Cursed

Chapter Two

Madame Estelle’s was divided into four rooms behind a shallow front counter. Each of the girls on staff had their own room that consisted of heavy black curtains covering all four walls and a table in the middle with two chairs. The two psychics had decorated their rooms in gypsy-like, jewel-toned colors with colorful rugs, fringe on everything, and candles.

Adrienne St. Croix was too new to have decorated her room yet, though she made another mental note to bring in something to fill the empty space. Sometimes she felt lonely, even knowing the spirits of her family and ancestors were crowded around her.

She studied the six cards on the table before her that had been drawn by the girl seated in the chair across the table from her. Reading tarot cards required a combination of understanding the symbols, interpreting the feel of the cards, and for her – translating the messages the spirits gave her. She combined all three to give the cards life and tell a story. Born of a long line of voodoo priestesses, she inherited the ability to communicate with the spirits from her mother.

But every once in a while, the spirits could be difficult. The story the cards were currently trying to tell her was more disjointed than usual. Four of them went together and presented cheerful predictions of a happy event.

Two sat to the side, their feel much darker to the point of being disturbing. The distance between the four and two was one of the subtle signs the spirits gave her. These two cards were away from the happy ones. They just didn’t fit the story the others were trying to tell her.

She chewed her lip.

“You look like you’re my age,” her client said. The girl had given her name as Tara, and she was well-dressed and gorgeous.

I wish you’d go back to texting, Adrienne responded silently.

The client was ignoring her request for silence yet again. She needed to concentrate, but understood repeat customers were always needed in a small shop like this, which meant she had to make small talk.

“I’m seventeen,” Adrienne said.

“Me, too!” Tara smiled. “Do you start school tomorrow?”

“Yeah.” Adrienne clenched her hands under the table, nervous about the new school. She glanced around her room, wishing she’d thought to bring in her small altar to Papa Legba or something to hang on the wall.

“What do they say?” Tara prodded, her excited gaze on the cards.

Adrienne picked up one – Death – and Tara gasped.

“Omigod! What does it mean?”

“Transition. Death is the ultimate transition to a new state,” Adrienne said, gazing at it. “It means major change is coming.” She looked over the rest of the cards. She set the card down and tapped the one next to it. “Did you bring someone with you today?”

Tara nodded.

“This card ain’t yours,” Adrienne said. She placed the Death card aside. “This one ain’t neither.” She moved the Devil card over. “Sometimes, someone else’s energy sticks to you when you come in.”

“So you can read my brother’s cards, too?” Tara asked.

“Not fully.” Adrienne couldn’t take her eyes off the cards for a moment. They felt … wrong. Not bad, more like the spirits thought she needed to see them. On instinct, she drew another and set it beside the first two.

“He’ll totally kill me for this, but what do his say?”

“This is him,” Adrienne held up the Devil.

Tara giggled.

“It don’t mean he’s bad.” Adrienne rolled her eyes. “It means he feels trapped by something. This one means it comes from his past.” She held up the new card, Six of Cups, then the Death card. “And this means he is about to face change. Something really, really important is gonna to happen to him.”

“Wow,” Tara breathed. “He’s so smart and athletic. I bet he gets a scholarship or something!”

Not sure the cards are giving good news. Adrienne kept the observation to herself. The energy lingering around Tara wasn’t enough to provide her a full picture, but she suspected the cards were a warning of some kind.

She shook her head. “Okay. Onto yours.” She drew two more to replace the Devil and Death.

“Where in the South are you from?” Tara asked, showing no sign she was about to let Adrienne have the quiet she preferred.

“Atlanta,” Adrienne replied. “Just moved here to live with my daddy.”

“Cool.”

Before Tara could interrupt her again, Adrienne rushed on. “Your cards are real good. You have a lot of positive opportunities in your near future, to include making a difference in someone’s life.”

“Hmm. Boyfriend?” Tara asked hopefully.

Adrienne hesitated. “Not near term, no. These are more focused on your family and school. This will be a very good year for you.”

“I guess that’s good.”

Tara was beautiful and wearing gorgeous clothes that fit too well to come from consignment stores where Adrienne shopped. She didn’t seem like someone who had trouble with boys, unlike Adrienne, who had the issue of a family curse that was hanging over her. It made for awkward introductions with boys back in Atlanta, and she guessed that the guys in New Orleans would be even less willing to date her. People in Georgia just thought she was strange while the people here knew too much about voodoo for her to hope that they didn’t shy away from her if it came up.

