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Back The Salt in Our Blood
Chapters (41)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. I.
  4. II.
  5. III.
  6. IV.
  7. V.
  8. VI.
  9. VII.
  10. VIII.
  11. IX.
  12. X.
  13. XI.
  14. XII.
  15. XIII.
  16. XIV.
  17. XV.
  18. XVI.
  19. XVII.
  20. XVIII.
  21. XIX.
  22. XX.
  23. XXI.
  24. XXII.
  25. XXIII.
  26. XXIV.
  27. XXV.
  28. XXVI.
  29. XXVII.
  30. XXVIII.
  31. XXIX.
  32. XXX.
  33. XXXI.
  34. XXXII.
  35. XXXIII.
  36. XXXIV.
  37. XXXV.
  38. EPILOGUE
  39. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  40. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  41. About the Author

I’m speechless. “Why do you want to help me?”

“Are you serious? Helping a cute girl untangle her sordid family history? Maybe if I do a good enough job, you’ll think about sticking around for a while. Leave New Hampshire to the Yankees.”

Cute. He called me cute. I’m so stupidly flattered I can’t respond. I recall the boy at my old high school that nearly every girl had a crush on, Jared Kahn. The nicest thing I ever heard him say in two years was “nice boobs” when Chelsie McCanna flashed the entire cafeteria on a dare.

Maybe my mom isn’t so wrong about New Orleans after all.

XV.

THE STORE WE’RE PERUSING IS TIGHT AND CLOISTERED. Purple-painted shelves hold row upon row of occult books, herb-crusted candles, hex dolls, and rare crystals. There is a whole section of potions for everything from finding love to curing male pattern baldness. The window hangs with stained-glass pentacles, fairies, and Celtic knotwork. And the whole place smells of nag champa and cloves. It is a hodgepodge of magical beliefs, both ancient and nouveau, all crammed into one tiny and probably haunted shop in the Quarter. And it is the fifth one exactly like it that we’ve been to today.

It is the kind of store my mother would love and likely one she has visited many times over. I leave Daniel fingering an assortment of ready-made mojo bags in a rainbow of organza as I home in on the selection of tarot and oracle cards they carry. Here, at least, is where this shop differs from the others. They carry three to four shelves more fortune decks than any other store we’ve visited.

As my vision shifts from one eye-popping box to another, I start to deflate. Even though all the decks have things in common and many of them are similar to my deck—the one my mother left with me so many years ago—not a single one is the same deck as mine. I look again at the box of my own tarot cards. No author name. No artist name. There is nothing to hint at whether or not one of these decks shares the same publisher or copyright date as my own. I try to determine if any of the illustration styles are close enough to assume the artist might be the same, but my deck is a bit off from all of these. And that means I can’t get another glimpse of the missing Moon card beyond what I saw on the Magician’s table that day.