Trio of Sorcery by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

uneasy around her. She had no problemgetting a seat, and not even the crazy-eyed guy in worn-out fatigues wanted to sit next to her. She stared out the window and watched as the streets they passed became progressively rougher and grimmer. Di realized immediately that she should have assumed Tamara would be reachable by bus from the start. After all, most clients that a “psychic” sees are not really the upscale sort. Most of them, if they owned a car, couldn’t afford to drive it much. And that was a big “if.”
    She got out and walked the three blocks to the address listed on the card. This wasn’t skid row but it was clearly a lower blue-collar neighborhood than Di’s own; there were children everywhere, playing on front stoops, having a stickball game in the street, clustered around a basketball hoop nailed to the side of a house. Sniffing the air told her a lot; soul food, corned beef, hot dogs and beans, all in the same block. And beer. Cans had piled up in the gutter. People here apparently liked to party, but their preferred brand was “whatever is cheap.”
    As soon as she got to her goal, she recognized something interesting.
    It wasn’t the fact that it was a typical two-story house in a run-down neighborhood; most “psychics” worked out of their homes. It wasn’t that there were no signs advertising PSYCHIC READINGS in the window. Lots of fortune-tellers didn’t advertise. Palm reading and the like were still against the law in some places, even if the law had better things to do than bust a five-dollar fortune-teller.
    It was that the area around the house was preternaturally quiet. No kids playing in the street or the yards. The houses on either side were shabby, but very quiet, and seemed to lean away from the one in the center.
    Di loitered in an inconspicuous spot for a while, watching the place, putting up a little “avoidance” aura to keep people from noticing her. The upstairs windows were all tightly curtained, but with sheers of the sort that would hide anyone who was looking out while giving the person inside a reasonably good view. The ones downstairs were tightly curtained in red velvet. So when Joe O’Brian had said Gypsy, he was being literal, or at least, that was what this woman was passing herself off as. Frankly, Di doubted that she was actually Romany.
    Then she watched the people on the street as they neared the house, and what she saw was even more interesting. Everyone hurried past the house. Some even crossed the street twice to avoid it, and most cast an uneasy glance or two at it as they went by. A cat, however, merely sauntered past. Mind, that didn’t mean much. For all their reputation as psychic animals, cats were completely indifferent to anything that didn’t directly threaten them.
    So, Tamara has all the neighbors spooked, and I don’t think it’s because any of them are sensitive. There couldn’t be that many people here who are even marginally psychic. So if it’s not outré, it’s mundane. Something she’s done has got them scared to confront her in any way at all.
    Given all of that…no way she was going to walkthrough that door right now. Mage-sight showed her nothing except that some of the same black-green aura that surrounded Tamara’s card also enveloped her house. Di picked up no clues about what the woman was doing, whether it was garden-variety black magic, or just the residue of someone using her powers to exploit people. Mage-sight generally didn’t tell Di anything about the strength of magic if it wasn’t being actively used. So she could walk in there and find someone who had picked up The Satanic Bible and discovered she really did have the Gift and was gleefully using it to get whatever she could, or she could find someone who was more than that. Potentially, much more than that.
    If it was someone that was more than that, without better