“The cards are saying that whatever you asked them, the answer is yes,” Adrienne added, wishing her client understood just how positive the premonition was. She’d give anything to have a reading like this.

“Really?” Tara brightened. “I want to design clothes so I asked if I’d get the internship with Louis Vuitton.”

“Looks good,” Adrienne said.

Tara beamed. “You are awesome!”

Adrienne smiled patiently.

Tara rose and left, tipping her a twenty, another indication the girl didn’t have money issues.

Adrienne waited until the curtain closed behind her client then collected the cards, except for the three that were for Tara’s brother.

These she spread out before her.

“C’mon, spirits. Give me more.”

The energy was too faint. Shaking her head at the cards, she replaced them in the deck and reshuffled.

The cards stuck with her, though, throughout the next couple of hours.

When her shift was over at five, she ducked in to wave to Madame Estelle and then left for the nearest bus stop.

Adrienne walked the opposite direction of the touristy section of the ward towards the river. The air was heavy and still, smelling of one of the water treatment plants. Her nose wrinkled at the scent, and she was sweating uncomfortably in her long skirt and long-sleeved blouse by the time she reached the bus stop. A native of Atlanta, she didn’t yet know if it was possible to reach the Iberville Projects via foot, and she wasn’t certain she should try.

After all, people said there was a serial killer loose in the Projects.

Devil. Death. Six of Cups. She couldn’t stop thinking about the cards. They stayed on her mind throughout the bus ride that dropped her off forty minutes later at her stop at the St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, near the Projects.

The sounds of a funeral were distant but clear, the blare of horns reaching her as she stepped off the bus. Her father lived on the exact opposite corner from where the bus dropped her off, and she began walking through the slums, lost in her thoughts.

The Iberville Projects had not yet been fully restored after the hurricanes, and she grew sad seeing the signs of the damage that still lingered. Sensitive to the spirits that still remained in the neighborhood, she tried not to let herself imagine the amount of people who had been hurt.

The spirits here were despondent, many of them lost. She didn’t need her cards to feel their pain and suffering. Many were trapped between life and death and had not been properly freed from their bodies through the dessonet rite practiced in the South meant to help them transition.

Their sighs and whispers were like music to her, a song too faint for her to grasp fully, but present enough for her to ache for them. They took her mind off the cards until she reached her father’s apartment building.

Pulling the heavy door to the building open, she entered a dingy lobby whose lights flickered and scent was that of must and mold. The elevator in the corner was semi-reliable at best. Most of the keys didn’t light up when pressed, and the ceiling of the lobby and elevator both sagged.

She crossed to it and waited for the elevator doors to open, entering the tiny space. Adrienne rode it to the fifth floor and hopped off.

She entered her father’s apartment and automatically paused to listen for signs he’d beat her home. The cramped apartment was silent. Tossing her keys in the bowl on the kitchen counter, she hummed as she went to her room. It was large enough for a twin bed, small dresser and not much else. A floor lamp lit up the room while the shades of the window that faced the brick wall of the neighboring building were closed.

She moved the ironing board out of the way, so she could get to her closet.

A few minutes later, she heard the front door open.

“Addy, you got a package.”

She had just finished changing out of the long skirt and blouse she wore to Madame Estelle’s when she heard her father’s voice. She poked her head out of her tiny room.

Grizzled and tired, her father had worked late today despite it being Sunday. He still wore the overalls from the shop where he was a mechanic and held a six-pack of beer in one hand. He kicked the door closed with his foot and held out a bubble mailer.

Curious, she walked down the shallow hallway and took it.

“You expecting something?” he asked.

“Not really,” she replied. Turning it over, she caught the small symbol in the corner: a snake and protective symbol of Papa Legba – the guardian god of the voodoo pantheon - that decorated her mother’s shrine back home in New Orleans. “Might be from Mama.”

Her daddy said nothing at the mention of his ex-wife. Adrienne returned to her room, where the ironing board took up the space between her bed and the door. After her shift reading tarot cards yesterday, she’d spent an hour on the pleated skirt of her school uniform and did her best to iron the wrinkles out of the white shirt. The more she ironed, the more accidental wrinkles she put into the shirt until finally she’d given up.

Adrienne plopped onto her bed and tore open the package, not recognizing the black leather journal inside. She was about to wad up the mailer and throw it away when she saw a small note inside. It was a familiar, square sticky note in pale yellow.

