Mr. Real (Code of Shadows #1) (43 page)
Read Mr. Real (Code of Shadows #1) Online
Authors: Carolyn Crane
“Say it,” Monica said. “Say your affirmation.”
Fawna sighed.
“Let…” Monica began.
“Let it be just this,
” Fawna said.
“Now move your feet.”
Fawna took a step backward, but she couldn’t turn away—he was blowing so much fire out of his mouth!
“You can let it be just this, Fawna. Enjoy him as he is now. Let that be a gift that you give to yourself.”
“But if I don’t look, I’ll be tormented for the rest of the day. Maybe it’ll be different—”
“Seriously?” Monica asked. “
This
is the load of shit you’re peddling to me?”
But Fawna couldn’t let it be
just this
. And he was right there—how could she resist? She was already focusing deeply on a point on his black jacket—she had to relax her mind on a point and let the point give way. Seeing the future was a mix of seeing
through
and seeing
into
somebody.
Monica’s voice sounded distant. “Fawna? Are you walking?”
She eased the point open until it became a tunnel of vision, something like snapshots and film clips building into episodes and eras. If she already knew the person, she could just think of them and find the opening; the activity of seeing the future didn’t belong to a point in space.
“Fawna!
You’re
in charge of your gift—your gift is not in charge of you.”
Too late. Fawna saw the Great Bertolt next summer—watched him enter the back tent whistling happily. She saw his pretty assistant kiss him. It was nice.
Feeling heartened, Fawna crept her vision forward. A year. Another. All okay. A basement flood, nothing big. He lived a pretty normal life, aside from his dangerous job.
Just a notch more
, she thought. She’d push it a notch more.
And then she saw it: Bertolt practicing a new trick. Scared. Something goes wrong. Burning liquid runs over his cheek.
“Fawna?
Shit
.”
She saw the hospital, the bandage, the painful, disfiguring scar that makeup couldn’t cover. She saw the Tandy Fair bosses refusing to rehire him; a wounded fire-breather made the fair look bad. Final check in the mail. He tries for other sideshows—with the same result. She saw him on a park bench, devastated. Fire-breathing was everything to him. She saw palm trees outside the window and a gun in Bertolt’s mouth. His throat closed with blood.
Fawna shut off the phone and walked out of the tent, grieving for Bertolt. Oh, why had she looked?
A group of girls at the fried onion blossom stand poked each other and stared at her. Fawna gave them a spooky smile until they turned away. Yeah, she knew what they saw—a twenty-something girl wearing a jacket laden with colorful scraps of fabric and ribbons and shiny objects, like a profusion of war decorations from a strange land. She’d braided little items into her hair and even within the fringes of her boots. Monica said she was trying to assert her independence after years of captivity by adopting
feral-looking fashion.
That was Monica. A theory about everything.
Fawna poked around in possibilities as she walked—what if she warned Bertolt? Warnings almost never changed somebody’s larger destiny—if the freight train was coming, it was coming.
But sometimes you could disrupt the train’s schedule, or the track it would use.
She formed an intention to warn Bertolt, and then followed the new possibility that opened up. In her vision, Bertolt looked skeptical. He’s heard of highcaps—people with high-capacity brains and powers like telekinesis or special kinds of sight—but he doesn’t believe she is one. A mini-prediction that she makes comes true, and then he believes, resolving to be careful. Later he punches a window, frustrated: the new, careful tricks are no good. He starts using knives only, but he hates it—it’s fire-breathing that he loves, but now he fears it. She looked further, seeing him in a circus management position. She sees a view of the mountains from the window and a gun in Bertolt’s mouth. His throat closed with blood.
Fawna shut her eyes against the tears.
Her phone rang. Monica. She turned it off.
Wild cards existed, even in the destiny game. Bertolt’s fate could intersect with a more dominant fate. Though usually, when people’s fates intersected, it was the disastrous fate that dominated. And sea changes and flukes could open new possibilities—even the future was in motion, but it was slow motion, like the motion of the earth’s crust—tectonic plates, shifting and grinding. Another wild card: a true change of heart could alter the currents of fate, but that wasn’t the kind of thing a person could simply
decide
to do one day. It had to be deep. Profound.
Somewhere she’d heard the saying
knowledge is freedom,
but to her, knowledge of the future was a cage. Just the
ability
to know the future was a kind of cage. Thank heavens that she couldn’t tell her own future.
