Though I was eager to see my parents, this guy kept showing up and I no longer believed in coincidences. My parents were going to have to wait.
I pulled up a stool next to a tall, gaunt man in a pin-striped suit and top hat, who was shuffling a deck of cards with skeletal hands. When he turned to look at me, I jerked and looked away. I did not look back again. Beneath the brim of his hat, there was no face. Shadows swirled like a dark tornado.
“Divine your future?” it said.
I shook my head, wondering how it spoke without a mouth.
“Ignore him, beautiful girl.”
“Show you who you are?”
I shook my head again, silently willing it to go away.
“Dream me a song.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Sing me a line.”
I angled my body away from it.
“You show me your face, I’ll show you mine.” Cards snapped together as it shuffled.
“Look, buddy, I have no desire to see—”
I broke off, physically unable to say another word. I opened my mouth and closed it, like a fish gasping for water, but I was gasping for words. It was as if all the sentences that I had been born with, enough to last a lifetime, had been sucked from me, leaving me utterly blank, silenced. The shape of my thoughts, the way I would phrase them, had been taken. Everything I’d ever said, everything I ever would say, it held now. I felt a terrible pressure inside my head, as if my brain was being vacuumed clean of who I was. I had the crazy thought that, in moments, I would be as blank behind my face as it was beneath its hat, leaving only a dark tornado, ceaselessly whirling, inside my skull. And maybe, just maybe, once it had everything it wanted from me, a fragment of a face would appear beneath its brim.
Terror gripped me.
I shot a frantic look at the dreamy-eyed guy. He turned away and poured a shot. I mouthed a silent plea at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
“I keep telling you not to talk to things,” the reflection of the dreamy-eyed guy said.
He poured and served, moving from one customer to the next, while my identity was erased.
Help me, my eyes screamed in the mirror.
The dreamy-eyed guy finally turned back to me. “She is not yours,” he told the tall, gaunt man.
“She spoke to me.”
“Look deeper.”
After a moment, “My mistake,” the card-shuffling thing said.
“Don’t repeat it.”
As abruptly as they’d vanished, I had words again. My brain was full of thoughts and sentences. I was a person, complete with ideas and dreams. The vacuum was gone.
I fell off my stool and stumbled away from the faceless man. On shaky legs, I tottered three stools down, hoisted myself back up, and clutched the counter.
“He will not bother you again,” the dreamy-eyed guy said.
“Whiskey,” I croaked.
He slid a shot of top-shelf whiskey down the counter. I slammed it back and demanded another. I gasped as fire exploded inside me. Though I wanted nothing more than to put a mile between myself and the card-shuffling monster, I had questions. I wanted to know how the dreamy-eyed guy could command something like that. For that matter, what was the faceless thing?
“The fear dorcha, beautiful girl.”
“Reading my mind?”
“Don’t have to. Question’s all over your face.”
“How does it kill?” I’m obsessed with the many ways the Fae dole out death. I make meticulous notes in my journal on the various castes and their methods of execution.
“Death is not its goal.”
“What is?”
“It seeks the Faces of Humanity, beautiful girl. Got one to spare?”
I said nothing. I had no desire to know more. Chester’s was a Fae safety zone. On my last visit to the club, it was made abundantly clear to me that if I killed anything on the premises, I would be killed. Since Ryodan and his men already wanted me dead, tonight probably wasn’t the best night to test my luck. If I learned more about it, or the killing weight of my spear in my shoulder holster grew any heavier, I might do something rash.
“Some things can’t be killed that easy.”
I glanced, startled, at the dreamy-eyed guy. He was looking at my hand inside my coat. I hadn’t even realized I’d reached for it.
“It’s Fae, right?” I said.
“Mostly.”
“So, how can it be killed?”
“Does it need to be killed?”
“You’d stick up for it?”
“You’d stick a spear in it?”
I raised a brow. Apparently, a prerequisite for working at Chester’s was that you had to like the Fae and be willing to put up with their unique appetites.