Dark Star Read Online Free PDF Page A

He was searching.
    I returned to my cards. “Okay, Wyle. I’m going to lay out ten cards, and they’ll tell me all your secrets.”
    “I must not have many secrets,” he said.
    “I’m just that good.”
    I knelt, finished shuffling, and set down the first card. Card fifty. Inverted Crescent. Good. I placed it in the center and laid out the rest of the cards.
    I began at the top, taking another long breath and focusing. Card one, Compass. Card eight, The Witch. Card sixteen, The Beggar.
    I frowned. In readings, the Compass card was always my mother. And this I got a sense of: the cooling twilight; a woman in black; a face in profile, the slope of her nose; light refracting off water. A single star shining. The Witch and The Beggar. Someone searched for and unseen.
    He was after my mother, all right. He might not have proof of who she was—but he had his suspicions.
    Still, I wasn’t about to tell him that.
    “You’re getting a divorce,” I said.
    “I thought you’d already figured that one out. Not really fortunetelling.”
    “I’m getting there,” I said. “Here. Card forty-nine. Inverted Anchor. You’re feeling lost. You’re probably one of those people who mostly has couple friends, and they’ve all taken her side. And she’s getting the house, too, huh?”
    He crossed his arms. “You didn’t get that from the cards. You got that from looking at me. Are you planning a career in law enforcement?”
    “Here, the cross cards. Forty-five, Sign of Brothers. Crossed by The Warrior and The Prisoner.”
    He leaned forward. “Meaning what?”
    This part was easy, a Knowing so clear I wouldn’t even have needed the cards. “You didn’t start out wanting to be a cop. You followed in your father’s footsteps. You probably wanted to be something totally ridiculous, like a football player, or a rock star.”
    “Baseball player.” His lips twitched.
    “Another score for the fortuneteller.”
    “You’ve got good intuition, kid,” he said. But he was giving me a look. A look that meant I was playing it a little too straight, and he was already suspicious of my mother, and he was well-armed with brains and his own common sense. It was probably not a good idea to give him any ammunition.
    “Now the terminal cards,” I said. “Sign of Lovers. Sign of Swords.”
    I bit my lip. That meant—
    Well. I didn’t really know what that meant.
    The cards had been helping, up to this point. Sense and feeling coming into alignment, thoughts taking shape within me. My Knowing had formed an image of this man, Detective Mickey Wyle, who had spent his boyhood summers fly fishing in Canada, whose eyes still saw past the dirt of city streets into the northern half-light of autumn, who went to bars with his cop buddies but rarely drank. But these two cards felt strange when I pressed my fingertips to them, and abruptly the world around us came into close focus. Details sharpened. I noticed the touch of gray at his temples. I saw the dust that floated in the light pushing in through the blinds. I breathed the deep, earthworm scent of soil that dwelled beneath the smell of the house—the smell of alleys at night, the smell of graveyards.
    I wouldn’t tell him that. I couldn’t tell him there was something chasing him, something like a voice in the dark, or that I could see that he hadn’t slept in three days and it had nothing to do with the wife he didn’t want to go home to. That it was possible he wouldn’t live very long.
    I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know why he was really here, in this room, with his rumpled clothing and quiet stare. And suddenly I was a little frightened. I didn’t know what it meant, but—He knew.
    About Mom. About us.
    Some part of him knew.
    I couldn’t say that. So I went for the obvious answer. Lovers and Swords. Not a difficult leap, though an incorrect one. “You caught her cheating,” I told him.
    “Way off the mark,” he said, but he was smiling, a little. He ran a