Page 24 of Soothsayer

“Cillian…”

“I’m fine. We made it out okay, but the situation now is kind of hard to explain. I need some help.”

“What kind of help?”

She sounded suspicious. I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t ask for help very often, and I wasn’t gracious about it even when it was unavoidable. Andre could attest to that. Still, I didn’t have a choice.

“I need a drop bag, preferably somewhere close to…” I racked my brain for the name of the town behind me. “Bloomington? Or Normal? Or both? Somewhere in the middle of fucking Illinois.”

“You can’t just go buy new bullets like a normal person?”

“Not if my picture is possibly being circulated to cops.”

She sighed. “I’ll talk to Phin about it. You know he’s going to make me cook him corned beef and cabbage for this. I’ll never get the smell out of my curtains.”

“You two got domestic fast.”

“Well, when your only other option for meaningful human contact is an angry young man who steals your Buddhas, you learn to get by with who you’ve got.”

“Oh, right.” I’d almost forgotten the little bronze Buddha figurine I’d taken from her spare room. “Sorry about that. I should have asked.”

“They’re not just there to be decorative, Cillian, they’re protective as well. Now I have to pay Lourdes to come back and renew the spell on that room, and that’s not cheap.”

Yeah, Lourdes was good, but she didn’t do discounts. “I’ll pay you back.”

“At this rate, you’re going to owe more than you can offer,” Marisol groused. I grinned despite my discomfort.

“No one can offer as much as me.”

“Says the boy who needs my booty call to arrange a drop bag for him.”

I pinched my eyes shut. “Could you refer to him some other way, please? I don’t want to think about the two of you getting it on.”

“Prude,cielito, such a prude. Anything else?”

“Yeah, do you know if Bobby is around?”

“Honey,” she said with a sigh. “It’s still summer, which means Bobby is wandering around bare-ass naked in the desert somewhere, flirting with scorpions and chasing coyotes. He never comes in until September at the earliest.”

“Shit.” Bobby was kind of crazy, but he was also an expert in a lot of the more esoteric lore that I figured was at work here. I didn’t want to call up a Northern European specialist in case they were working with Egilsson, and while I had an almost-priest on speed dial, he also reported to a higher power I didn’t want to share with just yet.

“Why, what’s going on?”

“I’m not sure yet.” It was too soon to talk about it. I didn’t know enough. I could do some more testing on my own before I got desperate. “I’ll let you know.”

“If you say so,” she said doubtfully. “I’ll talk to Phin and let you know about the drop bag. It’ll probably be tomorrow at the earliest. Do you have a place to stay?”

I looked out the window at the layer of dull gray clouds overhead, feeling soaked in the heat of the afternoon and the stink that I was slowly becoming accustomed to. Electra’s seats were pretty comfortable, though, all things considered.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“All right. Be safe, Cillian.”

“You too.” I hung up on her and checked my messages. One new one from my mother. I opened it up.

It was today’s horoscope.Your esoteric stars!it read.Aries: Today will be a tough balancing act as you’re caught between your aggression and your enthusiasm. Remember to bend with the winds, not resist until you break. Different situations call for different tactics, and what works well with one person may backfire with another. Be the honest and straightforward person that we all know you can be, and no matter what, go with your gut!

Ooooh…kay. Thanks, Mom, for that completely random astrological bullshit. Not that I didn’t see the purpose behind astrology. All sorts of things had power that made absolutely no fucking logical sense, and astrology was one of them. It bothered me, though, even more than tarot—at least with tarot there was an immediacy, an aspect of it that was tailored just to you. Generalized horoscopes were next to useless, the universe’s idea of shooting craps. Fucking ridiculous, and yet here was mine.

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