Free The Fortune Teller's Daughter by Jordan Bell

Yellow.
    It was
thunder that woke me, not someone knocking at the door. I pressed the heels of
my palms into my eyes and rubbed them awake. Water. I’d grab a glass of water
then go back to sleep.
    I kicked
free of the blankets, but when I went to stand I bumped the edge of the coffee
table with my knee. Half my tarot cards slid free and tumbled onto the floor.
    “Damn.”
    My mother
would have considered this a bad omen, a warning from the cards that something
was about to happen and my attention was needed immediately .
    I never
prescribed to such superstations. Cards didn’t have magic of their own. They
weren’t imbued with supernatural energies. I’d bought them in a bookstore at a
mall, for crying out loud. And yet…
    A prickling
sensation climbed my spine. I knelt to collect the cards, then spotted the last
just out of reach beneath the table.  I stretched to retrieve it, the slick
texture making it hard to grip, but finally I dragged it out from the shadows.
    The
Magician.
    I jerked my
hand away and scrambled to my feet. The card fluttered back to the floor face
up in a pool of street light cast from the open window.
    The broom
hanging in my kitchenette slid free and struck the linoleum like a cannonball.
    Broom
falls , my mother’s voice in my head warned. Company’s coming .
    “Oh,” I
breathed and clutched the pile of cards against my knotting stomach. “Oh crap.”
    “ Serafine .”
    I flung the
cards and shot for my apartment door without even looking towards the voice.
The husky voice I recognized intimately.
    The voice
that should not have been inside my apartment.
    I threw the
deadbolt and yanked the door, but it stuck on the chain.
    His hand
shoved the door shut hard enough to crack the frame and I screamed once. His
other had gripped my wrist and spun me to face him.
    It was over
like that, a half second to catch my breath and then I was pinned, the wood
cold against the back of my knees. He pressed my captured hand to the door
beside my head and I stared into an unfamiliar face I knew quite well.
    As my
thoughts raced through a million terrible ideas, one realization filtered
inappropriately to the surface.
    This was the
Magician, without his mask and face paint and he was as handsome without his
armor as he had been with. Thick black eyelashes framed his stony grey eyes and
the familiar dark circles of an insomniac.
    A curl of
black hair, shiny in the dim light, hung over one eyebrow. He had warm colored
skin, eyes slightly narrowed and overhardened by time and a lot of anger. He
looked European, the way they looked in movies, romantic and distant and
unamused.
    “Serafine,”
he repeated with mock charm and sugared, terrifying sweetness. “You have
something that belongs to me. Return it to me right now or I will turn you into
something small and reptilian and then feed you to something large and mean. Do
I make myself absolutely clear?”
    “Very.” I
swallowed. “It’s just that…”
    “No. The
key.”
    “I can’t
give it to you.”
    Wrong
answer. Fury lit his grey eyes and for one terrible moment I thought he’d let
it smother his reason. One by one he peeled his fingers from my bicep and
leveraged his hand on the door so that I was caged within his arms. I swallowed
and searched his shadowed eyes for some hint of the man on stage, of the one
who’d almost kissed me behind the tent. The man who created magic.
    “Where,” he
exhaled slowly, “pray tell, is it?”
     “I hid it.”
He tensed immediately and I put my free hand to his chest to stop him. Through
his shirt I could feel his pulse racing out of control. “Wait! Before you turn
me into something awful, hear me out. Please.”
    “You’d
better be very good at convincing me to spare you.”
    “I knew
you’d come,” I rushed on. “I hid it so you’d have to listen to me if you ever
wanted it back. I belong with the carnival. I was supposed to find you. You
take me back with you and I’ll give you back your