(Adapted from live play with Starspell)

Late Summer, 2015

The city was an abundant stretch of ley lines and lifelines, a colossal palm of mystique, of alleyways like arteries and holy-ground like veins offshooting restaurant runoff and overfilled dumpsters. The intersections were messy and unpredictable, even dangerous to those unacquainted with the pulse of the city. But for those who listened, for those who stood quiet on the cobbles or the curbs or the asphalt runways where bourgeois mingled with bohemian, there was a percussive rhythm to it all, a wayfinding system that relied on letting the city seep up through one's toes and speak directly to the limbic system without the interference of logic.

Ketch couldn't remember the last time he'd been truly lost here; he honored the method of listening with his feet and fingertips, especially at night and especially in the Marketplace where the heartbeat beneath the ground joined in the symphony of voices and the clatter of carts and wares above. It was a strange way of becoming lost, but a proven one; there was a strange solitude to be found in being just one among many.

Lifelines. Leylines. All the lines criss-crossed in separate patterns along the palms she read. Highways where no two came with the same type of asphalt. Lyra could be considered a hack by those that roamed a little too close and became a little too curious, burrowing into one another as the summer sweat its humidity across brows that furrowed when contemplating the phenomenon loitering off to the side. A little higher on the dollar and they might receive astounding results via the old world calligraphy of Rider-Waite tarot cards but often?sometimes too often?Lyra twisted the meanings behind what the cosmos wanted to tell her. White lies looked so pretty when formed on an amaranthine mouth; a deep red, almost purple, that didn?t play by the rules when she smiled like she had known the skeptical faces for years.

Tonight was a slow parade of wolves in business suits, caravans of women masked in traditional garb, the what-have-you nature of a realm that circulated with more than meets the eye, and she a bleach blond pixie amid all the ravenous gorgon-eyed types, shuffling the deck when her last customer left and the only company she was left with were crooked haloes of cigarette smoke. Self-rolled, the foreign cancer of tobacco mingling with rose hips and nectarine. The little booth set up wasn't fancy by any means, but when the dark shifted over and all the lamplights turned on, the decoration of white Christmas lights around that milk crate, makeshift table seemed to pop.

Scrawled on the side of a propped-up chalk board: Fortune Favors: Palm Reading $5 Tarot Reading $10

Ketch stood on the fringes of a small grouping of drummers, hands shoved in his pockets and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth cranking smoke steadily into the air while he listened to sound of palms slapping drumheads. He might have been there by happenstance. He was probably there by happenstance, had a way of walking the streets without expectation or aim late at night, and he usually came across a worthwhile distraction. So it was now with the drum circle and, too, when he turned to flick his cigarette off to the side and spied Lyra's sign and the tell-tale shock of her hair behind a lacework of smoke hanging in the humid air like tattered lace some twenty feet beyond him. He peeled away from the crowd and strolled in her direction: languid, unhurried, eyes taking in the set-up, the sign, the twinkle lights dampening the angles of her face like a soft focus lens. A vintage photograph from a bygone era. "You're cheaper than I expected," he commented, hands still tucked in his pockets and the point of his chin (thick with stubble that straddled the line between lazy and slothful) indicating the sign.

There was little evidence of coincidence trumping what some called Fate, but skepticism was a virus that had no surefire cure; Lyra didn't think of this as a wayward kismet but who could deny the second coming of their connection on these slow burning streets with a backdrop of a weekday evening? Ketch wasn't hard to choose from a lingering crowd: eyes fused with Doppelganger secrets and hard lines earned through long walks down memory lane, etched with a five o'clock shadow, stained with rings of a cigarette he no longer nursed, and a shadow that stretched too far to be of the norm.

Cards kept shuffling between the intricate lines of her slim fingers while her teeth bit a smile into the end of the cigarette she sighed against. "Lower the price, the easier it is for people to pay for something they probably don't believe in. Too high, and they decide it's a hoax and not worth it."

"That's a surprisingly cynical view. Astute, though, maybe. I guess you'd know better than me." Eyes slow to acclimatize to her esoteric surroundings, like he was indulging himself in the way she fanned the cards, the angle of a fine-boned wrist that set their backs to the stars and whatever portents they carried temptingly out of sight. For now.

The deck was set down, her hand shifting to the right to fan them out in a pretty peacock display with their backs turned to the stars. "Enjoying a midnight stroll, Ketch?" He had been animated enough to signal her sign with his chin and she mirrored this previous indication with her own to the seat across from her.

