Hex Me All Night Long, page 11
“Oh, hell yes,” Chav exclaimed.
Awesome, she was going to parole me from this casino prison. “Thanks, babe. I appreciate—hey, where are you going?” Okay, parole was off the table.
Chav made a bee-line for a lit-up neon door that proclaimed to house Reno’s most highly sought-after psychic, Madame Jane Tennison.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I groaned.
“Finally.” Ruth, the fourth in our quartet, and a deer shifter and an even dearer friend clasped her hands together. “It’s something on my bucket list.”
“You’re not dying, Ruth,” Willy said. “You only get a bucket list if you’re dying.”
Ruth, who had the skin and facial features of a Disney princess, gave Willy a disappointed look. “If I was dying, I wouldn’t be spending my last precious days in Reno. Besides, it’s not that kind of bucket list.”
“Please, don’t make me,” I whined to anyone of my friends who would listen. “I’m the thirty-something mother of two, and I’m not as...sturdy built as you therianthropes. I need my sleep.”
Chavvah, who’d finally come back after reading a sign hanging on the door to Madame Tennison’s, harrumphed. Ruth and Willy both shook their heads.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” I complained.
“Did you get one of your visions?” Chav asked, clear concern on her face.
I thought about lying for a hot minute, but I couldn’t make the words cross my lips. While I was a bonified psychic, unlike Faker-McFakee my friends wanted to consult, I had not had a vision about the fortune teller. But I’d seen enough of her kind when I was growing up to make me sick. My New Age parents loved the idea of people who could talk to the dead. When I first started getting visions of my own, they jumped all over themselves to take credit. It’s no wonder I took the first bus out of commune-central when I turned eighteen.
I shook my head. “Fine.” I crossed my arms across my recently deflated boobs, down two bra sizes since weaning my youngest. “But under protest. Fortune tellers are nothing but charlatans and con artists.”
Willy snorted. “I can’t believe you are a non-believer.”
“I’m a psychic, not a circus act. Only a liar would say they can predict someone’s future accurately.” My visions tended to be unhelpful and ambiguous, and worse yet, I had no control over how or when they happened. To top it off, I was usually neck deep in doo-doo before I figured out what the hell they meant anyhow.
Ruth pointed half-way down a list she’d printed at home. “Madame Tennison is ranked number five as a must-see-attraction in Reno.”
“On a review written up by someone whose Twitter handle is @Antsyinmypantsy.” Willy laughed. “I don’t know if he or she is a credible source.”
Ruth covered the left side of her chest with her hand. “The heart wants what the heart wants, and I want to check out the Madame Jane Tennison. But since this is Chav and Willy’s bachelorette weekend, they should have the final word.”
“I’m in,” Willy said.
Chavvah nodded. “For sure. Me too.”
Ruth grinned at me. “Come on. It will be fun.”
Famous last words. Ugh. I think the fact that Ruth had drunk three glasses of champagne at the VIP table at Reno’s Queens of the Desert drag show had a lot to do with her push to walk on the wild side. “It’s after midnight. I’m usually in bed by now.”
“Oh, Sunny,” Chavvah said. “I remember when you used to close down the bars in San Diego.”
“I was much younger and a lot less tired.” Being a mommy was the most awesome thing I’d ever done, but two energetic therianthrope babies took a lot out of me. “Can’t I skip this one thing?”
“No.”
“But--”
She held up her hand and cut me off. “I get to do anything I want this weekend.”
“You’re cruel, Chav.”
“You bet your sweet bippy.” She didn’t look the slightest bit guilty. “Besides, I didn’t make the rules. You did.”
“I can’t believe you’re throwing my own words back in my face,” I whined. “Just you wait until you have kids.”
This time Ruth held up a hand. “I’ve got nine children, Sunny Trimmel. You don’t see me crying about being tired.”
I frowned, because what else could I do. Ruth does have nine kids, and Linus, her youngest, to put it nicely, is rambunctious. “Well, you three are therianthropes. I’m just a mere human.”
Willy snorted again.
I narrowed my gaze at her. “That’s not attractive, you know.”
“Brady doesn't seem to mind none.”
I grinned. “Do tell?”
“No!” Chav and Ruth said in unison. They did not share my same interest in getting all the juicy details.
Chav held out her hand to me. I sighed and took it, all the while grumbling about the unfairness of it all as she dragged me into the fortune teller’s lair. The set-up was cliché—round table with two high-back chairs, a long, purple tablecloth with the hem rumpled on the circular throw rug, big all-seeing eyes on various objects and wall-hangings, black velvet curtains, strings of fairy lights, and the freaking place smelled like patchouli. Ugh. The scent reminded me of my childhood.
