Death always visited me in August. A slow and delicious month we turned into something swift and brutal. The change, quick as a card trick.
I should have seen it coming. The way the body would be laid out on the library floor, the way the gardens would be torn apart by the search. The way our jealousy, greed, and ambition were waiting to devour us all, like a snake eating its own tail. The ouroboros. And even though I know the dark truths we hid from one another that summer, some part of me still longs for The Cloisters, for the person I was before.
I used to think it might have gone either way. That I might have said no to the job or to Leo. That I might never have gone to Long Lake that summer night. That the coroner, even, might have decided against an autopsy. But those choices were never mine to make. I know that now.
I think a lot about luck these days. Luck. Probably from the Middle High German glück, meaning fortune or happy accident. Dante called Fortune the ministra di Dio, or the minister of God. Fortune, just an old-fashioned word for fate. The ancient Greeks and Romans did everything in the service of Fate. They built temples in its honor and bound their lives to its caprices. They consulted sibyls and prophets. They scried[1] the entrails of animals and studied omens. Even Julius Caesar said to have crossed the Rubicon only after casting a pair of dice. Iactaalea est—the die is cast. The entire fate of the Roman Empire depended on that throw. At least Caesar was lucky once.
[1] scried - foretell the future using a crystal ball
Charlie’s ugly Crocs stuck to the mats on the floor behind the bar, making a sticky, squelching sound. Sweat slicked the skin under her arms, at the hollow of her throat, and between her thighs. This was her second shift today; the afternoon guy quit abruptly to follow his girlfriend to Los Angeles and she was stuck with his hours until Odette hired a replacement.
But as tired as Charlie was, she needed the cash. And she figured she better keep busy. Keeping busy meant keeping out of trouble.
There’d always been something wrong with Charlie Hall. Crooked, from the day she was born. Never met a bad decision she wasn’t willing to double down on. Had fingers made for picking pockets, a tongue for lying, and a shriveled cherry pit for a heart.
If her shadow had been one of those magic ones, she was pretty sure even that thing would have run away.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to be different. And she was trying. Sure, it had been hard to keep her worst impulses in check these past ten months, but it was better than being a lit match in a town she’d already doused in gasoline.
She had a job— with a timesheet, even— and a stolid brick of a boyfriend who paid his share of the rent. Her gunshot wound was healing nicely. Little successes, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t proud of them.
It was on that thought that Charlie looked up to see a test of her resolve walk through the double doors of Rapture Bar & Lounge.
In Extract B, better than being a lit match in a town she’d already doused in gasoline means that the main character: