He seriously stiffened this time. There was no hiding it. I watched each muscle in his neck become taut as his jaw jutted out hard.
Jim wasn’t saying a word, just watching us. And I was gratified to see he was spending an equal amount of time watching the door. He would have a much better chance of figuring out how to use the door than I would. So I stuck with what I was good at. Lying.
“Your past will catch up with you,” I said, making my voice dip low. I rocked backward and forwards as if I were in the throes of a vision. “Your past will catch up with you,” I said again, making my voice drop even lower.
The Lonely King clenched his teeth, pared his lips back in a jerking wobble, and hissed at me. “I’m immune to your lies, seer. Now spend the last few hours of your miserable life contemplating your death.” He began to turn on his foot to head towards the door.
So I simply scrounged my energy to rock back and forth harder and harder until my knees rhythmically bumped and thumped into the carpet. “Your past will catch up with you. All the people you’ve murdered – all the hearts you’ve eaten, all the souls you’ve contracted to steal their magic – they will catch up to you. For,” I let my voice rattle out as if I were a theatrical actor in a Shakespeare production, “magic costs. It always costs. And you will pay your dues.”
He stopped. He’d taken a single step towards the door, but now he stiffened, every muscle down his back seizing with such force I saw them ripple beneath his shirt.
“I will not,” he said, but he barely spoke the words. Oh no, I saw the entire building speak with him. For everything shook as if it were being pounded by an earthquake.
I used all of my training as a fake fortuneteller to control my expression, to ensure fear didn’t crack across my face. I kept my head dipped low, my eyebrows furrowed, and my gaze locked on him. “That which you have feared is catching up with you. Your true destiny. For no one can hide from magic, Peter,” I said.
He snorted.
So his name wasn’t Peter, then? “It will peter out, peter out,” I shifted track, “your life. Your magic. The luck that has kept you going this far.”
The key to a believable fortune was in the details, often guessed, often statistical. The more apparent details you can throw in about a person’s fortune, the more likely they are to believe you. Though I often googled my clients to mine their social media accounts, I couldn’t exactly do that for the Lonely King. So I just had to wing it. “You’ve seen your own death, haven’t you? Imagined it year after year. It will come to pass. There is no running anymore.”
That one worked.
It had been a pretty safe assumption that an asshole who’d killed as many people and lived as long as the Lonely King would imagine his death. He’d be obsessed with it. Sure enough, from the exact raw emotion that cracked over his visage, it was clear I’d hit a nerve.
“You dream of it. It haunts you. Every waking moment. The moment your life will end. The moment your rampant use of magic will catch up to you. It’s coming. It’s coming. Tonight it ends,” I let my voice drop down as far as it would go until it croaked out of my throat like a dying breath.
A cold wave of horror crossed through the Lonely King’s gaze, and for the first time since the conversation began, I saw his fragility.
As I baited the Lonely King, Jim kept his attention on the door. He was doing something with his fingers, counting on them, tapping them methodically. I hoped like hell it was helping him to figure out a way out of here, and he wasn’t doing it to train the dexterity and strength of his hands.
“You are nothing. A broken seer. Nothing more than a husk – nothing more than a heart ripe for the taking. Your irrelevant life will give way to my spell, feed my future.”
Feed his future? Everyone seemed certain that the Lonely King was using a time spell to go to the past, so how exactly would that feed his future? Suddenly, something hit me. Something that should have hit me a heck of a lot earlier. Why exactly was this prick called the Lonely King? It couldn’t be that he alone ruled – that tended to be the nature of kingship. So what if it was something else?
I’d managed to string the Lonely King along so far with a combination of luck and gall. Now it was time to take a risk. I suddenly closed my eyes as if a vision was sweeping over me. I rocked forward and backward so violently, I chafed my knees beneath my torn jeans.
I let my lips part with a gasp. “It won’t work. Your spell. You won’t be able to bring her back. She is gone forever, lost to the ravages of time.”
Though the first thing I wanted to do was open my eyes and see if my lie had struck home, I held on long enough to hear a shaking, choked breath.
I controlled my smile as I finally opened my eyes, as I saw the horror and shock crumpling the Lonely King’s face.
Bam. My lie had struck home.
I rocked backward and forwards again, not caring that pain kept shooting up the back of my thigh. I could feel that the injury had opened again, and a wet slick of blood was covering the back of my leg.
One of