“It looks like Madame Fraudison is out. We should go,” I said to the others.
Ruth gave me a stern look. “Now, Sunny. Quit being a spoilsport.”
“I am Madame Tennison,” a woman said as she swept the black curtain aside. “I feel a strong aura, a powerful presence in you ladies. Please,” she gestured to the chair nearest us, “who shall I read first?” Her pale blue eyes framed by thick, dark lashes twinkled as she flashed a wide, ruby-lipped grin.
I pushed Chavvah ahead of me. “One of the brides-to-be should go first.”
My BFF glared at me then she turned a smile to the fortune teller. “I’d love to go first.”
After Chav sat down, Madame Tennison took the seat on the side. “What is your name?”
“You’re the psychic,” I muttered. “Don’t you know?”
The fortune teller raised a brow at me. “My gift is more abstract. I get images, not words.”
“Uh huh.”
“Chavvah Trimmel,” Chav said. “Excuse Sunny. She’s not usually this cranky.”
I stuck my tongue out. Chav and the charlatan ignored me.
“I don’t mind,” the con-woman said. “I am used to nay-sayers. Can I have your palm, Chavvah?”
“Sure.” Chav extended her hand. The fortune teller brushed her finger over a thick scar at Chav’s wrist. My friend winced. It was a souvenir of a terrible time in her life, and I didn’t like the fortune teller bringing attention to it.
Madame Tennison closed her eyes. “You have suffered much in the past.”
“You are a regular Sherlock Holmes,” I said. Anyone could have guessed that revelation.
“Hush now,” Ruth admonished. “We’re trying to have a good time here, Sunny. Why are you so intent on ruining it?” She blinked her big doe eyes at me and waited for my answer. It was a move I was certain she’d perfected on her multiple children to great effect.
Apparently, it worked on her friends as well.
I filled with guilt. Ruth had never been out of Missouri, and I really was acting like a buzz-kill. And worst of all, I didn’t know why. I’d just had a terrible feeling all evening, and I couldn’t shake it. The weighty foreboding had soured my mood. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to relax.”
Madame Tennison continued her schtick with Chavvah. “I see a great loss in your past.” She met Chav’s gaze. “A parent.” She shook her head. “No. A sibling. A brother?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. She’s reading your face, Chav. It’s a lucky guess.”
The con-woman narrowed her gaze at me, then back to Chav. “A hunting accident? Such a terrible shame.” With a flickering glance, she gave me a nee-ner-nee-ner stare.
“Fine, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then,” I said, borrowing a euphemism from a possum shifter I knew back home.
Willy put her hand on my shoulder. I looked down at the fiery redhead.
“Maybe you should wait outside, Sunny,” she said.
“No, I’ll behave.”
Willy snorted. “That’ll be the day.”
Madame Tennison was drawing a line across Chav’s palm. “I see a handsome man. A wolfish demeanor.”
My eyes widened. Humans—aside from myself—weren’t aware of therianthropes or lycanthropes, so having the fortune teller describe Chav’s werewolf fiancé, Billy Bob Smith, as wolfish, was just a little too on the nose. I saw a tug of a smile at the corner of the fortune teller’s lips. I got a horrible feeling she knew more about us than she should.
The foreboding intensified. “Chav, get up.” I tried to walk toward her and stumbled. My lips were numb and hard to move. “Don’t let her touch you.”
I forced my arm up and threw myself on the table. Chav jumped back with a startled yelp as I grabbed Madame Tennison and my vision fuzzed.
A large bear stands over me. I yelp and roll away. They can’t know I’m back. Not yet. So how... Wait. The bear isn’t moving. And, gruesomely, it is missing a large chunk of its head.
Nooooooooooooo! I’m in goddess-damned West Virginia. That fucking Hildy has probably already called Baba Yaga to haul my ass off to jail. Shit-damn-fairy nuts-and-honeybadger-stinkpits.
I throw my hands up. Sparks fly from my fingertips as I zap the bear in the jewels.
My power is back. All is not lost.
...And that was the last of the vision I remembered before I awoke in a ditch on a lonely stretch of road.
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About the Author
USA Today Bestselling author Renee George writes paranormal mysteries and romances because she loves all things whodunit, Otherworldly, and weird. Also, she wishes her pittie, the adorable Kona, could talk. Or at least be more like Scooby-Doo and help her unmask villains at the haunted house up the street.
When she’s not writing about mystery-solving werecougars or the adventures of a hapless psychic living among shapeshifters, she is preyed upon by stray kittens who end up living in her house because she can't say no to those sweet, furry faces. (Someone stop telling them where she lives!)
She resides in Mid-Missouri with her family and spends her non-writing time doing really cool stuff...like watching TV and cleaning up dog poop.
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