Chapter 245: The Fortune Teller's Tarot Cards (Patreon)

The glass door of the family restaurant swung shut behind them, sealing the cold air and the drone of the air conditioning inside.

It was already past two in the afternoon. The sun hung a little west of directly overhead, its light not particularly fierce, and there was always a strip of shade along the roadside to block it.

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Amamiya Rin and Tomie walked side by side down the sidewalk of the shopping street. There weren't many people out, just twos and threes: a young couple pushing a stroller, a housewife with shopping bags, a few girls in middle-school uniforms clustered outside a dessert shop, laughing.

A glance at his phone. Today happened to be Saturday.

"Anywhere you want to go?" Amamiya Rin turned to look at Tomie.

"Isn't arranging that supposed to be the man's job?" Tomie wound a few strands of hair around her index finger and lobbed the question back at him, lofty about it.

"Can't help it. I've got no experience with this sort of thing, so you decide," Amamiya Rin said evenly. "Everything up until five this evening is yours to plan."

"No sincerity at all. As a boyfriend, you fail." Tomie lifted her chin, apparently unimpressed with his attitude, though the corners of her mouth curled upward.

That said, when it came to planning something herself, Tomie couldn't come up with anything clever either, and settled without hesitation on the stock itinerary of every young couple's date.

"All right. First a movie, then the aquarium, and after that — we go spend money in Shibuya Ward."

Amamiya Rin, naturally, went along with it.

Tomie caught his hand and charged ahead, meaning to clear the shopping street and grab a cab straight to the theater.

But just as they were about to pass an intersection, her steps slowed, her gaze fixing on the far side of the road.

Amamiya Rin followed her line of sight. Across the road was a narrow alley, and at its mouth stood a wooden signboard painted deep purple, four characters scrawled crookedly across it in white — 占卜之屋 (House of Divination). Below that ran a line of smaller text: Love Fortunes, Compatibility, The Future.

A young man came out of the alley, talking to the girl beside him.

"That fortune teller is scary accurate. One look and she knew we were together — said our personalities complement each other, that we'd definitely go the distance."

"Seriously? She wasn't just a shill?" the girl asked, hooking her arm through his, her eyes crinkling into happy crescents.

"No way. She even brought up my ex. Honestly, it put a cold sweat down my back…" A trace of leftover fright crossed his face as he said it.

Still talking and laughing, the pair walked off down the street.

Tomie's gaze swept over the couple and settled on the signboard.

"A love reading…" she said thoughtfully.

"Want to try it?" Amamiya Rin asked calmly.

He put no stock in divination, but if Tomie was curious, killing a little time with her cost him nothing.

"We've got nothing better to do anyway."

Compared with the ordinary business of a movie and an aquarium, a love reading struck Tomie as far more interesting.

She hooked his arm and pulled him into the alley.

The alley wasn't deep — twenty meters or so and it ended. Where the House of Divination sign stood, the door hung open, a string of wind chimes on the frame ringing whenever the breeze stirred, and a curtain of pale yellow beads hanging where a door panel should have been.

Amamiya Rin lifted the bead curtain and stepped through with Tomie.

Past the entryway he pushed open a second door left ajar. Behind it lay a small room, maybe twenty square meters. Curtains shut out the sunlight, and the only light came from two candles burning on a counter against the wall, with what was presumably a decorative skull set between them.

In the middle of the room stood a square table and two sofas. A crystal ball sat on the table, along with a deck of tarot cards, and behind the low table sat a woman.

She was a beautiful woman — even measured against Tomie, she could be called striking. She wore a long dress of deep black that left a stretch of pale neck bare, and her jet-black hair fell to her waist, a few strands drifting past her ears. A thin black veil lay across her face, not the kind that covered the whole of it but one that hung down from her forehead over only the right side, more ornament than concealment, hiding nothing of her features.

Her eyes were lovely and narrow, tilted slightly upward at the outer corners, the pupils turning some moist gleam in the candlelight.

