Throne by Phil Tucker Page B

the next. No friendly looks. What had she done wrong? Had she been humming, or distracting the others while working?
    Then she saw. By her table. The belts. A pile of them, a slithering horde of them. Not ten, not thirty, not even forty. Hundreds. They had slid over, fallen onto the floor, buried the brown carpet beneath their morass of twisted lengths. A hundred? Two hundred?
    Maya stared at them, not comprehending. Had she made them all? Turning, she looked at Jose, who couldn’t meet her eyes. Then she looked at Sarah, the closest to a friend she had in the group. Sarah’s face was pale, drawn. Her eyes were closed off, afraid. Maya raised her eyebrows, then pointed at the pile of belts. How many? She asked, and Sarah shook her head.
    “Over four hundred,” said a voice. Mr. Donahue. He was standing in the corner of the room, and the way he looked at her made her shiver. As if her body were a pale thing in his hands, and he was turning her over and over while gazing down at her from the dark, searching for a place to bite. “Over four hundred,” he said again, “In six hours. That’s about sixty belts an hour. One belt a minute.”
    He stepped forward, and Maya shrank back into her seat. She wanted to shake her head. The light was hurting her eyes, the endless shimmer. People were murmuring now. Mr. Donahue was staring at her, his lips wet where he’d been running his tongue over them, his gray, receding hair brushed back and gleaming with gel. “A belt a minute. Incredible,” he said, and for a moment she thought he was going to reach out and run his hand over her hair, pet her like one might a prize dog. “Incredible.”
    Maya looked about the tiny room. Nobody would meet her eyes. Everybody looked away, including Sarah. Everybody looked away except Mr. Donahue. Words came back to her, from earlier in the night. I can help you , the man in green had said. I can help .
    Maya shook her head, tried to rise to her feet. Mr. Donahue reached out, placed his hand on her shoulder, and pushed her back down. “Shhh,” he said. “There’s no rush to go anywhere. Stay still. Shhhh.”

Chapter 5
     
     
    Maribel wrapped her scarf once and then twice around her neck and then tucked each end into her coat which she zipped closed, right up to her chin. It was getting colder in New York, as if the city were settling in for a big freeze, a premature ice age of its own, each day a premonition of the frozen centuries that were to come. Stepping out of the building’s front door and into the street, she paused like a hound arrested by a new scent, and lifted her face to the wind that moaned down the building canyon. There was a charge in the air, a metallic tang mixed with the noxious smell of exhaust bled into crusted snow. Suppressing a shiver, she walked quickly to the end of the block and stopped at the avenue. Extended her hand, and waited for the first cab to pull up to the curb. For the first time since she had moved in, she had a place to go.
    She’d spotted the small store two days ago, and spent the intervening time debating the wisdom of going. A red palm had been lit in bright red neon in the window front, and gaudy curtains of the kind one might expect to find gracing a gypsy’s caravan filled in the rest. Ms. Silestra’s Psychic Readings, had read the sign. The sight of the small store had fallen on her like a depth charge, not making any impact at first, only detonating later that day while she had sat in her corner café, chin resting on her palm, gazing out the window at nothing.
    Why not? She had felt nothing but disdain for psychics all her life, considering them charlatans, but now the decision to go made a clinical, logical sense. Something had coalesced out of the air, taken Sofia and left in her place a dead log of tissue and bone. If that was possible, then it required no leap of faith on her part to accept that a psychic might be able to help. And any psychic that could afford to operate in the