The Fortune Teller's Daughter by Jordan Bell Page B

stayed
quiet long enough that I started to drift sleepily between waking and dream,
sure he had no intention of answering me. His warmth, the comfort of his body
beside mine, was almost too good to be true.
    A scratch of
a warning whispered in my ear to ruin it. Don’t get too comfortable . This
is not yours .
    “Eli,” he
said finally. “Eli Matteo. I’ve gone by other names, but I prefer this one.”
    Eli.
    My magician
did have a name after all.
    “How did you
get into my apartment?”
    “I am a magician ,
Serafine.”
    “That
doesn’t even make any sense. My door was locked. The window is three stories
off the street.”
    “I could saw
you in half too, if you like. I know all kinds of tricks.”
    I snorted.
“No, thank you.”
    He leaned
his head back and I could feel his breathing even out. He sounded tired.
    “That’s too
bad.”
    The train
car lurched manically on its tracks, robbing us of our stillness. Lightning
whiplashed across the sky outside, causing the lights to blink on and off while
thunder rattled the sliding doors. Eli stiffened and peeled his fingers from
mine, placed my hands in my lap as calmly as possible, and stood slowly. He
stepped into the middle of the aisle, legs wide for balance, and looked
carefully around our empty car.
    “What is
it?” I followed his gaze, but there was nothing to see. There was no one else.
    Fear made my
lungs hurt, made it difficult to stand. That predator feeling came back, that
acute, primal knowledge that if I went another step I’d never return.
    “Sera…” Eli
warned and reached for me just as the train lurched sickeningly in one
direction so hard I could feel us leave the tracks, briefly, long enough to
feel my stomach bottom out. I stumbled, caught one of the vertical bars for
balance to keep from going to my knees. I lost track of Eli as the lights
strobed off and on, blinding and nauseating.
    The man
appeared at the end of the empty car, standing so still as if the lurch of the
speeding train did not bother his equilibrium. The strobe effect made it
impossible to see his details, the thing that made him more than an apparition.
    When the
lights flickered out and back on, the apparition seemed closer by a foot, head
bent. It flickered again when the lights stayed on, he shifted closer another
foot without ever moving his feet. Another foot. Like a bad radio signal. I
could almost see through him when he shifted another foot closer.
    “Eli…what…”
    “Stay behind
me,” he ordered and moved to block the aisle. He too seemed unimpeded by the
shake and rock of the train car even as it seemed to go faster, impossibly
fast, blowing through the next station without slowing.
    The
apparition flickered out again, left an empty train car and my imagination
swearing it couldn’t have been real.
    Then it
reappeared inches from Eli’s rigid body, caught the right frequency, and
snapped its head up.
    “Castel!”
Eli gasped in the moment the Other cracked his fist into Eli’s sternum and sent
the Magician sailing down the length of the car to the opposite end. Impossible. No man had such strength. I knew this even as Eli lay unmoving in a pile on
the floor too far away for me to reach.
    The Other
flicked his gaze from Eli’s body to where I’d been cowering behind the
Magician.
    He tilted
his head, appraised me like a specimen he might buy in a secondhand store.
    “Interesting.”
    I didn’t see
him disappear. He was there and he was beside me, a trick of the flickering
lights or a result of my very real fear. He didn’t even let me scream.
    A fist
wrapped around my throat and yanked me off my feet. Fingers like vices held me
aloft, like I weighed nothing, like there was no such thing as gravity. For a
moment it was like being underwater, and as the fist tightened on my windpipe
it also felt like drowning.
    As black
splots blotted out the face of the Other, he cracked my face violently into the
window and let go.
    Light
bloomed behind my eyes,