The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper) Read Online Free PDF Page B

defeated, sat.
    “Did she go off with the motorcyclist?” the fortune teller asked picking a stray sliver of cucumber off the tablecloth and putting it back into her half of the sandwich.
    “Hm?” Lachlan had never tasted such a good sandwich, he looked up at the fortune teller.
    “Your girlie…she went off with the man on the motorbike I presume?” she sounded weary. Lachlan nodded.
    “She’s not my girlie.” he said and sipped some tea.
    “She’ll be killed on the back of that contraption.” the fortune teller chomped a mouthful of sandwich. “Sometime next week. Thursday I think.”
    Lachlan felt the mouthful he was currently munching dry up in his mouth. The fortune teller stared at him.
    “Oh yes. I forgot. ‘It’s nonsense’.” she said with a wry smile.
    “What nonsense do you want to tell me?” he asked, putting on, he thought, a good show of bravado. “I haven’t any money.”
    The fortune teller gave a short, wry laugh as she turned from the table and bent down. From a rough hessian sack she produced a crystal ball. Lachlan wanted to laugh, but, somehow, an instinct told him this was not funny.
    “There’s a stand here somewhere…” the fortune teller glanced around at the sparse contents of the tent and when no stand became apparent she placed the crystal ball onto the cloth. It did not roll, it was, Lachlan could tell, very weighty indeed.
    “What do you see?” she asked, her eyes glancing at the ball.
    “Isn’t it supposed to be what you see?” Lachlan’s bravado surfaced once more. The fortune teller ignored it.
    “What do you see?”
    Lachlan looked at it, the globe of dense glass was about ten inches in diameter.
    “Nothing much. It’s a good lensing effect on the cloth. I can see the fibres…magnified.” Lachlan sounded braver than he felt. His eyes were finding it quite hard to look into the ball itself. He chanced it, ha, nothing, he was right, except there was a slight flaw.
    “There’s a flaw, look, in the top right here…” his eye was drawn to the flaw, a tiny black speck and then the speck moved, four legged until it became a black wolf walking across snow and more specks, white this time began to flurry and drift.
    “It’s a snow globe?” Lachlan laughed and looked up to the fortune teller, she was not smiling, only waiting. Inside the ball the snow deepened. He could see the landscape now, it was very beautiful, lovely craftsmanship to capture the snowlight like that, the grey, the tinge of bronze “It’s a good one…well ma-.” he stopped talking. Walking across the snowscape, a man. Walking. Walking.
    “Recognise him?” the fortune teller was matter of fact. Lachlan took his turn to stare her down.
    “No.” he lied. The fortune teller shook her head, held her hands up in surrender. She reached a finger and rolled the crystal ball around to a different spot on the table. As she did so Lachlan could see that the only thing that changed within was his point of view of the snowscape. He could see the wolf in the far distance, see the man’s face now, not that he needed to.
    “Know him now?” she sniffed. Lachlan got up from the table, knocking it as he did so that his cup toppled and tea spilled across the cloth.
    “It’s a good trick.” he grinned, stretching his face as hard as he could “Really good…but…as I mentioned…I don’t have any money.” He turned out his pockets and winked before turning to the tattered doorway.
    “You will be lost Lachlan Laidlaw.” the fortune teller said “But she will find you.”
    Olivia Dashford’s funeral, two weeks later, was a bleak affair of black hats and, as he boarded the train for Oxbridge, Lachlan Laidlaw tried his best not to think of it. He tried his best not to think of the tattered tent and the scent of cheroot, of being lost and of being found.

Dr Laidlaw’s Destiny
    Lachlan Laidlaw: age 25
    Dr Lachlan Laidlaw worked out of a small office, in a Gothic fronted building, down a side