley. It emptied out onto Josephine, a busy one-way street that was all businesses where it buttressed Colfax but became formerly elegant houses and apartments farther back. If I went left, I’d hit a park eventually. Right and I’d be headed toward the shabby-chic conundrum that was this part of town.

My phone buzzed, interrupting my musing. I frowned as I pulled it out of my jacket pocket. Only a dozen people had this number, and I wasn’t expecting to talk to any of them any time soon. I unlocked it and looked at my new message.

Move ten paces to the right.

My feet were moving even before my brain caught up, obedience was so instinctual. Two seconds later, I was out of the mouth of the alley, and three seconds after that, a beat-up silver sedan coming down the road was clipped by a delivery van and veered straight into the corner of the building. It wasn’t moving fast, thankfully, but the crash was plenty loud, especially since I was just a few feet away from the point of impact.

A memory flashed through my mind, one of my personal rare and painful gems. I was in the backseat of an old Lincoln, and I was very small. My feet wouldn’t have touched the floor even if I hadn’t had my knees squished to my chest, and my face was pressed to the knobby joints so hard they were leaving red blotches on my cheeks. The man driving was on a phone—an old-school dumb phone, clunky in his hand, distracting. He wasn’t paying attention, but I knew the moment before the car was hit and covered my head with my hands, so when I went flying into the door, it didn’t hurt as much. Metal crunched, and bright spots flashed across the darkness behind my eyelids as the car spun and spun…

I shook my head and took a deep breath, focusing on the present. The van hadn’t stopped, but I didn’t bother trying to catch its license plate number―there were plenty of people exclaiming and getting on their phones. I headed over to the driver’s side and opened the door, but didn’t reach in to touch the woman who had been driving. She was moving under her own power, picking her head up off the remains of her airbag and whimpering softly. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…”

“It’s all right,” I said gently. I might not be a martyr, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel compassion for another person, especially one who’d just been thrown into a wall. “You’re okay. Just a little accident. There’s an ambulance coming to help you.” I could already hear it in the distance. We were only a few blocks from a major hospital. “Can you look at me for a moment?” She blearily turned, and as soon as our eyes met, I sighed and backed out of the way. One of the employees at the auto-painting store took my place, and a second later—bam. The fucking Ace of Cups moment. Who found true love as a result of a car accident? This wasn’t exactly the heartwarming scene I’d envisioned getting me through the day earlier.

“Are you all right?” the newcomer asked frantically. “What’s your name? I’m Felix. I’m gonna stay with you until the ambulance gets here, okay? Oh Jesus, are you all right?”

“I’m…I think so?” the woman said, her voice gaining a little bit of strength. “I’m Paula.”

“Paula, hey.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back. I rolled my eyes. “Nice to meet you.”

For fuck’s sake. Well, at least the settlement from the trucking company would give them a nice nest egg to get their new place together. I turned away and walked to the end of the block before getting out my phone again and making a call.

She picked up on the second ring. “Hi, baby.”

“What, you can see me getting smeared across a wall, but you don’t bother to let me know about having a gun pulled on me?”

“Cillian.” My mother sounded half apologetic, half resigned. “You know it doesn’t work like that.”

Yes, fine, I did know that, but I didn’t feel like being reasonable right now. “So you didn’t see that this morning, then?”

“Did you need me to see it?”

I wasn’t about to go down the self-sufficiency road with her. It meant a surefire argument, and I was still buzzing with adrenalin from being so close to the car crash.

“No,” I said flatly. “I guess not.”

“Cilly…”

Fuck, I was being an asshole. I didn’t talk to my mother very often, and I didn’t want to turn this into a thing . She didn’t hold grudges, but I did, and if I didn’t get myself together now, I’d end up not calling her for months out of guilt for being a dick to her. Vicious cycle.

“I thought you didn’t like to text.”

“The timing worked out better that way,” she said, sounding a bit more relaxed. “You’re all right, then?”

“You know I am,” I replied, pulling out another cigarette and lighting up on the corner. “Thanks for that.”

“You’re welcome, baby.” She sounded genuinely pleased, and I started to respond, but waited for the wail of the oncoming ambulance to diminish first.

“How are you?” I asked once we could hear each other again. It sounded like a banal question, but it was anything but. If my mother was seeing things about me, then she was opening herself up more to other psychic influences. Depending on how those manifested, she might lose consciousness for days. I knew the neighbors would check on her―it wasn’t like she would die up there all alone―but I couldn’t help worrying. I would have given almost anything to be the one she could rely on, but she and I hadn’t been able to live in close quarters since I was thirteen. I might damage her if I stayed too close.

“Fine, baby, I’m just fine. Dana’s dog just had puppies, and she offered one to me when it’s old enough. I think I’ll take her up on it.”

“Good.” That was really good, actually. My mom did a lot better with a pet around, but she’d been heartbroken when her last dog had died and put off getting another for two years. There had been a few close calls since then, so a new puppy was a positive step. “That’s great.”

“I thought it was time,” she said. “It’s been a little lonely, and I don’t want to go into another winter without a companion.” I wished, not for the first time, that that companion could be me. It hurt to know that my mom felt like she had to be alone in order to be safe. Just because I wasn’t safe with her didn’t mean no one else could fill that void.

“Sounds like the puppy will be perfect,” I said, staring out at the passing cars but not seeing any of them. “So no headache, then?”

“Not this time. Random events seem to affect me less strongly.”

“Good.” The silence stretched out between us, and I thought about the last time I’d seen my mother in person, almost half my lifetime ago. I wondered if she was sitting on the same old couch by the window or if she’d finally gotten it replaced—the springs had been going back when I’d lived with her. I wondered if she was wearing warm enough clothes, because she tended to ignore the weather until it prevented her from going outside, and summer in Yellowknife was different from summer in Denver. I wondered if she missed me, and then felt like an idiot.

“I looked up your interview online. It seems like it was fun.”

“Oh.” Right, the interview. Through the complicated web of favors and reputation that my mother somehow maintained, she had gotten me in touch with a friend of hers whose daughter’s fiancé, a freelance journalist, was writing an article about psychics and wanted someone to talk to about it. I’d been volunteered and caved to my mom after a few minutes of arguing over exposure.

I eventually talked to the guy on Zoom, using a fake name and not giving him a visual, and the interview had been…surprisingly fun. Kind of tongue in cheek, really. He was more journalist than hardcore believer in supernatural phenomenon, but I guess when the economy was down you took work where you could get it, even if it was with Modern Parapsychia . “It was all right.”

“You should take a look at it.”

“I will.” My skin was starting to itch, just a little bit, and I knew it had to be worse for her. The longer we talked, the higher the chances of an incident happening. “Mom, I’ve got to go.”

“I know, baby.” She was quiet for a moment and then said, “I love you, Cillian. I just want you to be happy.”

“I know.” I wanted to ask her to call me again when she got the puppy, to let me know when the snow hit, to tell her about Marisol and her tarot and her strange dreams. Instead I hung up. The prickle immediately went away, and I scowled.

Fuck this for a lark. The day was hardly begun and I already needed to forget it.

I was in the right part of town for that.