Page 10 of Trick Me
The woman at the center of the crowd is probably sixty, or possibly six hundred because with real magic, age becomes negotiable. Her silver hair is piled in an elaborate style held with pins that are definitely bones, tiny ones that might be from birds or something smaller. Her dress is midnight-blue velvet that doesn’t reflect light so much as swallow it, and every finger bears a ring.
“Now then,” the woman says, voice low and as rough as grave dirt. “Who among you remembers what Halloween really is? Not the parody that many peddle with candy and plastic bones—but the truth beneath the costume.”
No one answers.
“Halloween,” she says, “is not a celebration. It’s a reckoning. The dead don’t need an invitation tonight. They’re already listening. Waiting. Watching. Because this is the hour when the rules weaken. The stories you forgot try to remember themselves. The things you buried dig back to the surface.”
A sharp prickling spreads over my skin. I don’t need the reminder; my awareness is already shifting. That buzzing at the edge of hearing, the pressure inthe air that tells me the afterlife is closer than it should be.
She lifts a crimson apple from a basket full of them at her feet.
“Tonight, illusions rot. Fate demands payment in truth. If you dare ask her questions, she will answer.”
Someone in the back speaks up. “Is this some kind of spell?”
Her eyes flash like something ancient waking. “Not a spell. A mirror. A test. A doorway, if you’re foolish enough.”
She produces a silver blade from her sleeve, impossibly small and wickedly sharp.
“You carve the peel in a single unbroken spiral. If it breaks, so does your tether to the answer. But if you succeed… and you cast it over your shoulder without looking… the first letter of your destined’s name will appear with the way the peel lands.”
“That’s just folklore.”
“Exactly,” she replies. “And folklore is simply memory polished with time. Truth that learned how to lie.”
Without breaking eye contact, she holds the apple and the blade like an offering.
“Who will ask fate to answer?”
A short man in a tux steps forward. Not bravado, more like something is dragging him by the spine. He slices, fumbles, throws. Gasps follow as the peel lands.
“AnS,” someone whispers.
The man’s breath catches. “Sarah. My ex.”
The old woman smiles slowly, as if she already knew. “Fate has no interest in your regrets. She plays the long game.”
Then her eyes find me.
It’s not a glance; it’s a collision. I flinch before I can stop myself, every instinct screaming that something has noticed me that should not.
“You,” she says, voice softer now. “You smell like the grave.”
I don’t respond.
“You walk too close to the edge,” she continues. “One breath in this world, one borrowed from the next. I can hear them around you. Old ones. Hungry ones.”
I feel them too.
The shift in temperature. The way the air thickens behind me, like the space I take up has grown crowded. I keep my posture neutral, but something just brushed my shoulder, and it wasn’t alive.
“I speak to the dead,” I say, more as a reminder to myself than a boast. “It’s my job.”
Her stare slices into me. Something inside me stirs in response. Not fear. Not exactly.
Recognition.
And deep down, I know I shouldn’t have come tonight.
