Lux [h.s]

eight

Cora ran down Market Street, not even caring to stop and look behind her to check if Harry was following her.

She spotted a little red tent on the side of the road and darted in, deciding to hide in there for a while and hope that, if Harry truly had come after her, he would get tired of looking around and leave.

She knew that hers was only a temporary solution since he was staying at her hostel and they would inevitably meet again, but she hoped she could at least get some hours away from him to try to make sense of her actions.

It wasn't like her to kiss someone like that. It had to have been the effect he had on her—he'd been around her, clouding her senses, for the whole day. Maybe it'd got too much, and that was why she'd done it. She nodded to herself. It had to be that.

"Do you want a reading?"

Cora let out a squeal and spun around. The same enigmatic woman she'd encountered earlier was standing right behind her, studying her with deep violet eyes.

"Uh, I don't think..." Cora tried to decline the offer, but she didn't get to finish her sentence.

"It's free," the woman insisted, pointing her towards the table in the centre of the room, and Cora understood that her offer wasn't a request at all.

She sat down on a chair unsurely and sent the woman a wary glance as she rounded the table and sat in front of her. She took out a set of cards with a dark red back, that Cora recognised as some kind of tarots, even if they were a type she wasn't familiar with. She passed her hand over them and put them down on the table, face down.

"You don't really need them though, do you?" Cora let out. The woman stilled and sent her a penetrating look.

"Very well." She threw the cards on the table and picked out seven, putting them in a line in the middle. She gathered the others in a pile and put them away. "I see your point, but I like to be visual." The cards didn't tell the story, she chose them to tell the story.

She looked down; the golden leaves of her earrings tingled with the movement of her head. Cora took it as her opportunity to look at her better, without risking being noticed. She seemed to be older than her, but she wasn't old at all. Her hair was as dark as pitch and her eyelashes long, and her long nails tapped on the backs of the cards as she decided how she wanted to start. She swapped two and uncovered the first in the line.

"The Fay," she stated, looking up. Cora jumped back in surprise and tore her gaze away from her. "There's a part of your reality you're yet to uncover."

The card showed a rudimental drawing of a woodland creature, with long pointed ears and dark eyes. Cora couldn't help but feel like she was being glared at by a scrap of paper.

The woman's nails tapped on the second card. "The Mother." She flipped it around at once. "There's someone around you that knows much more than they let on. It's the closest thing you have to a parenting figure." A smile curved her lips when she went to the third one. "Now things are getting interesting," she murmured, flipping it over together with the fourth. "The King and the Kiss. You kissed Harry."

Cora instantly stood up, but a glare from the woman made her sit down again. A fluttering sound came above their heads; it was a bat spreading its wings hanging upside down, ready to fly out into the night.

"I thought you were supposed to read my future?" Cora hissed through her teeth. Yet, in her mind, there was only one question: how did she know? It hadn't even been ten minutes, and they'd been alone in the Pavilion.

The woman shrugged, and her earrings jingled. "It's impossible to predict the future. Every single one of your choices brings to a different outcome, and all the choices of every person in our world put together bring to billions of different ones, and everyone's will can change at any second, which makes it nearly impossible to predict anything about what will come." She went back to the cards and uncovered the next one. "The Cat." She debated commenting on it, but then went on without offering her an explanation. "The Fire." She tapped on a card that represented vivid flames. "You will get deeply intertwined with it."