Mystic Mayhem: Fortune's Child, Book One by Ash Fitzsimmons

Author:Ash Fitzsimmons [Fitzsimmons, Ash]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ash Fitzsimmons
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

* * *

Around ten, as I was packing lavender shea butter bath bomb components into their molds, Rose knocked and poked her head into my workshop. “Hey,” she croaked. “Got something I need you to see. Can you step away?”

“Sure.” I covered my materials and stripped off my gloves, then followed her back to the house. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she replied, though she sounded groggy. “I always look like I’ve had a rough night after a couple hours of trance, but give me a minute to clear my head.”

“Hydrate,” I suggested, and sat her down at the kitchen table, where she’d left her sketchpad, while I poured water from the filter pitcher. She drank greedily, then accepted a refill, and I suspected I knew why Yven had been so hesitant to leave her.

“So,” said Rose once her eyes no longer seemed glazed, “tell me if you can ID either of these people.” As I watched over her shoulder, she opened the pad, flipped past a series of half-finished drawings and one prairie landscape with colored pencils, then stopped on a page with two figures facing each other. Their expressions suggested they were in the middle of a heated discussion, edging toward a full-blown fight, and part of me noted that whatever else she might be, Rose was an artist with a true knack for portraiture.

A much larger part of me was too shocked at the faces I was seeing to worry about such minutiae as artistic merit.

“That’s Katarina,” I said, pointing to the woman on the right. Rose had captured her likeness well—the blonde C-cut, the large blue eyes, the stack of thin gold necklaces—but her cheeks were flushed, her brow furrowed in anger.

Facing her was a brown-haired man with hooded brown eyes, whose face had colored to match Katarina’s. His mouth was partly open, exposing a short incisor on the left side, a tooth about half as long as the front tooth and canine flanking it. He had thick eyebrows like bunched-up caterpillars, which almost met over his nose, and several days’ stubbled growth on his chin and upper lip.

“I don’t recognize him,” I told Rose, “but she’s definitely Katarina from last night. You’re good.”

Rose smiled wearily. “You’re kind. And if I’m not mistaken, your problems here have a common source.” Tapping the sketchpad, she said, “I focused on the shooter. That’s him, I’m positive. So if he’s hanging around with Snake Oil Girl…”

“They’re working together,” I muttered.

“That’s what it sounded like to me.” She leaned back in her chair and stretched. “Now for the important question: what’s their grift?”

“And how the hell does that faun figure into it?” I started to reach for my phone to call Dad and pass on the news, then paused as something Rose had said hit me. “Wait—it sounded like they were working together?”

“Yeah…” She regarded me, perplexed by my confusion, but her face relaxed as the realization hit. “Ah. I don’t just see events—I hear them. Experience them. It’s like I’m a ghost, I guess, but without the weird footsteps and flickering lights.

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