The Fortune Teller's Daughter by Jordan Bell

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smoked cigarettes off the balcony at two in the morning. I was sixteen and we’d
just had another knockdown, drag out screaming match that had the neighbors banging
on the paper thin walls and Cora crying in the bathroom when I slammed the
front door, swearing I was running away for good.
    I’d made it
to the street, sweat soaking my hair, pooling down my back and thighs. I
weighed more then too, so round I’d taken refuge in men’s clothes far too big
for me. They hid the bump above my belly button and the bulges around my bra.
Wearing the big men’s clothes made me feel thinner than I was, but I was still
full of self-disgust because I was lonely and no one noticed me and I lived in
a motel with a mother who treated me like her pet.
    I walked far
enough that I could only just see the motel lights when I froze. For the first
time in my life I felt danger, the skin crawling, heart racing feeling girls
get telling them that something very bad will happen if they take another step.
I knew in the creeping sensation on the back of my neck that if I kept walking,
I was never going to come back.
    All the
worst predators chased me down when I turned and ran for the motel, sick with
fear. I didn’t stop until I’d shoved my way into the motel room and locked the
door behind me. My panic sent Cora over the edge and we moved to Arundel, Maine
the next day.
    The face of
the man in my doorway was the thing I’d run from that night. Vacuous yellow
rimmed irises traced my face and body in that half second it took me to shove
my door closed on him, but he was faster and stronger. He barreled into my
apartment, cutting off my scream by clapping a hand over my mouth and across
the back of my head. He shhhed me, flat lips forming a grotesque O and leaving spit dotted across my cheek until he had me against the wall.
    In the light
bleeding in from the hallway, another figure snaked in, then another, black
silhouettes who were not quite men. Flashlights clicked on and as the
yellow-eyed man fought to contain my wild struggles, the other two began to
tear my apartment to pieces.
    “Baby girl,
baby girl, stop. Stop.” He pushed my head back, forced my head at an unnatural
angle. I felt his fingers prod at my mouth. I clawed and fought, snarling,
snuffling noises muffled against the palm of his hand. He shushed me kindly
with eyes so dead they left me feeling rotten on the inside.
    He pressed
his barreled chest into mine until it was hard to breathe. “Baby girl, why
don’t you make my night and tell me what the Magician wanted with a thing like
you?”
    Something
behind him crashed to the ground and I heard plates shattering against the
wall.
    Please,
please let someone come…
    He slid his
hand away from my mouth.
    “Tell me.
Tell me what he wanted.”
    “Go screw
yourself, you fucking psychopath,” I snarled and flailed at his face, fully
prepared to gauge his eyes out with my nails.
    I caught his
cheek and ripped lines of red to his jaw.
    He hissed,
narrowed his eyes into snake-like slits and calmly grabbed me by the hair and
face and cracked me solid against the drywall.
    Pain
blossomed across the back of my head, a brief and angry swelling that dulled
and left me feeling dizzy and light headed.
    I gasped,
hating the taste of tears on my lips and the grainy, dirty flavor of his skin.
    And then
before he could strike me again, his hands were yanked off in a single grunt,
the only sound he managed before the Magician struck him in the face with his
fist. With the sound of bone breaking bone, he crumpled to my feet.
    Without the
yellow-eyed man holding me up my legs gave out and I slid down the wall.
    “Stay,” the
Magician ordered and then he turned to face the other two men ransacking my
apartment. They came at him together, but it was clear very quickly that it was
no match. The Magician opened his hand and sent one flying back into my fridge
without even touching him. The other swung, but he blocked the punch,