Adam Grimmer's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Adam came back to the hollow at dawn to check the ring. The fire still burned low. The small drake watched him from the tallest stump. He counted the runes on each seat and found them clean. Then he saw the bootprints in the soft dirt by the north tree, leading in, not out. A woman sat on one of the stumps with a purple feather laid across her open palm. She was not the barista, the librarian, or the cashier. She wore a long coat and had a folding table set up at her knees, its top crowded with tarot cards in a wide spread. She looked up and said her name was Tasha. She said the feather had sung to her from a gutter three towns over, and she had followed it here because the cards told her to. Adam reached for the knife in his coat. Tasha did not move. She turned one card on the table and tapped it. Many would come to train under him, she said. The spread showed it plainly. Then she turned a second card and her finger stopped. Something dark was waking in the East. He had to keep the hollow secret until the cards said the time was right, or it would find him before he was ready. Adam lowered his hand. He asked how she had passed the drake and the sigils. Tasha said the cards had walked her through. He sat across from her and looked at the spread. The feather had been meant for three. It had pulled in a fourth he had not chosen, and she had brought a warning he could not yet act on. He told her she could stay. He told her she could not tell anyone what she had seen here, not the shape of the ring, not the road in, not his name. She gathered the cards into a neat stack and agreed. The coven had its first member. The secret it had to keep had just grown teeth.