Augur Ch. 01

"Sure thing, Manny, let me know how it goes! Thanks again for the tamales."

I closed the door to my apartment as my guest walked out, then sighed tiredly and turned to plod back to the kitchen. A large ziploc freezer bag sat waiting for me there, steam fogging up the interior, holding a promise of dinner tonight, lunch, and possibly even dinner again tomorrow depending on how hungry I was between now and then. I grabbed a beer from the fridge, extracted a corn-husk-wrapped treat, and popped the can as I sat down on my couch.

The tamales were a payment for services rendered. While I did also accept money in exchange for my talents - as well as performing "real", if not terribly steady gig work - my rates always varied with my clientele. In this case, Emanuel Sainz was a neighbor, from an apartment on the other side of the building, and the consult in question didn't take long, so my rates were low. Also, his mother's tamales were worth their weight in gold, so it felt like a fair exchange: my magic for hers.

Admittedly, in this case I didn't think that she actually literally used magic. So far as I knew. As I bit into an unwrapped, still steaming tamale, I groaned happily and reminded myself that I did not, in fact, have real certainty that his mother did not use magic. I, on the other hand, very much did. Nearly my entire family possessed what the greater magical community apparently referred to as "minor talents". So minor, in fact, that we were not generally welcomed into the arms of the magical community at large, and I had never spoken personally with anyone other than a fellow fringe dweller to validate that was the term. For all I knew, they called us "squibs" or something equally ridiculous and pop-culture-y. These days, though, maybe not..

My talent was a bit of an odd one, but once I understood it well enough to judge, I always felt that it suited me. Taking a little time, energy, and concentration, I had the power to assess the range of possibilities that could result from... almost anything. If you shuffled a deck of cards, and told me to pick one at random, I could tell you that you had about a one in fifty two chance to pull the ace of spades. I could tell you that without using my power, because I graduated high school and had a pretty decent understanding of statistics, but I could tell you more or less the same thing with my power. The information wouldn't look quite the same, since to me that would look like a crystalline red field with just a hint of blueish green, rather than a specific number, but by now I had a good enough feel for the results of a power check to know what that meant.

Moreover, I could give a semi-decent lay of the odds for almost any situation I considered, with the accuracy of my reading - my "portent", as my nerdy father described it - increasing as my understanding of the situation got better. If a random stranger off the street asked me what the chances were that they would make it to work and back safely, I could give them a quick and dirty answer that probably didn't fall too far from an actuarial table. If I knew what they were driving, and what route they were taking, my portent would map closer to reality. If I knew them personally, and had driven their car, and the route they described, my results would be more accurate still.

Unfortunately, that's why my talent was regarded as distinctly "minor" on the grand scheme of things. In order to more accurately predict anything, to give better odds of success, I had to understand so much about the circumstances I was predicting that my ability became less of a scrying of future events, and more about pointing out the obvious.

Much of that came down to human free will. The one area that I'd always been relatively consistent with is predicting events that appear to an outsider to have a large degree of random chance, but that in truth are predetermined. Humans shuffling cards have a great deal of impact on the outcome of the deal of a hand of poker. A fully stand-alone electronic slot machine that relies entirely on its internal programming to generate results has no free will, and the only human intervention is down to the person pulling the lever. Even that has some impact on the results, though, which precluded me from making it rich anywhere in Vegas. There was also the issue of the Vampire Mafia. Apparently they frowned on any degree of "gifted" individuals intervening in their turf. I hadn't found that out for myself, having never been to Vegas, but my aunt was pretty clear it wasn't worth the risk.

Sometimes, though, someone wants to know the spread in front of them. Manny was an enterprising entrepreneur who wanted to get out of apartment life and 9-5 jobs, so once every couple weeks, he would engage my services and ask me what the odds of a new hustle panning out were. We would shoot the shit for an hour while he laid out his plans, and at the end of it, I would tell him what his chances were. He'd bring me some of his mom's cooking. I had a pretty similar setup with about a dozen other folks. Some of them I charged cash, some favors, and a few of them I offered the service for free for one reason or another.

