“Donkey. Are you a little baby that I have to tell you right from wrong? You feel every day what you have to do, and you make like you don’t. But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords.”

“All I want is to quit doing downtime.”

Whatever was using Sherrea’s mouth hooted. “My brother already said he’d help with that. You know my brother? Uncle Death?”

I clutched at my knees. “What am I trying to accomplish, at least?”

“To open the way, little donkey!”

“What’re you frowning about?” Sherrea grumbled, pinching the bridge of her nose. She was back. Her eyes were where they ought to be, her face was her own.

“Is this your way of teaching me that I get what I pay for?”

“You don’t like the way I read, don’t ask me to do it.”

“I don’t mind your reading. It’s your little friends coming to visit that gives me a sharp pain.” She was sullen. “So you got a visit from Tia Luisa, huh? Better clean up your act, then. That’s for when the querent is in shit up to the chin.”

She put out a hand to sweep up the cards. I put two fingers on hers, lightly, and let go. “Sher. I’m sorry. But four times, it’s happened. I get some kind of physical trauma, not even enough to knock me out, and zip — I wake up someplace else, with the closing credits rolling, and I can’t remember the rest of the movie. Something in my head is broken.”

“Most people’s heads are broken, Sparrow. So what?”

“So I need help. And I’m scared.” That last escaped before I got my mouth closed.

She scratched her lower lip with her fingernail, watching me. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll try a clarification.”

She picked up the cards, all except Joan of Arc, and shuffled them. “Cut,” she told me, and I did. She picked up the piles and began to flick down cards. And slowed, and stopped, finally, with the fourth card, the grinning figure with the fan of swords over his shoulder. The third card had been the black juggler. The second had been the man with the sun. The first, Baron Samedi. Sherrea’s hand hovered over the deck, not quite touching the next card. Then she pulled it, quickly, and slapped it down. The red-and-white lovers. She raised her eyes to my face. “Don’t fuck with me,” she said.

“Funny. I was going to say that to you.” And I really was. I was angry. My vulnerability had slipped out into her hands, and she was playing me with it. I’ve seen card tricks; the randomness of a shuffled deck is an overrated quantity. But Sherrea’s eyes were a little wild, and her hands were graceless and uncertain. In a haphazard flurry, she laid the rest of the pattern. All the same.

We sat in the dim room, staring at the ugly pictures. I was holding as still as I could, so that none of them would do their foolish dance of transformation. But my nose itched, and it made Baron Samedi laugh.