An old woman wearing a turban and dangly gold earrings sat outside one of the tents with a crystal ball. “You will fall in love with a tall, dark stranger,” she said. “Very soon.”
A lot of highcaps—especially telepaths and prognosticators—had gone into the fortune-telling business. But a tall, dark stranger? Fawna scowled and sailed on past the old woman to the cotton candy stand, where she bought a large cotton candy, her new favorite food. She wandered toward the merry-go-round, packed with laughing children and proud parents. It was a happy scene, and she swept up her bright pink cotton candy with her tongue, loving the way it melted to tingling bits, loving the bell-like tones of the children’s laughter.
She hadn’t known cotton candy existed until recently. For twelve years she’d been a prisoner of Bobby Barrington, a murderous gambler with golden hair and the bloated face of an aging cherub. Barrington made her tell him the future so that he could win at the casinos and horse races. She’d made him wealthy, and he couldn’t have given her some cotton candy?
Fawna never had a problem with seeing the horrible things that fate had in store for Bobby Barrington—or for the researchers at the lab where she’d been held captive before Bobby. It was actually consoling at times.
The children smiled and waved and laughed, proudly riding the horses.
Let it be just this
, she told herself.
And she got out of there quickly.
She ended up at the edge of the sideshow area, leaning over a railing overlooking the midway below, a dusty path lined on either side with bright tents that housed games where you could throw balls into hoops, shoot wooden animals, whack moles, ring bells, guess things, and toss rings.
It was at the ringtoss that she caught sight of somebody she knew: Simon Fitzgerald. The gambler.
Fawna groaned.
She and Simon were forced to interact now and then because they both knew Sterling Packard. Fawna went way back with Packard—to the childhood before she was kidnapped and taken to the lab.
Simon had come along later; he was on Packard’s psychological hit squad—a so-called
disillusionist
. Simon could zing people with his recklessness, which apparently he had too much of. Infusing people with recklessness was a stupid power as far as Fawna could tell. What possible advantage could that provide? She may not have had access to cotton candy in her captive life, but she’d had access to enough TV and movies to know you didn’t want a reckless opponent.
Simon was also a serious, seasoned gambler. That one fact told her everything she needed to know about his character. She’d looked at his future a few months ago, knew that he’d die underneath a poker table, lying on a pile of chips, his face beaten and bloody. Some sort of heart failure. She’d never warned him—he seemed to be on some sort of self-destructive path, and anyway, he would’ve taken the opportunity to mock her prediction the way he mocked every prediction she made. He despised her and what she did—he’d made that very clear. Which was fine, since she despised him and what he did.
She swept up the last clump of cotton candy with her tongue and crumpled the paper cone in her fist.
A mob gathered at the basketball toss game, blocking her view of Simon’s ringtoss. She moved sideways to keep him in sight.
Over the months that she’d been back in Midcity, Fawna had seen a whole parade of women and men become fascinated by Simon and latch onto him. They’d boast that they had gone to New Orleans or Las Vegas with him, had lost everything with him, had been beaten up with him, got fucked by him in a parking garage, got arrested with him, and on and on, as though surviving a stint with Simon made them cooler or tougher than everybody else. Some of the tales sounded made-up to her.
Some didn’t.
Sure, Simon had a certain charisma—which he used mainly to corrupt people.
And yes, he had a certain masculine beauty of the dark-haired, pale-skinned type; his appearance called to mind a doomed and dangerous hero from a silent movie. Especially with those sharp features of his—features that she might describe as
fine
or even
exquisite
if she’d been shown a photo of Simon, rather than meeting him in person. But she knew him now, knew firsthand that nothing about him was fine or exquisite. God, were people
really
so easily fooled?
Yes.
Furthermore, Simon had done his best to make her feel unwelcome in Midcity. Why? While Fawna had significant reasons to loathe gamblers, considering her long imprisonment by one, what cause did Simon have to dislike prognosticators? Maybe he sensed that she could see through him, that she knew gamblers like Simon were every bit as complex as cottage cheese.
Maybe he worried that she would inform his fans that big, bad gamblers like him were just parasites who wanted something for nothing because they were unable to generate anything of value on their own.
Their mutual friend, Justine, thought that she was obsessed with Simon, but Justine didn’t understand. You had to keep a close eye on gamblers.
She went down the steps and strolled along the game tents until she got to the crowded hoops booth, right next to the ringtoss. She let the crowd camouflage her, and watched.
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DEVIL’S LUCK
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The woman of his dreams…with the secret agent of his nightmares