"So is it worth it or is it a hoax?" The quirk at one corner of his mouth was disillusioned but not unaffected; there might still live a spark of belief that could be coaxed into a smolder.

Ketch didn't sit immediately but cast a look over the back of the chair that carried up to the stars above. "I suppose I am, Lyra." There was something familiar about her name that he couldn't place. Or maybe it was just her; something on the tip of his tongue, same as the syllables that composed it against the back of his teeth: half-caught, waiting for cognizance to release it fully. Finally, he sat without ceremony in an ungainly slump, knees splayed wide and the whitewash fade of denim capping them thinning further with a forward lean as he inspected the cards without touching, and then her face, drawing a constellation of her features with eyes far too bright and blue to be entirely human. "Can you See without them?" A single, soft tap of his middle finger a half inch from the cards to show his meaning.

He asked a question that had been served Lyra's way more than a million times but each one was decorated in the bowtie wrapping of a different tongue. His was unusually gritty, gutter-born with a harshness eroding behind his smile like the canyons littering Arizona.

Well deserving those Alice eyes. Too blue, sky blue, to be anything other than eternal; they had seen so much but never became jaded, always fresh beneath the low lidding of her lashes. Thoughtful look became a less potent thing when her attention swung to the cards. They didn't speak -- she spoke for them.

"All depends, I suppose, on if you like what they say or not. Easy to believe in good news while deciding it a charlatan?s lie if it's bad." Accent or not, the hymn of her voice was rustic while being youthful, sultry without being born of a bordello. Ketch didn't touch at a card, but one was singled out, indicated with how his paw prints were now smudged atop the makeshift table. Lyra didn't choose it for him, didn't flip it, just let it sit belly down in such a way as to obey the challenge of his own judgment.

"Sometimes I can see without them,? she confessed while leaning forward to arrange her sights better on him. All the darkness and shadows didn't seem to put a damper on the ivory of her skin. She was Cassiopeia in a world full of carbon copies. "But I trust them more than I trust myself." Them being the cards. Those holy grails that helped to achieve a greatness in astronomy and the culture of her people, her masters, since the first blink of man.

"Do you tell the truth no matter what?" His experience with tarot card readers was limited mostly to the fraudulent who'd spare the harsh in favor of coaxing more money from sweaty palms hoping for a happy future, a child, a husband, a lover, fortune, or a fate other than what slumped their shoulders inward; the methods of his own people (or at least those he could claim with half his blood) had different instruments, many of them brutal, most of them secret. He, however, was not a practitioner of divining. Instinct was the lifeblood that ran through him, culled first from the forests and then from the populace and commingled in a way that was equal parts savage and civilized, an eternal inward struggle with battles waged nightly?sometimes even hourly.

"I say only what should be said. It's not my place to set in motion the ideas of what tomorrow should bring, but that isn't to say I lie, either. People usually just want the facts of -- will I find love? Is my other half cheating? Does my grandmother still watch over me? No one is very intrigued by the broader spectrum of things." Reciting this as if it was in a manual somewhere, a savvy notebook that was handed down for the generations of starstalkers like herself. Here, she was just a woman who enjoyed cherry-red lipstick and the violent clash of music, bathing in the afterglow that was life as it was meant to be. But further into the unknown districts, she could be heralded as a wish granting witch that hid behind the same smile she was giving Ketch now. It progressed a little thicker, a little wider around her teeth, a sense of wonder always tripping down the coast of her girlish features. And tonight, she sat across from a coyote kid that clothed himself in a skin that may or may not be his own.

At the moment, Ketch was all personable ease and a smile that shifted higher for the way the sultry hymn of her voice ran the seams of his skin and sank deeper into his bones. "That's some kind of faith you have," Confession for confession in a matched tone, low and secretive in a way that sent a gentle current of air between the mouths that shared them, "I trust nothing more than myself."

"You don't trust anyone else." Not a question; she recited it in her own verse so that he could hear a nonbiased party reiterate it. "Which is good. And bad." Deep into the silence that grew thick between them, even with the muffled background of drums, stepping-stone feet, and wagging tongues of strangers. Lyra stripped him down, blue eyes capable of dissecting while seeming impartial. "I'd trust you." Quiet, barely above a whisper, but he'll feel it in his bones way down into his marrow as if he had heard the words before.

(continued...)

During her launch of stifled laughter came the ritual of lighting another cigarette, the cloud forced to linger in a mysterious way that cloaked Lyra's features when she finally gave way and looked to the card.

