Page 12 of Soothsayer

I swallowed. “I don’t know.” Except there was something at the back of my mind, niggling at me. “Turn the last one over.”

She did. “The Hanged Man, reversed. Again.” We all stared down at the card. “Cillian, think, something important must be happening today. Is it related to the man you met yesterday, the cowboy?”

“No,” I said slowly. “I don’t think so. He was part of it, but…” What was it that had spurred my awful night? “Oh, shit.” I pawed at my pocket for my phone, pulling up the article on it as fast as I could get the damn thing to turn on. I found the picture I needed, zoomed in as best I could, and stared at it.

I could be mistaken. It had been two years?that was a long time to still be able to recognize someone, especially since he’d only been twenty when I met him. You still changed a lot at that age. Of course, he’d been taller than me already and broader through the shoulders thanks to his Nordic heritage, so how much bigger could I expect him to get? But the curve of his chin, the way his naturally blond hair seemed to reach skyward, the way his hand lay on the side of the gun…it looked like him.

I pulled back and scanned the article for a name that might confirm it, the name I’d missed the night before. A businessman who’d angered the government of Iceland by moving a portion of his ancestral homeland—emphasis on theland, I had no idea how he’d done it—to America, where it was sitting in a warehouse outside Chicago. Possible ties to the Bróðurlega, the Icelandic mafia. Shit, who even knew they had a mafia? Name, name?there. Ólafur Egilsson.

It was him, then.Fuckmy life. It felt like the floor had just vanished and I was freefalling straight into Hell. “It’s…well.” I swallowed hard. “I think I’m looking at a dead man.”

Chapter Seven

Neither of my companions were the sort of people to look dumbfounded after hearing something that should be impossible. They’d each seen too much. If I’d been hoping for a moment of shocked awe, maybe a frisson of fear or two, I’d have been sorely disappointed. As it was, I got ruthless practicality, which was exactly what I needed in the moment. I was already freaking myself out. I didn’t need to deal with their panic too.

“What are you talking about?” Marisol snatched the phone from me and looked at the picture. “What do you mean? Who’s Ólafur Egilsson, and why would he be dead?”

“No, he’s not in the picture. They’re talking about the shipment belonging to him.” I forced myself to speak, to explain. There was a part of me—a big, big part of me, huge really—that wanted to backtrack, to say I’d been mistaken and not go down this road.

I hadn’t willingly talked to anyone about this before, ever. The only person who knew about it was my mother. Of all the thingswe never discussed, this little period in my life was at the very top: more than when I was drugged out of my mind, more than the second time I’d been kidnapped, more than anything. Just thinking of speaking to her about it infuriated me, and she knew that. Not fair to her, maybe, but I was no prince. I didn’t have to be fair to my own mother, not with everything we’d been through.

Marisol, though?maybe?I could tell the story to. Some of it, at least. And Phin because he was here, and because he reached across the table to press the back of his hand briefly to my forehead, his extensive forehead wrinkling with concern.

“No fever,” he muttered. “Did you take your pills this morning?”

I glared at him. “Yes, thanks,Dad. I’m not sick, I’m not high, I’m completelycompos mentis.”

“Well, who’s the one who should be dead?” Marisol looked from the phone to me. “And why?”

“The blond guy on the right. His name is Sören, and he…”Is the son of.“Works for Egilsson.” They didn’t need to knowallthe sordid details. “Remember when I dropped off the grid a few years ago?”

“Of course,” Marisol said immediately. “You didn’t answer your phone for almost a month! I was worried sick about you, but your mama told me not to fuss, that you’d be back soon. And then you were, and you seemed fine and you never said anything. Until now.” Her dark eyes glistened with concern. “What happened,cielito?”

“Well.” Now that it came to it, the words stuck in my throat. I couldn’t tell them everything, I just couldn’t?it was too hard. I could talk about being abducted as a child, I could talk about wasting away for months in shackles in a backwater Louisiana shed, but I couldn’t talk about everything that had happened with that fucked-up family. Everything I had done. Maybe if Ifelt less, I could have. “I?” I took a deep breath and exhaled it explosively.

“I got grabbed in Vegas.” And I should have known better. I should never have gone back to Las Vegas, not after all the trouble it had caused me. I’d been an idiot. “I was knocked out, transported across the country, and when I woke up, I was in a hotel room.” A really nice hotel room, actually. “Ólafur Egilsson was there, and he had some work for me to do.”

“What kind of work?”

“He wanted me to help him break a geas.”

Phin nodded his head slowly. “An old-country curse.”

“Very old-country.” I smiled in an effort to keep my mouth from blurting things it shouldn’t. “He said it had been laid on his ancestor by a god.”

“A Norse god?”

“Yeah.”

Phin sighed. “I can probably guess which one.”

“Well, I can’t,” Marisol interjected. “What are you talking about?”

“A geas, Mari. It’s a magical compulsion. It’s a way of keeping someone you don’t trust loyal, or punishing someone who’s wronged you.” Phin crossed his arms, his fingers tightening on his biceps. “They were simple enough for a practitioner to lay on someone else, but to manage one that followed an entire line…that’s uncommon. That would take some real power. Possibly godly power, and there aren’t many Norse gods who worked magic.”

“Anyway,” I continued before Marisol could ask anything else, “apparently he’d heard about me back during my stupid phase, and when the geas got bad enough, he paid someone I knew to help him find me.” If Ricky hadn’t already been dead, I would have gone back and murdered him myself after I’d gotten free. He was the guy who’d made me swear off semi-regular lovers.

“What exactly did he want you to do?”

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