Free Winging It by Deborah Cooke Page B

for my birthday. I’m wondering why he would give it to me.’
    Isabelle eyed the ring but didn’t touch it.
    ‘He loaned it to you last spring.’
    ‘Well, yeah.’
    ‘And something happened.’
    I nodded. ‘It turned into the ghosts of Sophie and Nikolas.’
    ‘The last Wyvern and her lover.’
    ‘And they helped me defeat the Mages, as well as get Rafferty and me free of their spell trap.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘They spun back into the ring.’ I picked it up, turned it in the light. It didn’t have any of that starlight inside it anymore. Strange. ‘Like Aladdin’s lamp, but more portable.’
    ‘Do you get more than three wishes?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ We both looked at the ring. It appeared to be just a piece of glass, reflecting the twinkle lights hung in the windows. It was hard to believe at this moment that it had any power at all.
    ‘Maybe Rafferty thinks you awakened something in it,’ Isabelle said. ‘Like now it’s rightfully yours.’
    ‘Then he would have just given it to me in the spring, I think.’ I shook my head. ‘I think it’s something else. I thought you might know.’
    Isabelle shook her head. ‘You could ask him.’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘Let me guess – he told you to work it out for yourself.’
    I nodded agreement. ‘He didn’t answer at all.’
    Isabelle smiled. ‘Maybe he doesn’t even know the answer.’
    She studied me for a long moment, then took a deep breath. ‘Let’s see what the cards can tell us.’ She shuffled the deck of tarot cards as I watched. She drew a card and snapped it flat on the table beside the ring.
    The Falling Tower.
    I don’t know much about the meanings of the cards, but this picture – of a castle being struck by lightning and tumbling to pieces – seemed somewhat less than optimistic.
     
     
    If I was wary, Isabelle was spooked.
    Her hand shook as she set the rest of the tarot deck down on the table. She stared unblinkingly at the card, which wasn’t a particularly encouraging sign either. I waited, thinking that maybe she was meditating on it or something. With Isabelle, you can never be sure.
    Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. ‘So, what does it mean?’
    ‘Maybe Rafferty thinks he won’t need the ring much longer,’ she said, her voice uneven. ‘Not in this life.’
    Now I was horrified. I hadn’t even thought of it as a legacy. ‘Wait a minute. You can’t mean that he’s sick.’
    Isabelle folded her arms around herself and sat back. ‘He’s not exactly young, even for a Pyr. ’
    And Rafferty had had his firestorm, which is supposed to start the aging process in dragon dudes.
    He couldn’t be dying, though. ‘No, I don’t believe it. It has to mean something else.’ I didn’t want to think about a world without Rafferty.
    Isabelle visibly braced herself to pick up the cards again. ‘Have you noticed that I always draw from the higher arcana when we’re together?’
    ‘Should I know what you’re talking about?’
    Isabelle turned the deck over and spread the cards across the table. ‘There are seventy-four cards in the tarot deck. Four suits of thirteen, similar to regular playing cards, which are called the lower arcana. In addition, there are twenty-two allegorical cards, called the higher arcana.’
    ‘You sound like a professor.’
    ‘ Fortune-telling Through the Ages: Tools and Techniques is one of the courses I’m taking this semester.’ Isabelle leaned forward. ‘The thing is that the higher arcana are powerful cards. They usually turn up when a message is important. Like a warning, or a huge life change. But every single time I draw a card in your presence, it’s a higher-arcana card.’
    I shivered despite myself. ‘So …?’
    ‘So the cards are responding to your energy.’
    I leaned forward, intrigued. Could I learn to use the cards? Was this where I would discover the Wyvern’s traditional ability to predict the future? ‘What does this one mean?’
    Isabelle grimaced. ‘Big changes.