Devil's Luck Read online

  Devil’s Luck

  Copyright ©2012 by Carolyn Crane

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this ebook only. Please don’t re-sell it or put it up on file sharing sites. Thank you for respecting my hard work.

  Please know:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or business establishments, organizations or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover art: Anne Cain annecain.deviantart.com/

  Copyediting: Carrie Smoot & Tee Tate

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As usual, I owe a huge debt to my critique partner Joanna Chambers for her great feedback and insistence back in the Double Cross days that Fawna must come back in some form. I’m also grateful to my brilliant husband, Mark, for his insightful critiquing, and advice on everything from heroes to fight scenes, borne of long hours with comic books and punching bags. Thanks also to my writing group: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, Marcia Peck, and Teresa Whitman, for smart late-stage editing. My fabulous copy editors Carrie Smoot and Tee Tate brought amazing precision and polish to this piece, and Anne Cain, what a fabulous and Simon-y cover!

  I am lucky to have lots of great author and blogger and online friends—you know who you are, and your support means the world. Special thanks to my twitter pals who provided key expertise on cotton candy, a food I have never been able to bring myself to try.

  Most of all, deepest thanks to my readers. Every time you read a book of mine, it is like a gift to me.

  DEVIL’S LUCK

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fawna Brady stood at the front of the crowded sideshow tent, watching breathlessly as the Great Bertolt turned his face upward toward the flaming knife he held in his hands. He opened his mouth—like a baby bird waiting for food, she thought—and then he plunged it straight down into his throat. Just the hilt was sticking out of his mouth.

  The audience gasped.

  With the knife mostly swallowed, he stretched his arms out sideways and spun in a circle, so that the audience could tell it wasn’t an illusion. Bits of flame leaked out of his mouth, licking the sides of the handle. It was horrible. Fantastical.

  Bertolt’s pretty assistant handed him another flaming knife, which he swallowed, his long silver braid swaying over his back like a pendulum. And then, he turned his face toward the audience and smiled.

  Smiled! With two knives in his throat!

  Fawna put her fingers to her lips, and for a moment, she was like everyone else, and there were wonders in the world, and the future wasn’t a cage—it was a clear expanse of possibility.

  The Great Bertolt’s assistant handed him yet another flaming knife, and with a flourish, he swallowed that one, too.

  How could he swallow knives day after day? Wouldn’t he damage his throat eventually? Fawna relaxed her vision, thinking to check his destiny, just to make sure he ended up okay.

  No, no, no.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She and her therapist, Monica, had been working so hard on her resolution not to peek at people’s futures. Fawna always found terrible events—even the most charmed lives contained some type of tragedy. It was disturbing to see, and hell on relationships.

  She should leave. The curiosity would calm if she left.

  But now Bertolt was pulling out all the knives. Flames were roaring from his mouth, as if the fire had burned inside him all that time. Was it truly nothing to him? It was only natural to want to make sure he would be okay.

  No peeking! she told herself. Let it be just this.

  The urge to peek reminded Fawna of the urge to gawk at a car crash. Fawna knew all too well that people didn’t do that out of a lust for gore or morbid curiosity. It was hope that made people look—a secret, fragile hope that the crash victim would be unscathed, or at least that, by looking and learning what had happened, they might avoid a crash like that. That the world could be made safe somehow.

  The last knife was out. He smiled and turned to his assistant. The audience clapped.

  Let it be just this, Fawna told herself.

  She should leave.

  But the Great Bertolt was pushing a fiery ball into his mouth. Suddenly a massive flame roared outward, lighting his features. He looked so wild! Wild and happy.

  Maybe things turned out okay for him. She could take a quick peek.

  Don’t!

  Fawna turned and pushed her way through the crowd to the back of the tent, where she could just barely see the stage, and called Monica.

  “Maybe it will be okay,” she said to Monica, after explaining the situation.

  “What is your affirmation?” Monica’s voice sounded sharp through Fawna’s bejeweled phone.

  “Maybe it would be good for me to see a positive outcome,” Fawna said as Bertolt swallowed another flame ball. He exhaled twice the fire now, face aglow.

  “Turn around and walk out.”

  “I just want to see a little ways in.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Monica said. “Until you see something unpleasant to focus on, to confirm your shitty worldview.”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s where this leads—to you feeling like shit.” Shit was one of Monica’s favorite words. “You abuse yourself by seeking out the doom.”

  “I don’t abuse myself…”

  “No?” Monica asked. “Then you just want to feel like shit. I see.”

  “No! It’s just…” Fawna frowned. “Just…” She just wanted things to be different this time. But Monica was right. Whenever Fawna saw good news, she would kick the tires of the future and see what else transpired. If she looked far enough down the pike, she always found sadness and agony.

  Well, it was only natural to want to know. It wasn’t just her—almost any time she told someone good news about his or her future, there’d always be that ‘but what about this…’ moment. Everyone kicked the tires. Happily-ever-afters belonged to people who couldn’t know the future.

  “Say it,” Monica said. “Say your affirmation.”

  Fawna sighed.

  “Let…” Monica began.

  “Let it be just this,” Fawna said.

