Free Dark Oracle by Alayna Williams Page A

rattled when she shook it.
    She dug in her cosmetic bag. Its contents were spare: lipstick, mascara, a bit of plum-colored eye shadow. They’d gone a bit stale and gloppy; she wondered why she’d brought these things with her. She knew the answer: because it was expected of her, and it was part of the mask she’d always worn while working a case. Habit.
    She dug a pair of nail clippers from the bottom of the bag, folded out the metal file, and began to crack the case of the watch. It took some doing, but she managed to open it without scratching the case.
    What she saw inside surprised her. . . or rather, it was what she didn’t see. She expected to see the usual mass of gears, maybe a circuit chip. There was only one thing inside: a mass of tiny copper wires, finer than hair, spiraled in on themselves in an infinity loop, bordered by a backing of green circuit board. The rest was smooth and empty. Time had disappeared from the watch, even as it was running out for Magnusson.
    Tara closed the case up, contemplative. There were too many things that seemed missing at the scene. The inordinately small amount of rubble and now the guts of Magnusson’s watch. To say nothing of Magnusson himself.
    She reached for her cards, spreading her mother’s scarf out on the bedspread. She pulled out the Magician card, lay the watch below it to focus the reading, and cleared her mind to focus on the investigation. She meditated on the Magician, on his stance and his inscrutable, secretive smile. What was he hiding? What had he conjured from the elements before him, what forces had he summoned from the darkness?
    She shuffled the cards, feeling the familiar flex and flip of them in her hands. Amazing how easily she was falling back into this life, and that worried her.
    “Where do we stand now?” She drew one card, placed it on the far left of the scarf. A picture of a man hanging upside down by his ankle looked back at her. He was dangling from a wire drawn taut between two trees. His hands were held behind his back as he hung over a misty chasm. It was impossible to tell if his hands were bound behind his back, or if it was simply an attitude of contemplation.
    The Hanged Man. It represented suspension, sacrifice, limbo. Tara wasn’t surprised. The investigation had been blatantly stonewalled, and it felt like more than sheer territoriality.
    She wrote down in her notebook the date and Magician. Below, to the left of the page, she wrote Hanged Man. Beside that, she wrote the first word that came to mind: s tagnation.
    “Where do we want to go?” She shuffled the cards again, until her shuffle felt smooth and even, and picked another card, laying it in the center of the scarf.
    The Six of Wands depicted a man on horseback, holding a flowering staff with a laurel crown attached to it. Surrounding him were people holding up other wands bursting with flowers. The sky was blue behind them, and the overall attitude was one of victory, of a conquering hero returned to his homeland.
    Tara frowned. The card also represented mobilization, promotion, public acclaim, and the acknowledgement of others. Why would she want the acknowledgement of others?
    Her eyes slid back to her makeup case, and she recalled slipping and letting Harry see one of her scars. Perhaps she cared more than she wanted to admit about what other people thought.
    But perhaps this card didn’t relate so much to her. She recalled Harry’s situation of being in political exile. Perhaps he sought a way out, might see this case as an opportunity to move out of the shadows. She looked back at the Hanged Man. That may also speak of Harry, his state of career limbo.
    In her journal, she noted this, but she also wrote Whose victory?
    She framed her third question in her mind, and voiced it aloud. “What’s the path to get there?”
    She pulled a card from the deck that seemed to draw her eye, placing it to the far right. The Star again. The smiling maiden poured water from