Cassie’s a street fortune-teller, and she’s got this amazing pack of Tarot cards: large, with beautiful art on the back pattern and individual paintings for each card’s front. When she takes them out of their silk bag for a customer, you can’t help but be impressed and expect an accurate reading—which is the whole point of them, of course. But this old pack she pulled out now were her real working cards, battered and worn with a plain pattern on their backs. She’d apparently gotten them from some old witchy woman years ago, long before I met her and Joe.

She shuffled the deck once, twice, three times, then laid three cards down on the carpet by her knee.

“They’re all blank,” Siobhan said.

They were. The fronts of the whole pack were blank. But that would change, now that Cassie had put her mojo on them.

“Watch,” I said. “Pictures will show up.”

A long moment passed with no visible change, but I, at least, could feel something in the air. It was like the static charge you get when you walk across a carpet in the winter and the air’s so dry; like a promise, except instead of a static shock it was the promise of magic.

“Are we all supposed to believe in this for it to work?” Andy asked.

Cassie responded with a wistful smile.

“If magic required any kind of widespread belief to exist,” she said, “there wouldn’t be any left in the world at all—not in this day and age.”

Andy looked like he wanted to ask something else, but then the images began to form on the blank fronts of the cards, rising up from the white surfaces the way a picture develops in a darkroom, and we all leaned forward.

“Jesus,” Andy murmured.

I didn’t pay attention to anything the others went on to say as I studied the images.

The first showed a number of small figures doing something in what looked like an empty lot surrounded by abandoned buildings and rubble—I thought it might be the Tombs, that part of Newford that’s fallen into the worst kind of urban decay. I needed a closer look to see who the figures were, and what they were doing, but first I turned my attention to the next card.

It had Lizzie riding a small brown pony that was walking along a deserted shoreline. Sand, sea, and sky all appeared leeched of colour, which made the bright red shock of her dyed hair really jump out.