  “Now move your feet.”

  Fawna took a step backward, but she couldn’t turn away—he was blowing so much fire out of his mouth!

  “You can let it be just this, Fawna. Enjoy him as he is now. Let that be a gift that you give to yourself.”

  “But if I don’t look, I’ll be tormented for the rest of the day. Maybe it’ll be different—”

  “Seriously?” Monica asked. “This is the load of shit you’re peddling to me?”

  But Fawna couldn’t let it be just this. And he was right there—how could she resist? She was already focusing deeply on a point on his black jacket—she had to relax her mind on a point and let the point give way. Seeing the future was a mix of seeing through and seeing into somebody.

  Monica’s voice sounded distant. “Fawna? Are you walking?”

  She eased the point open until it became a tunnel of vision, something like snapshots and film clips building into episodes and eras. If she already knew the person, she could just think of them and find the opening; the activity of seeing the future didn’t belong to a point in space.

  “Fawna! You’re in charge of your gift—your gift is not in charge of you.”

  Too late. Fawna saw the Great Bertolt next summer—watched him enter the back tent whistling happily. She saw his pretty assistant kiss him. It was nice.

  Feeling heartened, Fawna crept her vision forward. A year. Another. All okay. A basement flood, nothing big. He lived a pretty normal life, aside from his dangerous job.
/>   Just a notch more, she thought. She’d push it a notch more.

  And then she saw it: Bertolt practicing a new trick. Scared. Something goes wrong. Burning liquid runs over his cheek.

  “Fawna? Shit.”

  She saw the hospital, the bandage, the painful, disfiguring scar that makeup couldn’t cover. She saw the Tandy Fair bosses refusing to rehire him; a wounded fire-breather made the fair look bad. Final check in the mail. He tries for other sideshows—with the same result. She saw him on a park bench, devastated. Fire-breathing was everything to him. She saw palm trees outside the window and a gun in Bertolt’s mouth. His throat closed with blood.

  Fawna shut off the phone and walked out of the tent, grieving for Bertolt. Oh, why had she looked?

  A group of girls at the fried onion blossom stand poked each other and stared at her. Fawna gave them a spooky smile until they turned away. Yeah, she knew what they saw—a twenty-something girl wearing a jacket laden with colorful scraps of fabric and ribbons and shiny objects, like a profusion of war decorations from a strange land. She’d braided little items into her hair and even within the fringes of her boots. Monica said she was trying to assert her independence after years of captivity by adopting feral-looking fashion.

  That was Monica. A theory about everything.

  Fawna poked around in possibilities as she walked—what if she warned Bertolt? Warnings almost never changed somebody’s larger destiny—if the freight train was coming, it was coming.

  But sometimes you could disrupt the train’s schedule, or the track it would use.

  She formed an intention to warn Bertolt, and then followed the new possibility that opened up. In her vision, Bertolt looked skeptical. He’s heard of highcaps—people with high-capacity brains and powers like telekinesis or special kinds of sight—but he doesn’t believe she is one. A mini-prediction that she makes comes true, and then he believes, resolving to be careful. Later he punches a window, frustrated: the new, careful tricks are no good. He starts using knives only, but he hates it—it’s fire-breathing that he loves, but now he fears it. She looked further, seeing him in a circus management position. She sees a view of the mountains from the window and a gun in Bertolt’s mouth. His throat closed with blood.

  Fawna shut her eyes against the tears.

  Her phone rang. Monica. She turned it off.

  Wild cards existed, even in the destiny game. Bertolt’s fate could intersect with a more dominant fate. Though usually, when people’s fates intersected, it was the disastrous fate that dominated. And sea changes and flukes could open new possibilities—even the future was in motion, but it was slow motion, like the motion of the earth’s crust—tectonic plates, shifting and grinding. Another wild card: a true change of heart could alter the currents of fate, but that wasn’t the kind of thing a person could simply decide to do one day. It had to be deep. Profound.

  Somewhere she’d heard the saying knowledge is freedom, but to her, knowledge of the future was a cage. Just the ability to know the future was a kind of cage. Thank heavens that she couldn’t tell her own future.

  An old woman wearing a turban and dangly gold earrings sat outside one of the tents with a crystal ball. “You will fall in love with a tall, dark stranger,” she said. “Very soon.”

  A lot of highcaps—especially telepaths and prognosticators—had gone into the fortune-telling business. But a tall, dark stranger? Fawna scowled and sailed on past the old woman to the cotton candy stand, where she bought a large cotton candy, her new favorite food. She wandered toward the merry-go-round, packed with laughing children and proud parents. It was a happy scene, and she swept up her bright pink cotton candy with her tongue, loving the way it melted to tingling bits, loving the bell-like tones of the children’s laughter.

  She hadn’t known cotton candy existed until recently. For twelve years she’d been a prisoner of Bobby Barrington, a murderous gambler with golden hair and the bloated face of an aging cherub. Barrington made her tell him the future so that he could win at the casinos and horse races. She’d made him wealthy, and he couldn’t have given her some cotton candy?

  Fawna never had a problem with seeing the horrible things that fate had in store for Bobby Barrington—or for the researchers at the lab where she’d been held captive before Bobby. It was actually consoling at times.