"You're engaging in a conflict that is very close to your heart. Unwilling to let others in on the tension, and possible hostility of it. You're trying to pick up all those missing pieces because you might feel you need to put that puzzle back together to figure out the truth." Everything could be anything when favoring the cards, when learning that some held the same troubles -- but why this card? Lyra dug in deeper when she reached to brush her fingertips across the face of it, drawing down the spine of the depicted champion who had thwarted others in his progression.

"Beware the attempt at vengeance, Ketch. No one wins a victory without a little blood on their hands." So much more huddled on the bench of her tongue, but she swallowed down the unethical spill of it; oily substances like the truth were often hard to scrub from your skin. "There is betrayal in his smile, you see." Tapping along a muddied smirk scribbled in the print of the simple face on the card. "Where one minute he believes he has won because all of his demons are walking away -- but nothing stays dead forever. Cloak and dagger, or should I say, swords. You are pretending, so hard, to be something that you aren't because of -- fear? Regret? The loss of Mimi." Each word was becoming more diluted, harder to hear in the adaptation of the soundtrack spilling around them, the city crushing in till it would dissolve into white noise. Lyra's eyes teetered between the bridges of her thick lashes when looking at him from her side of the smoky veil she wore.

"I'm sorry." Sudden in that, shaking her head some to drive up another regeneration of her inspiring laugh. "I'm sorry." Repeated for clarification; Lyra often overstepped the invisible lines drawn in the sand when the cards were whispering so many things.

Another slow inhale drawn from the pitched corner of his mouth, white streams exhaled through his nose. Ketch stubbed the cherry beneath a boot and was watching the embers wink from orange to black when Lyra began a translation that shifted both his focus and body resolutely (and maybe even reluctantly) upward the longer she went on. His features hardened, firm lines set in the cement of fortitude and something else, too, something closer to beast than man that wrestled with its human constraints.

Ketch heard the droning white noise of people around them, and then she said a name and he heard nothing but her voice and the apology that came like an afterthought. His knee knocked sharply against the corner of her table -- unintentionally, but with enough incidental force to scatter the cards, and he felt the ominous crawl of skin along his forearms, the desire to reach across the table and curl his fingers tight around her throat until the color fled from beneath his grip and the name that didn?t belong on her tongue was choked back into darkness. Instinct, see, was sometimes a burden. It was higher consciousness that settled the pulse of fire in his blood and instead of leaning forward, he settled back with effort, chin tucked close to his chest, a knuckle thick with scars and the scabbed evidence of a more recent scuffle smoothing back and forth over the skin of his forehead. He swallowed back three sentences and tried to frame a question, instead, not trusting a declarative to come out civilly for now, "Regret, probably. But the pretending to be other than I am?"

Wolves on the horizon tend to reflect their eyes in cryptic ways. Flash of silhouettes in the dark with the moon hanging low, exposed as a pregnant belly, shining eerie light on otherwise nocturnal habits. This was the face of the moon, of a flesh-crafted Luna that offered a shred of illumination to a man who smiled while starving off a beast. And it clicked as the cocking of a trigger to unload a sudden bang of human emotion, the red poker of her words aimed at a soft spot within Ketch's ribcage; he buckled enough to cause a bit of chaos on the table where the cards suddenly shifted, flipped, gracefully fluttered as the feathers of a peacock might in some show of domination before cast aside -- all while the center of everything, the gravitational pull of a woman with constellations in the vast blue of her eyes, stared. Not harshly, not in judgment, but melting away into a smoother valley of attention that spoke volumes of her delicate regret at having let a simple name skip the stones of her teeth. Ferocity had a smell to it. First crack of a match across the red bones of a book. There was sulfur with black Cohosh, blood and white willow, a feast of traditional flavors ranging from savory to sweet. Lyra swallowed down the wafting of sumac that shouldn't have been here, not in this busy section of a semi-city, and reached to begin retrieving the cards that had fanned out in disarray from his exposure to this pretty piece of girl-creature.

"Everyone is sometimes afraid to let themselves be seen, right? We try very hard to keep our bad parts, our dark gems, hidden away. I think it's because we are afraid of how others may interpret us afterwards. Are you man, or are you beast? Either way -- my cards --" and by such she meant herself, her structure in tune with the cosmos, "-- don't lie."

