Free Natural Evil by Thea Harrison

her deal out the first seven cards from the top of the deck, and he recognized the god on each card as she turned it over. Nadir, Camael, Hyperion, Taliesin, Will, Azrael, and Inanna. The Depths, the Hearth, Law, the Dance, the Sacrifice, Death, and Love.
    Then she scooped them up, shuffled the deck—really shuffled it, he saw—and flipped over the first seven cards, and all the gods appeared again.
    Well, damn.
    “What are you doing?” he asked, growing fascinated, despite his runaway hormones.
    She said, “I’m giving my hands something to do until you’re ready to talk.” Was her voice a touch huskier as she replied?
    He could give her hands something to do. It almost fell out of his mouth. Somebody should hit him.
    He gestured to the cards laid out on the table. “How are you doing that?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. The cards have been doing that ever since someone in New York gave them to me.”
    He held his palm a few inches over hers as she handled the cards. Warm, aged Power pressed gently against his palm. “These are old,” he said. “Really old. How long have you had them?”
    “Since January. Some strange woman stopped me in the street, told me the cards wanted to come to me and pushed the box into my hands.”
    “Objects of Power often have wills of their own, and they influence the world in ways we don’t understand,” he said. She frowned, clearly not liking that thought. He asked, “What happened to the woman who gave them to you?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. That was the last I saw of her, and the cards have been doing this ever since. I found a discussion about it in an online forum. The general opinion was that it meant upcoming events would have ‘life-altering significance’. I feel like the cards are shouting at me, only I have no idea what they’re saying.”
    Life-altering significance. Yeah, he could agree with that, but for all seven of the Major Arcana to keep showing up repeatedly, he was pretty sure the significance was about much more than one person.
    Somehow she had ended up in Nirvana at exactly the right time to save his life. As an old object of Power, the deck might be exerting influence on the world in ways that had nothing to do with her understanding what the cards might be trying to tell her. He had heard sacred stories of items that the gods threw into the world to enact their will. The Machinae, they were called. The machines.
    But those were legends. As far as he could tell, this was just a deck of cards.
    “When we have time, I’ll do a real reading for you,” he told her.
    Her head snapped up. “You know how to read the Tarot?”
    “I’m not as good as my grandmother. She’s a bruja ,” he said. At her blank expression, he added, “A witch. She lives in New Mexico. I learned what I know from her, since she raised me.” Talk about nature’s prodigious gifts. He hadn’t even grown up poor. A competent bruja made good money, and his grandmother lived in a stylish three-bedroom ranch in a suburb of Albuquerque. She’d paid all of his college tuition and even indulged his serious obsession with snowboarding.
    Claudia set aside the cards, ran her fingers through her sleek, pale hair and massaged the back of her head in a tired-looking gesture. “So what are you doing getting shot and beat up in Nevada, Precious?”
    Arousal pulsed again as he watched her, and his unruly penis stiffened further. He wanted to push her hands away and take over the massage, to soothe away that tiredness until she turned to him with as much desire as he felt. He wanted any damn excuse to put his hands on her again. Fuck. He pivoted and stalked down the miniscule hall toward the bed alcove until he was out of her sight.
    “I’m a Peacekeeper with the Elder tribunal,” he said. He snapped the sheet from around his waist, wadded it and threw it hard at the bed.
    “You’re with the Elder tribunal police force? That’s an elite posting.”
    For crying