“I was hoping to have a little chat with you—if you have the time.”
“My lord, I am dead,” she declared with a flourish of her hands, ushering us into her home. “I have nothing but time!”
Lord Death ducked down as he stepped inside the dark house after the young woman.
I remained out in the alleyway for a moment, staring into the darkness after them. If I thought the alleyway had been dark and creepy, it paled in comparison to the darkness of the house of the Empath. Death vanished from my sight and for a moment I felt safer out in the openness of the alley than I would in the darkness of the home.
Something moving before me caught my eye, making me look up again, wondering what this world would throw at me now.
It was just Lord Death, leaning against the door frame, his arms crossed in front of his chest. He looked like a shadow hiding in the darkness as he stared down the steps to where I continued to just stand.
“Rebecca?”
I must have jumped at the sound of his voice because I watched his face change from slightly annoyed at my inability to follow him to slightly humored…
There was still something in me that warned me to stay away--surely a living thing constantly being so close to death could not be healthy. There was something about him--something powerful and perhaps even dangerous--that made me nervous. But I had to trust him—at least for now.
Picking up my skirts that I was quickly coming to despise with each step I took, I let Lord Death take my hand and lead me away from the outside world and into the stuffy darkness that was the Empath's home.
I felt like I had just stepped foot inside a haunted house with lamps covered in old scarves, their tassels swaying back and forth as we wandered across the old, lop sided creaky floor. Tables filled the main room we stood in, covered with tea sets, the tea cups on their saucers rattling softly. I tried to ignore the layers upon layers of spider and cob webs billowing in the breeze over my head.
“This is the tea house,” the woman with hair as black as night explained lazily. She was dressed head to toe in white—a simple cotton dress, a scarf around her head, and a billowing shawl hanging from her arms—it was a stark contrast to her dark hair and even darker eyes. “If you’d like,” she turned her head just enough to look back at me with a smile on her face, “I can read your tea leaves after this.”
The idea of fortune telling and reading tea leaves, numerology, and tarot cards was almost laughable to me. Why did the dead need to know their future? What was there left to see? But I realized that humans always long for more—we need more, want to know more, want to see more… it makes us feel as though we have a bit more power over our lives. Of course, we never have and we most likely never will have any power or control... but it's still nice to pretend every so often, I guess.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
I'm still super behind on NaNoWriMo... I just passed 15,000 words when by now I'm usually around the halfway mark. But today was a pretty decent writing day for this year so here is a snippet.
Enter our new character--Kira--the tea witch and Empath that brings Becks and Death a bit of unwanted news. She's named after my favorite student here in Russia and I absolutely adore her.
I'm hoping to get a big day of writing in tomorrow! Only 11 more days here in Russia and there is still a lot of writing to do, packing to do, and (of course) work.
a.r.w.
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