Bridge of Souls (Cassidy Blake #3)(19)

Jacob tenses beside me, and I try so hard not to think of him, of his growing power, of Lara warning me again and again to send him on. But maybe it isn’t about Jacob at all. Maybe it’s about the Emissary, about me.

“But your card was upside down,” Jacob whispers, “so that means the opposite, right?”

I voice his question, but the fortune-teller only shakes her head.

“Not exactly,” she says. “This card doesn’t have an opposite. It’s like the crossed swords themselves. No matter how you look at them, they form an X. Reversed, the Two of Swords still signals the same challenge, the same choice. It means, no matter what you choose, you cannot win without losing, too. There are no right answers.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” mutters Jacob. “You can’t just change the rules based on the card. She said there were two readings—”

I shake my head, trying to think.

“Can I draw again?” I ask.

“No sense doing that,” Sandra says with a shrug. “It’s your card. You picked it for a reason.”

“But I didn’t know what I was picking!” I say, panic worming through me.

“And yet, you chose.”

“But what am I supposed to do? How do I know which road to choose if neither one is right?”

The fortune-teller eyes me steadily. “You’ll make the choice you need to make, not the one you want.” Her mouth tugs into a crooked smile. “As for your future, I’ll tell you everything I can,” she says, adding, “for twenty bucks.”

I dig my hands in my pockets and find a couple of coins, but one is a pound from Scotland, and the other a euro from Paris. I’m about to ask my parents if I can borrow some cash when Dad appears like a shadow at my shoulder.

“What have we here?” He looks down at the cards. “Ah, tarot,” he says, his face unreadable. “Come on, Cass,” he says, tugging me gently away from Sandra and the Two of Swords.

“I need to know,” I say, and he must be able to tell how shaken up I am because he stops and turns back, not toward the fortune-teller, but toward me. Dad kneels, looking up into my face.

“Cassidy,” he says in his steady scholar’s tone, and I expect him to explain that fortune-telling isn’t real, it’s just a trick, a game. But he doesn’t say that. “Tarot isn’t a crystal ball,” he says. “It’s a mirror.”

I don’t understand.

“Tarot cards don’t tell you what you don’t already know. They make you think about what you do.”

He taps the spot, just over my heart, where my mirror pendant sits beneath my shirt.

Look and listen. See and know. This is what you are.

Words I’ve only ever said to ghosts.

But I guess they do apply to living people, too.

“Those cards just make you think about what you want, and what you’re scared of. They make you face those things. But nothing can predict your future, Cassidy, because futures aren’t predictable. They’re full of mysteries, and chances, and the only person who decides what happens in them is you.” He kisses my forehead as the rest of the group comes over.

“Oh, tarot cards!” says Mom, beelining for the fortune-teller.

“The first one’s free,” says Sandra, fanning out the weathered deck, but Dad catches Mom’s hand.

“Come along, dear,” he says. “Those graveyards won’t visit themselves.”

Jacob and I fall in step behind them.

I hold the card in my mind.

The girl, blindfolded. The two swords crossed before her chest.

You cannot win without losing, too.

And I know what I’m afraid of.

That I don’t know how this ends.





I don’t mind cemeteries.

They’re usually pretty peaceful, at least for me. See, ghosts in the Veil are tied to the place they died, and most people don’t die in graveyards. They just end up there. Every now and then you get a wandering spirit, but on the whole, they’re quiet spaces.

“So are libraries,” says Jacob, scuffing his shoe on the sidewalk.

I roll my eyes as we pass through the gates of St. Louis No. 1. To my surprise, there’s no grass—just gravel and stone, interrupted by weeds. Pale crypts crowd the space, some polished and others grimy with age. Some even have wrought-iron gates.

“New Orleans is known for many things,” says Mom, and I can tell by her voice that the cameras are rolling. “But it’s especially famous for its cemeteries.”

“And the people buried within them,” says Dad, stopping before a stark white tomb. Small stone planters, filled with silk flowers and slips of paper, are on either side of the sealed door. The stone walls of the tomb are scratched with Xs. On the ground in front of it, people have left a strange pile of offerings: a tube of lipstick, a bottle of nail polish, a vial of perfume, a silk ribbon, and a chain of plastic beads.

“Here lies Marie Laveau,” Dad says, “considered by many to be the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.”

Voodoo. I think of the shops we passed yesterday, with their brightly colored pouches and dolls, the word stitched into curtains and stenciled on glass. And I remember Lara’s skull-and-crossbones warning. Do not touch.

“Born a free woman,” Dad goes on, “Laveau opened a beauty salon for the New Orleans elite, and gained a following as an accomplished voodoo practitioner …”