Keep this journal safe. Another symbol of protection was in the corner, a hastily drawn skull and crossbones.

She stretched for her rickety nightstand and opened the top drawer to pull out her Bible. She’d received two other notes like this one and hid them where her daddy wouldn’t look. The first she’d received upon arriving to New Orleans a couple of weeks before. It had appeared on her pillow one day. The second surfaced a week later.

Adrienne added the third mysterious note to the other two. If neat writing were any indication, they all appeared to have been written by women. Although it looked to be three different women wrote the notes.

She set them aside and opened the front cover of the journal. She gasped.

Property of Therese St. Croix

DO NOT READ!!!

Adrienne read the words over and over, unable to believe she held her dead sister’s journal. Therese St. Croix had disappeared five years before and was presumed dead, the first victim of a serial killer who had eluded the police for five years. He took a new life in the Lower Ninth Ward every month for the first year and then sporadically for another four years. The police claimed the serial killer was probably keeping his first kill as a gruesome trophy and insisted it wasn’t possible she was still alive.

Where had the journal been all this time?

Adrienne studied the bubble mailer closely. While the journal’s pages had yellowed from age, the mailer was new and crisp. There wasn’t even a postage stamp on it, as if someone had dropped it off at the building.

“Daddy, why did the mail come on Sunday?” she called down the hallway.

“It didn’t. Someone stuck it in Mrs. Hatchett’s box, and I ran into her on the way up.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Adrienne ran her hands over the journal, imagining her sister as the last person to hold it. Her eyes misted over at the thought.

Therese, the oldest of five girls, moved away to live with their father in New Orleans after the sign of the family curse appeared on her. Their mother hoped someone in New Orleans could help her escape the curse, while Therese had hopes of being scouted by the jazz music industry and earning a record contract that would help their impoverished family. It was a dream Adrienne shared with her.

She recalled how beautiful Therese was and how she could light up a room with her smile. People loved her, even the crotchety old ladies at church, where Therese sang weekly until she left for New Orleans when she was seventeen.

Although Adrienne was considered a better singer than Therese, the crotchety old women never accepted her. In all the years she’d been dutifully showing up Sunday mornings to fill her sister’s shoes, they had never smiled at her the way they did Therese. There was something special about Therese. Her sister had never been forgotten by anyone who ever knew her, and Adrienne’s whole life had been filled with comparisons of how much she wasn’t like her sister.

We shared so much more than our looks, Adrienne thought. Even knowing her sister had been dead for five years, she still found herself checking the mail to see if Therese wrote the way she had every week during the year she was in New Orleans.

Would Therese’s journal be filled with writing about school, boys, their father? It was marked with the year she disappeared.

Fingering the soft leather of the journal, Adrienne turned to the first page filled with writing.

The cover was black, plain, and the writing inside red. It was neat and feminine, interlaced with geometric veves. Like the rest of her mother’s family, Therese had been a follower of the mysterious religion brought over to the Americas originally from Africa.

Adrienne tried to read through the first page and frowned. Half the writing was in French, the other half in English. The words, though, didn’t fit together. Some letters were randomly capitalized and the sentences were nonsensical. The only thing that she was able to make out with any certainty was the protective symbols scattered throughout each page. Skulls and crossbones, crosses, and the veve of Papa Legba were carefully drawn.

“I’m sorry I missed hearin’ you sing at church this morning, pun’kin. You ready for your first day at the snob-school tomorrow?”

Adrienne jammed the journal under her pillow just as her father appeared in the doorway. His potbelly, drooping shoulders, and dull eyes were signs of how rough the past few years had been. He had been the most handsome man she ever knew at one point, but no longer.

“I think so,” she replied. “I ironed the daylights out of my uniform yesterday.”

“If it goes well, we can get ice cream,” he offered. “If you’re not too old for ice cream.”

“No, Daddy, I’m not.”

“I can’t believe you’re seventeen. I don’t remember seeing you grow up.”

Were his words directed at her? She wasn’t certain. His gaze was on the small shrine to Therese on top of her dresser. This had been Therese’s room five years ago, and Adrienne loved the idea that they were still able to share something more than their looks and ability to sing. They looked a lot alike: same white-blonde hair they got from their father and amethyst green eyes they inherited from their mother.

Therese had been athletic and tall, like their parents, standing almost six feet tall at the age of seventeen. Adrienne was tiny and preferred reading to sports. She barely reached her father’s shoulder.

