Page 555 of Flirting with Darkness

He also withdrew his arm.

No one called him that.

No one even knew that name.

Not even Maggie or Augustine knew him by his birth name, Lazarus. Only his family. Only the few Travelers he still spoke to now and then when they passed through London or France. Even they didn’t call him that any longer, not after he told them to stop.

He asked them to stop, and now he couldn’t even remember why.

It hurt him, he knew.

It hurt him, because it reminded him of her.

She slid a large playing card across the white tablecloth.

No… not a playing card.

It was something else.

Painted by hand, rivetingly detailed, beautiful, filled with symbol and meaning. It reminded him of the colorful, mystical cards his auntie, Jyn, used for fortune-telling and the like. He’d seen her use them on unsuspecting rubes, back when they had one of their gatherings. She would sit inside her heavily perfumed caravan and spin the most amazing tales.

When he was young, in those years he traveled for a while, too, he would hide in there sometimes, just so he could listen to her fantastic stories.

Burning loves in foreign lands.

Beautiful strangers bestowing mysterious gifts.

Magicked rings and surprise weddings.

Deaths of mystical portent.

Children born under the sign of the river nymph.

Trees that spoke to the wind.

“It won’t be enough,” she said.

She pushed forward another card, sliding it across the linen cloth.

Ghost looked down at the second one she showed him.

It was another male figure.

The face painted on the first card appeared strange to his eyes, forbidding, the black eyes cold, even cruel. Yet somehow, everything about the image evoked familiarity in him.

Those pit-like, fathomless eyes looked like eyes from his dreams.

He knew their colorless depth, the shiny blackness they wore like hawk’s eyes, or a shark from one of the ocean exhibits he’d witnessed in a seaside fair. Ghost recognized the expensive, foreign-appearing clothes. He knew their rich colors and fabrics, the gold threads and buttons. He knew that tall, lean, yet muscular body.

He knew the strong hands, the long, heavy-knuckled fingers.

The man on the card had no hair upon his head. A thick black beard shot through with gray matched the coarse black hair on his arms and hands.

Ghost knew all of it.

But not as well as he knew the man painted on the second card.

Out of the second card stared the eyes and face of his father.

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