Endless Night by R. M. Gilmore Read Free Book Online

small round table from each other, my back facing the entranceway that led to the public area of the store.
    In the center of the table, sat a rectangular shaped object wrapped in a fancy silk fabric. The girl’s child-like hand reached across the table and took the silky block from the center. One hand was wrapped with a simple black rosary that dangled between her fingers. The cross that hung from it dragged along the table as she moved about. She unwrapped the hidden shape and revealed it to be a deck of cards. My moderate knowledge of the occult told me it was likely a set of tarot cards.
    “Take ‘dis and hold it tight, yeah,” she handed me the stack of cards and pushed my hands toward my chest. “Make a thought of what you want or a question you need answerin’. Focus. Then cut the deck two times.” The miniature girl sat across from me with the stillness of a marble statue. Her bare arms showed more tattoos trailing from her wrists up to her bare shoulders. Each one similar to the one on her chest, several kinds of symbols. Sort of like the ones I’d seen on her sign. More symbols dangled from gold wires and brown leather strips wrapped in her neatly matted dreads.
    I followed her instructions and thought hard about my question. More likely, my mind raced with a good one. Over and over images of Cyrus’s beautiful green eyes and Mike’s adorable ass came through my thoughts. I forced myself to concentrate on one thing, where is my life going? I took a deep breath in and slowly let it out through pursed lips.
    “Cut twice and hand it back,” she said through the momentary silence as if she knew just when my mind had been made up.
    Without further words, the girl took the deck and began dealing them across the table in an intricate pattern, a cross dragging along the silk table covering. One on top of the other, then to the side, to the north and the south, then at random in a straight line. The cards depicted images in crude thick line drawings and paint; a woman sitting atop a throne, a man holding a bunch of sticks, a child on a horse, a man stepping off the edge of a cliff. I watched with intense eyes, hoping to decipher what was coming across the cards. I had nothing. Well, unless I was going to become a queen and order men to build me things and leap from cliff edges. No, nothing.
    “ How the hell is this supposed to tell me my future?” I said, mostly to myself. In fact, I really hadn’t expected to say it out loud.
    “Not your future, ‘ cher , your path. A path can be changed. The future is loosely defined,” she spoke without looking up from the cards.
    “You don’t believe in fate? Destiny and all that?” I asked a bit too smugly.
    The girl let out a petite scoff, “Ah, fate. You said future. Fate comes as it wills. Nothin’ moves fate.” Her eyes moved over each card, reading them, as far as I could tell. “From the city of angels I see,” she said and moved on without waiting for my response. “You seen death.” Again, a statement not a question. “On your hands, blood,” a slender finger lifted from the card and waved in the air in front of my face. “Tsk, Tsk, Tsk, naughty girl.”
    “What? What do you see?” I wiggled in my seat at the thought of her possibly knowing the ins and outs of the deaths of two young men at my hand. Mike had pulled a ton of strings and got me off the hook, but that’s not to say it wouldn’t come right back and bite me in the ass someday. This day.
    “I see death…and you. And blood. Yours…and others. Lust. Greed. Sex,” her eyes never left the cards. It was like she was seeing things in her head I couldn’t. Regardless of her apparent focus on the cards, it was obvious her focus was wide spread throughout the room.
    It was my turn to scoff. “Sex? Yeah, right,” I said, trying to ignore the tightness I was beginning to feel being stuck in that tiny back room.
    “Don’t mock, just listen,” her small hand lifted as she spoke and