“I’m glad you got the scholarship,” her father said. “It’s been a long time since I saw you kids. I told your mother there’s more opportunity for you here.”

“I know, Daddy,” she murmured. “It’s good to be here now. I missed you.” With a mother on welfare and a father who was a mechanic, Adrienne had only been able to come because of the music scholarship and her job reading tarot cards.

Money wasn’t the only reason she hadn’t come sooner. She loved her daddy too much to tell him that her mother still blamed him for the death of Therese. Their mother hoped New Orleans with its rich culture of magic would protect Therese from the curse afflicting the firstborn members of their family.

“Remember what I told you,” he said firmly. “Stick to main streets if you’re going to walk to school. No alleys and avoid the graveyard. And no walking after dark. If I’m working, one of the other guys from the shop can pick you up. Cops won’t come to the Projects and they gave up trying to find the psycho serial killer after the first couple of years. He pops up every few months. I won’t lose another little girl.”

She smiled warmly. “I’ll be fine, Daddy. My vocal practice is before school. I already done bought my bus pass.”

“All right.” He lingered in her doorway, eyes on the picture of Therese again. He said nothing further and left.

Adrienne waited until she heard the sound of the television turn on. She pitied him. He needed someone to take care of him. All he consumed was microwave meals and beer, and he seemed uninterested in life in general. Since moving in, she’d taken over making him breakfast and dinner and even packing him a lunch for work. She cleaned, too, doing everything she could to help him.

It’s not your fault, Daddy, she wanted to tell him. The curse took her sister, even if her inevitable death came at the hands of a serial killer.

Eyes on the mirror over her tiny dresser, Adrienne rose and crossed to the small shrine. Something seemed off about it this evening. Therese’s softball glove and ball, a songbook and a collection of school pictures were all that remained of the girl. The police hadn’t even found a body, which their mother attributed to the curse swallowing her daughter whole.

Adrienne pushed the thick strap of her tank top to the side so she was able to see the mark beneath it. At first glance, the discolored patch appeared to be nothing more than a birthmark. Unless one knew what it was. It was the mark of the family curse, a triangle of symbols: a cross, a misshaped skeleton key, and the number ninety-nine.

It appeared on her seventeenth birthday this past spring. Adrienne studied it, uncertain why she wore the mark of the curse when it had already claimed the firstborn of her family for this generation. Did her entire family bear the mark of the curse, or was there something more going on?

She rose on her tiptoes to make sure the veve she’d drawn with crushed eggshells under the shrine was still there. It was a little smudged, but present. She concentrated on fixing it then dropped back to her heels.

What was off about the small collection of items?

One of the pictures was skewed. She nudged it back into place only to see the pale yellow of another sticky note. Adrienne gripped its corner with her fingernails and pulled it free.

Free us. Find the key.

A chill went through her. “Free who?” she asked, looking around her room. “Or what?”

Was the key a real-live key or symbolic?

The smiling pictures of Therese didn’t answer.

Adrienne sighed. She went back to her bed and added the newest member of the sticky note mysteries to the group. She pulled the journal from beneath her pillow. She had seen too many voodoo ceremonies to be scared of a few supernatural sticky notes. Nothing was as terrifying as seeing her mother’s eyes roll back in her head when the spirits of their ancestors possessed her.

Who had sent the journal to her, if not her mother?

She flipped through its pages, pausing to study the elaborate veves. Some looked like they’d been traced while others were clearly freehand. Adrienne’s excitement grew when she ran across a page she could actually read. Instructions for how to slaughter and then prepare chickens for sacrifice were written in the same hand as the nonsensical words on every other page.

The recipe was the only passage that Adrienne could decipher. The writing was mostly incoherent, lacking punctuation and sentence structure. The wording was random and confusing.

Halfway through the book, she began to notice the strange sketches of a robed man in red. They were small at first, filling up corners or other blank spaces. As she turned the pages, the images became more frequent and larger, as if they were trying to muscle into the book in place of words. A symbol she didn’t recognize accompanied him: that of a cross splintered by a lightning bolt on the background of a malformed heart.

Who was he? Why had Therese drawn him obsessively? Why didn’t most of the journal make sense?

Adrienne glanced around. Her heart was flying like she’d just run up the stairs to her father’s apartment. She pushed the journal under her pillow. The unsettling image of a robed man in red stuck with her.

