Earlier, I decided to lean into my Mother Earth side, so I lead us right.

Click here

We head left, pushing through hanging beads into a darkened room.

“What do you think this… Oh, it’s just a storage room.”

I agree with Cleo’s conclusion once I see the walls are lined with shelves of boxes. We turn to leave, until something catches my eye. I turn and see there’s a curtain covering the back wall. At least, I think that’s what it is.

“Can you make out what’s back there?” I ask.

Cleo shakes her head beside me. Now curious, I shuffle through the room in the semidarkness and my hand taps against the dusty curtain. I start to pull it aside, until something brushes against my hand. I can’t see it, but it feels like an enormous spider skitters across the tops of my fingers.

I gasp, pulling away and accidentally moving the curtain along with me. I stagger backward, clutching my hand.

“Are you okay?” Cleo asks, rushing to my side.

“Yeah. I think it was just a spider,” I shudder. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait. Amelia…”

Cleo points back up at the wall, at what has now been revealed in the dim light of this room. Hanging there are six framed paintings, all of them recreating images from our tarot deck. From Grandma’s deck.

My eyes widen, seeing the gorgeous renderings. I’ve never seen this tarot artwork anywhere other than our own set of cards. Seeing them expanded in such detail like this is—

I lose the thread of this thought, however, as a hand clamps down on my shoulder.

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

Click here

We head right and enter a large room with a counter and a cash register, which must be the winding shop’s lobby. The register is unoccupied, but my eye is drawn around the room anyway.

Cleo wanders up to a wall full of crystals and glass vials, but my focus is pulled by two bookshelves across the room. One houses a veritable library of volumes on the tarot, while the other is filled with dozens of different variations of tarot card decks.

I step up to the bookshelves and examine the colorful spines and deck sides, searching for anything familiar. I dig out our tarot deck from my bag and glance at it, then back to the shelves a few times, but nothing seems to resemble the unique look.

“Oh my god.”

Hearing this new voice, I spin around to find an old man emerging from a doorway on the other side of the room. He doesn’t look at me, though.

Instead, he stares at the deck in my hand—Grandma’s deck.

“Where in all perils below did you get that?”

Click here

CHAPTER TWO

CHASE

MY EYES DON’T know where to settle.