At the sound of footsteps she raised her head. Her gaze landed on Tomie first, lingered a second, then shifted to Amamiya Rin.

In the instant their eyes met, her pupils widened a fraction.

The fortune teller's gaze slid from his face to his shoulders, from his shoulders to his chest, then back up to his face. The whole survey took less than two seconds, but it left Amamiya Rin with the sensation of something damp clinging to his skin.

There was a kind of fondness in that look. A fondness saturated with possessiveness.

Amamiya Rin's brow twitched.

He knew the feeling far too well. At the party, Takaichi had looked at him exactly that way — a gaze that sat wrong on the skin.

Unlike Takaichi, though, this fortune teller's eyes never wandered below the belt. They kept returning to his face — or more precisely, to his head.

Forehead, brow ridge, bridge of the nose, jaw. The way one might admire a work of art.

"Welcome." The fortune teller's voice was soft and syrupy, and oddly weightless.

"Are the two of you here for a reading?"

Tomie hadn't noticed the way the woman looked at Amamiya Rin. She dropped onto the sofa across the low table, folded her arms, and raised her chin.

"That's right. A reading. Tell us the love fortune between him and me," she said, tugging Amamiya Rin down to sit beside her.

The fortune teller's eyes moved from Tomie's face to Amamiya Rin's, then dropped to their joined hands. The corner of her mouth curved — half hidden behind the veil, hard to make out.

"I can't read a palm while you're holding hands."

Tomie let go and thrust her own hand out over the table, palm up.

"Fine. Read it."

The fortune teller didn't reach for it right away. She glanced at Amamiya Rin first.

"Not the gentleman as well?"

"Do hers first. I'm in no hurry," Amamiya Rin said easily.

She nodded, and only then turned to Tomie's palm, studying it closely.

A moment passed before she raised her head and spoke.

"Your life line is very deep, Miss, and it crosses the entire palm — you'll live a long time. Your heart line, though… it's strange. Complicated. Many branches, many crossings, and yet very shallow. It says a great many people love you, but you have never given your feelings to anyone… no. No, that isn't quite right."

Tomie raised an eyebrow at that, but didn't cut her off.

"There is one main trunk, very clear, running all the way to the Mount of Jupiter — you carry a very definite goal inside you. And at the end of the heart line there's a pronounced fork. One branch climbs toward the base of the index finger; the other drops and cuts into the Plain of Mars. The upward branch is pure feeling. The downward branch is possessiveness, the hunger to control. Your feelings run fierce, Miss. You're the type who never lets go until one of you is dead… no. In your case, even death wouldn't be the end of it."

She lifted her head, and the look she gave Tomie carried a probing suspicion. There was something off about this palm.

"Hah. Not bad. Anything else?" Tomie clicked her tongue, entirely unbothered.

"That's as far as the palm goes. Next I'll need to look at the gentleman's."

That faint smile still rested on her lips as her eyes turned to Amamiya Rin.

Tomie seized his wrist without ceremony and planted his hand in front of the fortune teller.

The fortune teller took his hand in hers. Her thumb traced gently along the lines of his palm, from the life line to the heart line, from the heart line to the head line — slowly, and with a strange weight to the motion.

"Hey. What do you think you're doing? Copping a feel off my boyfriend?" Tomie's brows knitted, displeasure plain on her face.

"Of course not. The gentleman's palm is unusual. It deserves more care." The fortune teller looked up at her, the picture of innocence, her hands never pausing.

"It had better." Tomie's gaze turned dangerous.

If the woman's final answer failed to satisfy her, Amamiya Rin's objections wouldn't count for much.

But the fortune teller had already stopped looking at her, cradling his hand and bending close over it.

This time she took far longer than she had with Tomie.

A long while passed — long enough that Tomie was losing patience — before she lifted her head, looked into Amamiya Rin's eyes, and spoke softly.

"Your life line is unusual, sir. No — contradictory would be the better word. The line itself is deep, which says your life should be long. But…"

She paused, uncertain.