There was a reason that the night creatures howled at the moon, and it was reflected in the sudden luminescence of eyes that knew far more of sinew and soil than celestial patterns and tides: jealousy, admiration, respect, or some pungent bouquet of all three. Had Ketch gone with his first instinct, Lyra might have heard the raw-throated admission of his own nature prodded from slow simmer into roiling flare by the arrow-tipped landing of her words. Her aim could not have been truer had she wielded a knife and ill intent; still blind-sided and reeling internally, Ketch watched her collection of the cards, the tenderness she afforded her Vision and the way her fingers floated reverently above them. The night had changed in an instant, in two syllables, and the lenient disposition of happenstance and aimlessness had evaporated, leaving him in a cold sweat of defensive posturing. Ketch felt the restlessness of his extremities and the craving for vast empty space where girls with impossibly blue eyes didn't know things they were not supposed to. It was a moment during which, in many ways, he felt more naked than he could recall ever having felt in his life. Unfair to sit there without a way in which to strip the girl opposite him in a similar manner.

When he spoke this time, there was a fraying ribbon of calm in his tone, compartmentalization at its best, even if it strained the fibers of his soul. "Not one or the other. Both. There's a story passed around where I'm from about two wolves that live inside us all: one evil, jealous, superior, resentful and the other good, kind, generous, and faithful. The question is always which one wins, and the answer, traditionally, is 'the one you feed.'? He paused for the internal debate to resolve itself. When he continued, it was in the tone of confession. ?But I always thought there was another answer: you feed them both." It was the second time he?d shared this story since his return, memory of the first time jarred him further. Ketch leaned forward, fingering the edge of the Five of Swords still face up on the table and then stood, finding he had nothing else to say in such a drastically changed landscape; his usual easy quips were playing hooky.

"That's a great saying." She ushered the tide of her voice in as if it could be a balm to the savagery tearing through his circuitry. Hardship of peeling back the skin to those that sat opposite of her was the karma of being from her ilk; Lyra had been burned at the stake, shot through the heart, landed face down within the very streets of New York, but it was the validity of those she saw that wore on her. Curse of the moon, you could say. Lyra lapped at the smoke still toying at the corner of her lips before looking up at Ketch, looking up to him, and no matter the flood of his ferocious appetite which lingered long in the pinpoints of his eyes, she smiled. A moonmilk doe that would have given her throat for his banquet and kept that smile the entire time.

This was no coincidence. It never was.

"I would think of it more as...neither ever really win. Some days are good, some days are bad, but the black and white? It never becomes grey." Lyra began to shuffle the cards once more without watching how her fingers, delicate bones and orchid skin, intimately touched on each one as if they had always been there and she knew their edges better than she knew the fates of man. "Question is: who did you feed tonight, Ketch?" Cards were stowed away into that plum velvet pouch, knotted at the neck and strangled till it could be twined around her frail-seeming wrist. Standing up as if she knew this would be an appropriate point to sever their shadows, which had been groping at one another this whole time, combined into one unexplainable abomination that would need to be cut down the center.

"I'm really good at feeding the hungry, too." A shot in the dark, really, how she let that comet-tail innuendo hang with the rest of the vapor from the cigarette she'd been nursing. "Hope this didn't scare you off. I like looking at you." Bold, unabashed. Lyra confessed it like it might be a sin but she heralded no scarlet letter. Lights were shut down in that tiny booth on that boring corner of the markets and she pulled down the curtain of her lashes for one last look at the shape of his jawline, how the turf of his features was scratched in marks of a five o'clock shadow, before breaking her fingers apart to wave at him. Almost as if all these words that had been passed between them had not affected her intrigue with the jackal with the grime of oil and dirt beneath his fingers.

"See you later, wolf." Lyra proposed that pet name with tenderness, with selfishness, with the classified signature of her voice before moving off in a separate direction from wherever the rogue would pivot his step.

Balm or temporary panacea to the ichor crawling in his veins, Lyra?s voice came like zephyr stolen from Spring to soothe the heat that'd flooded his body. Smoke wafted from her lips in meditative currents that transfixed Ketch, same as the susurrus of the cards she shuffled. But he did not return her smile for fear that his own would have a sharp edge he couldn't control. No, this realm harbored no coincidences; Fate colluded with Timing and would eventually bring the curtain down on all the best laid plans. He provided no insight for final question but felt the answer in the flex and curl of his fingers and knew, too, that she could probably feel the same. His hunger felt boundless in the moment, and her eyes looked like a vividly saturated promise; he stared at them at length until the blue bled from the edges and blurred into darkness and then turned away, looking off down the street at some point in the distance. "I don't scare off easily," he said. A lead-lined truth from a heavy tongue.

"Until next time, Lyra," no clever metaphor tonight for the brazen oracle that peddled her gift with the nonchalant confidence of a snake charmer. He moved East towards sunrise where the pull of the moon didn't grip his bones so tenaciously.

(End)