  The children smiled and waved and laughed, proudly riding the horses. Let it be just this, she told herself.

  And she got out of there quickly.

  She ended up at the edge of the sideshow area, leaning over a railing overlooking the midway below, a dusty path lined on either side with bright tents that housed games where you could throw balls into hoops, shoot wooden animals, whack moles, ring bells, guess things, and toss rings.

  It was at the ringtoss that she caught sight of somebody she knew: Simon Fitzgerald. The gambler.

  Great.

  She and Simon were forced to interact now and then because they both knew Sterling Packard. Fawna went way back with Packard—to the childhood before she was kidnapped and taken to the lab.

  Simon had come along later; he was on Packard’s psychological hit squad—a so-called disillusionist. Simon could zing people with his recklessness, which apparently he had too much of. Infusing people with recklessness was a stupid power as far as Fawna could tell. What possible advantage could that provide? She may not have had access to cotton candy in her captive life, but she’d had access to enough TV and movies to know you didn’t want a reckless opponent.

  Simon was also a serious, seasoned gambler. That one fact told her everything she needed to know about his character. She’d looked at his future a few months ago, knew that he’d die underneath a poker table, lying on a pile of chips, his face beaten and bloody. Some sort of heart failure. She’d never warned him—he seemed to be on some sort of self-destructive path, and anyway, he would’ve taken the opportunity to mock her prediction the way he mocked every prediction she made. He despised her and what she did—he’d made that very clear. Which was fine, since she despised him and what he did.

  She swept up the last clump of cotton candy with her tongue and crumpled the paper cone in her fist.

  A mob gathered at the basketball toss game, blocking her view of Simon’s ringtoss. She moved sideways to keep him in sight.

  Over the months that she’d been back in Midcity, Fawna had seen a whole parade of women and men become fascinated by Simon and latch onto him. They’d boast that they had gone to New Orleans or Las Vegas with him, had lost everything with him, had been beaten up with him, got fucked by him in a parking garage, got arrested with him, and on and on, as though surviving a stint with Simon made them cooler or tougher than everybody else. Some of the tales sounded made-up to her.

  Some didn’t.

  Sure, Simon had a certain charisma—which he used mainly to corrupt people.

  And yes, he had a certain masculine beauty of the dark-haired, pale-skinned type; his appearance called to mind a doomed and dangerous hero from a silent movie. Especially with those sharp features of his—features that she might describe as fine or even exquisite if she’d been shown a photo of Simon, rather than meeting him in person. But she knew him now, knew firsthand that nothing about him was fine or exquisite. God, were people really so easily fooled?

  Yes.

  Furthermore, Simon had done his best to make her feel unwelcome in Midcity. Why? While Fawna had significant reasons to loathe gamblers, considering her long imprisonment by one, what cause did Simon have to dislike prognosticators? Maybe he sensed that she could see through him, that she knew gamblers like Simon were every bit as complex as cottage cheese.

  Maybe he worried that she would inform his fans that big, bad gamblers like him were just parasites who wanted something for nothing because they were unable to generate anything of value on their own.

  Their mutual friend, Justine, thought that she was obsessed with Simon, but Justine didn’t understand. You had to keep a close eye on gambl
ers.

  She went down the steps and strolled along the game tents until she got to the crowded hoops booth, right next to the ringtoss. She let the crowd camouflage her, and watched.

  Simon was the lone ringtoss player. He’d draped three long strips of tickets around his neck. They dangled over his silky red shirt, which hung open to reveal his chest, all lean and muscled—and covered with dragon tattoos. Outrageous, roaring dragons. Is that how he fancied himself? And of course he had to display his tattoos like that … she thought with a fluttery lightness in her own chest that was something like annoyance. He might be fooling all of Midcity, but he wasn’t fooling her.

  What’s more, his faded old jeans hugged his ass perfectly as he stepped forward to toss a ring, and then they loosened as he stepped back. Hug, loosen, hug, loosen, hug, hug…hug…loosen. Jeans all perfectly rumpled right down to his dull, black boots. No doubt he chose those jeans specifically for their butt-hugging abilities. He probably practiced that hug-promoting movement in the mirror.

  The only impressive thing about Simon at the moment was how badly he was losing at the ringtoss game. He couldn’t get even one ring to land over one bottle neck.

  She pulled a Mounds bar out of her pocket and unwrapped it, smiling. Watching him lose was the most enjoyable experience she’d had all day. He exchanged tickets for more rings, and set them out on the flat, wooden ledge in front of him, arranging a crude row of circles over the peeling paint. Beyond the ledge stood the hundred or so green glass bottles, arranged in a rough square. He threw one ring after another, never once looping a bottle neck, and then called for more.

  Hah! Midcity’s biggest, baddest gambler, trying to win at a sideshow game. Of all people, he should know such games were rigged. Only fools played sideshow games.

  She edged closer, carefully chewing the chocolate off the side of the coconutty candy, as Simon lined up a new round of rings.

  “Enjoying yourself?” he asked.

  Startled, Fawna realized that he was speaking to her.

  CHAPTER TWO