"At the very start of the line there's a distinct break. It reconnects afterward, yes, but a break like that…"

Curiosity and calculation sharpened her gaze. Today's customers were remarkable indeed — one with an immortal body, the other returned from the dead. Small wonder theirs was a bond death couldn't sever.

"The head line is unusual as well. Very deep, very straight, running clear across the palm — your mind is powerful, and rational. Yet the end of it splits into a mass of fine branches, spreading out like the roots of a tree, reaching into every quarter of the hand. Your store of knowledge is enormous. You are a man of broad learning."

Amamiya Rin gave a slight nod, and something appraising entered the way he looked at her.

To read all that off a palm, the woman had real substance behind her act. She was no ordinary person.

If the setting had been right, he'd already have taken out his notebook to check whether the woman in front of him turned up anywhere in the intelligence he'd recorded.

"What about the heart line?" Tomie pressed impatiently, irritated that the woman had skipped past it entirely to talk about some head line instead.

"The heart line… is deep. But heavily forked." The fortune teller's finger drifted lightly across his palm.

"And these forks aren't ordinary hairline creases — they're distinct branches, each running off in a different direction, each ending in a clear island mark. It means you are fated to become hopelessly entangled with a great many people. Except that for all their number, the ends of those branches all have nearly the same shape, as though they'd split off from a single source. Which means the people who come to feel for you are, in essence, all one and the same kind."

Tomie's mouth twisted.

One and the same kind? Every last one of them was a counterfeit — every one except her.

The fortune teller caught the change in Tomie's face but said nothing more. With visible reluctance she withdrew her hand and shuffled the tarot deck three times.

Then she spread the cards across the table in a fan.

"Three each, if you please."

Neither of them hesitated; each drew three.

The fortune teller turned over Tomie's three first.

The first: The Tower, upright. The second: The Lovers, upright. The third: The Wheel of Fortune, upright.

"The Tower, upright. Sudden collapse. Ruin. A fall from a great height. The most ominous card in the deck. Anyone who draws it has lived through one irreversible, devastating event. After that event, Miss, your life became something else entirely."

"The Lovers, upright. The pull between two people and the ties of fate, and beneath that, deeper choices and deeper bonds."

"The Wheel of Fortune, upright. Destiny. A turning point. Change beyond anyone's control. Your coming together with him was no accident, Miss — it was written. But what is written isn't necessarily kind. When the wheel turns, it will make you into something that is no longer yourself."

Tomie frowned. All three cards had come up upright, all three supposedly favorable — so why did they taste so wrong coming out of this woman's mouth?

With that, the fortune teller turned over Amamiya Rin's three cards.

The first: The Fool, reversed. The second: The Hanged Man, upright. The third: The Star, upright.

"The Fool, reversed. Recklessness. No plan. Immaturity, and the risk of failure lying in wait. Or to put it another way — you were forced onto a road with no return. A bad beginning, because of the person your fate is tangled with."

The fortune teller's eyes shifted to Tomie, freighted with meaning.

A vein stood out at Tomie's brow.

What was that look supposed to mean? A bad beginning? A road with no return? Was she implying that Tomie had ruined Amamiya Rin?

Tomie was already opening her mouth to snap at her, but the words stalled on her tongue, and something in her went guilty for reasons she couldn't name.

A beginning…? The start of everything had been her meeting with Amamiya Rin in that hospital.

"The Hanged Man stands for sacrifice. For seeing the world from another angle, for trading pain to buy wisdom. Upright, it says you take that pain on willingly, sir. That you give things up by your own choice, for the sake of some greater purpose."

"The Star, upright — one of the finest cards in the deck. Hope, and faith. All three of your cards tell a single story, sir: struggle. Setting foot on a road with no return. A struggle that burns you as its fuel."

"And the lady's three — ruin, bond, turning point. Your life was changed utterly by one act of destruction. Then you met him, and from that moment the wheel of fate began to turn, carrying you toward a place you cannot control."

The fortune teller pushed the cards forward, her gaze sweeping across the faces of Amamiya Rin and Tomie as she delivered her verdict on the spread in a heavy tone.