Needing a break, she went to the kitchen,. The garbage can was overflowing.

“I’m taking out the trash, Daddy!” she called over the sound of the television.

“Okay, honey.”

Adrienne grunted, pulling the overflowing garbage bag out of its trashcan. She tied it closed and moved towards the door. The television was loud. A peek into the living room revealed her father seated on the couch with another beer, the upper half of his overalls shoved around his waist to reveal the white t-shirt beneath.

He seemed to be in a trance.

Was it wrong for her to wish he took as much interest in her as he did in mourning her sister?

She left the apartment and eased the door closed. Adrienne walked down the hallway to the garbage chute and stopped short, seeing the pile of bags in front of it.

“It’s always broken,” she muttered. She’d taken more than one trip to the alley to toss their garbage.

She went to the elevator, pleased when it opened without any wait. It was seven in the evening on a Sunday, and the building was quiet. Half the numbers were missing from the buttons, and a panel in the ceiling sagged. Like the rest of the building, the elevator was worn down and falling a part. She got off on the main floor and managed to heft the bag over her shoulder.

Walking through the front door, Adrienne breathed in the humid air of September. It was mixed with the smell of exhaust and a recent rain. She walked to the alley and paused, recalling her father’s warning about being out after dark.

The dumpsters were about twenty feet into the well-lit alley. The streets were quiet, aside from the occasional passing of a slow moving vehicle. There wasn’t anywhere for criminals to hide, and she doubted anyone could tolerate the smells rolling off the dumpster long enough to hide behind it.

She hurried to the dumpster and struggled to lift the bag over her head. After a few attempts, she managed to shove the bag onto the lip of the dumpster. Another hefty push, and it disappeared into the depths.

Panting from the effort, Adrienne planted her hands on her hips and gave the dumpster a satisfied nod.

“Therese?” The man’s voice was low, smoky and close.

Adrienne jumped and whirled. She didn’t hear his approach from the direction of the alley’s center. He wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up far enough to shade his face. His hands were jammed in his pockets and his jeans dark. The shadows of the alley seemed to cling to him and obscured his form. He was tall, but that was the extent of what she could make out.

She stared at him, ready to run.

“Sorry. My mistake,” he said and turned away.

He was a few steps away before his words registered.

“My sister’s name was Therese.”

“Was.” The stranger stopped and shifted his head over his shoulder without facing her. “Why was?”

“She, um. Died. Five years ago,” she replied.

The man was quiet. He didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe.

Adrienne looked him over, suddenly aware that she was alone with the stranger. Her father warned her about this. The man’s sweatshirt was dark red, the color of the robed figure in Therese’s journal.

Unsettled, Adrienne took a step back, hoping to be discreet when she put distance between them so she had a better chance of escaping.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said at last. There was terse emotion in his voice that made her stop. “What is your name, sister of Therese?”

The stranger was waiting for her response in a way that made her uneasy. As if it was far more important than she warranted it to be.

To give your name is to give someone power over you. Her mother’s superstitious warning returned. Be careful who you trust with yours.

Adrienne had never taken the warning seriously, until this moment. On one hand, it was lame not to give him her name. Everyone knew it. If her mother was right, then wouldn’t everyone have power over her?

On the other hand, Adrienne had seen strange occurrences while with her mother during voodoo ceremonies, most of which she couldn’t explain except that something supernatural happened. She had that sense now, that whoever this stranger was, he wasn’t entirely of this world. What if that was the difference between giving her name to someone normal and to someone … unnatural?

“Is your daddy still in five twenty?” he asked.

Adrienne swallowed hard. How did this stranger know where she lived?

“Do me a favor. Stay out of the alleys after dark. Someone like you can get hurt. Or killed. Or maybe just disappear without a trace. You wouldn’t be the first.”

At her scared silence, the man began walking again.

Adrienne watched him, feeling a chill despite the balmy southern weather.

Therese is a common name down south, she told herself. Still, she watched him walk down the alley. He turned the corner at the end and vanished behind a building.

Knowing her daddy’s apartment wasn’t a coincidence, even if guessing Therese’s name was.

Adrienne bolted. She didn’t stop running until she stood in front of the elevator, waiting for it to open. She hit the button a few times, scared for reasons she didn’t understand. Only when she was safely locked in her father’s apartment did she relax. She paused at the door, staring at it intently.

The strange encounter in the alley had to be some horrible coincidence. Maybe the guy got his car repaired by her father, and somehow, her daddy told him where he lived. Maybe five years ago, he was a neighbor who met Therese before she disappeared.

But the more she thought, the more she realized that there was simply no way the stranger in the alley knew her sister or where her daddy lived.

“Where have you been?” her dad called, jarring her out of her thoughts.

“The chute was overflowing. I took care of it,” she replied quickly. “I’m fixin’ to go to bed, Daddy. Kinda nervous about tomorrow.”

“Okay. Sleep well.”

“You, too.” She glanced into the living room once more as she walked down the hallway.

Her father was a zombie, starring glassy-eyed at the television. Adrienne saddened at the sight of him. The man she recalled from her youth used to smile and laugh. In the two weeks she’d been in Atlanta, he hadn’t smiled once. Had he been this sad since Therese’s death?

Adrienne returned to her room and maneuvered the door closed. She flopped onto her bed and pulled the journal free again, opening it. Would she find the mysterious man from the alley in there somewhere?

She flipped through the entire journal, pausing only at the drawings. She reached the end without finding the hooded man. Disappointed, she closed it.

“You’re so lame, Addy,” she told herself, rolling her eyes. “Even he said it was a mistake.”

She stretched for the pocket sized French dictionary in her book bag and rolled onto her back. She looked up a few of the French words in the journal. They made no more sense than the English words. Frustrated, Adrienne turned to the last page of the journal.

The entire left hand page was of a robed man in red with the strange symbol doodled almost absently into all the white space around the figure. On the right hand page was a short sentence in French.

Adrienne looked up one word then spoke them all aloud.

“He is coming.”

Beneath them was a cross with a skull and crossbones at its center surrounded on all sides by veves of the gods.

The journal ended there.

Adrienne closed it, pensive. She stretched to reach her sticky notes and read through them again in the order she received them.

I’m glad you’re here.

Be careful. He is coming.

Keep the journal safe.

Free us. Find the key.

All were written in different handwriting, but bore the same protection symbol in the same corner, the only unifying factor. They appeared in her room randomly, placed there by someone, maybe the same person who dropped off the journal.

Whoever left them wasn’t trying to scare or hurt her, though. If anything, the opposite was true. Whoever it was, wanted her there. Wanted her help.

“You should totally leave better instructions,” she said to whatever spirits might be listening. “This is kinda creepy. Just leave me like, one long letter instead of all them sticky notes.”

She tucked the notes into the back of the journal and replaced the dictionary in her backpack. She didn’t think her father would search her room the way her mother did, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

Whatever was going on, it was important. She just didn’t understand why.

What is your name, sister of Therese?

The stranger in the alley scared her. Had she just run into the serial killer lurking in the alleys of the Lower Ninth or was he just some creepy guy who knew too much about her?

She opened the top drawer of her nightstand and pulled out the deck of oversized tarot cards she kept with her at all times. Her gaze went to Therese’s shrine. The deck had been hers and was sent back to New Orleans with the rest of her things after her disappearance.

With little money to spend on such things, Adrienne adopted the cards as her own. They were unusual, the backs of each one featuring a coiled snake, a sacred symbol in voodoo representing Papa Legba, the protector and head of the gods who communicated with the one true god. She suspected they were custom made for Therese, because she’d never seen any printed in such a high level of quality, certainly not at Madame Estelle’s.

The cards always reminded her of Therese and of the darker side of Therese no one else had known about. Only Adrienne had seen her sister kill animals outside the need for sacrifice. Therese had done it while learning black magic spells, which she once claimed was merely curiosity. As much as she loved and missed her sister, Adrienne also suspected Therese got involved in something she shouldn’t have.

The journal seemed to support her hunch. Therese was clearly influenced by magic when she wrote the nonsense.

Adrienne shook away her dark thoughts. She preferred to think of her sister as looking over her rather than dwelling on Therese’s interest in black magic.

“Will my first day of school be good?” she asked the spirits.

As she did every night, she drew one card to see what the next day had in store for her. She placed it before her then took a deep breath and flipped it over.

“The Star.” She smiled. “This is awesome.” The Star card normally meant a bright day filled with opportunity of some kind. She didn’t try to guess what, but she hoped it had to do with her singing.

Satisfied, she shuffled the cards and tucked them into a pocket of her backpack.

Devil. Death. Six of Cups. The cards from her reading earlier still haunted her, particularly because she didn’t understand why.