I was just putting away the remaining tamales and deciding between video games or Netflix for the evening when a knock derailed my train of thought. I closed the fridge and ambled over to the door, peering through the peephole before letting whoever was on the other side know whether I was home. On spying the lovely face of my very pretty landlord, Sara, I paused. As far as I knew, I was up to date on my rent - probably - and she and I didn't normally talk casually. Sara didn't entirely buy into the awesome powers of my talent, but she was superstitious enough that on months when I might have come up short, she was willing to accept a trade of my services for the amount I was missing. That may have just been her way of offering me charity, but as long as the late payments didn't show up on my credit report, I was happy.

I paused for just a moment to consult my gift before opening the door. Engaging with people in real time was one of the ways my talent was weakest. People's moods fluctuated pretty rapidly when they were socializing, and while some outcomes were relatively fixed - groping a girl at a bar would lead to a bad end ninety-nine times out of a hundred - most had at least a little wiggle room. Worse, it wasn't as if I could look through all of the possible outcomes of a conversation and pick the one I wanted. What I got instead was more like a rainbow graph, with certain areas highlighting more vividly as I contemplated what I might say.

None of the standard greetings I might give flooded my mind with dangerous crimson, so I opened the door and gave my best winning smile. "Hey Sara! What can I do for you?"

My landlady was short - barely five-two - slender, and young, with dark hair tied back in a relatively severe ponytail. She was hispanic - I was pretty sure her parents were from Mexico, but we weren't 'talking about family' close, so I wasn't exactly sure of her nationality. She was also tasked with extracting rent from a collection of low-income losers who couldn't pony up the funds to find a better place to live. In order to encourage those of her tenants who would just as soon not pay their rent, the young woman generally adopted a largely stern, business-like manner that spoke of her resolve and position of power. Today, however, her eyes were wide, and rather than boring a hole through my head, they darted around the inside of my apartment the moment the door swung open. While Sara rarely shouted, her voice normally carried, which made the faltering way she asked me, "Hey Jack - mind if I come inside for a minute?" stand out even more.

"Yeah, of course - come on in." I stepped back and gestured inside, pointing towards the kitchen. I watched the brunette as she stepped through, taking a moment to admire the way her pants hugged her backside. Sara was fit, and while she and I had never been involved - nor had she given me so much as a hint that she was interested - she was worth checking out. Her hips swayed gently as she stepped over to lean against the kitchen counter, and it was only an unprompted flash of red from my gift that ensured that my eyes met hers when she turned around, rather than being caught blatantly in the act of looking at her ass. She took a deep breath as I closed the door and turned back to face her, clearly steeling herself, then spoke quietly.

"Look, Jack... I never bought into your whole... magic fortune-telling thing, but... it's legit, right? Like... actual magic, occult power legit?"

My brow furrowed at the question and I thought for a moment on how to answer, eventually just drawling out a long, probing, "Yeeeesss....?"

It took Sara another few moments to gather herself, her eyes drifting past me to stare through the door to my apartment, before she snapped her attention back to me with a visible degree of effort. When she spoke again, her voice was still quiet, but a little of her typical brisk tone emerged. "Ok. Look, I've cut you deals before, because you seem like a nice guy, and you always make an effort. I never get the feeling that you're trying to cheat me. I'm not sure that I believe you actually have magic powers, but you did warn me against that timeshare, so maybe you're on to something. Or maybe you just read a buzzfeed article telling you all the way timeshares would screw you, and when I ignored you, that was on me. Now, though..."

She paused her sudden flood of words, inhaling again, and then continuing quickly, "I think one of my other tenants is into something weird. Occult, freaky black magic weird. I want you to check it out for me."

I let myself drift into my talent while the pretty young woman spoke, curious to see that there was a flood of teal available in my responses. Normally conversations like this just didn't include that much positive outcome, but there were good things that could come out of this talk. As such, I didn't hesitate much before stating, "Ok - I'm interested. Can you tell me anything about him? About what he's doing?"

She shook her head, her gaze dropping down to stare at the floor while she answered. "No. Yes. Ok, so... do you know Micah? Over in 214? He's late on his rent. Two months late. Starting eviction notice late. One of his neighbors bitched about a weird smell coming from his place, so I stopped by to check it out." She stopped there, bringing her eyes up to my face. The look of sudden concern she saw must have been pretty obvious, because she paused and held up both hands, "No, no, no - Edith saw him walking around yesterday, so it's not like he stopped paying because he died. Edith is his neighbor in 215, she's the one who complained."

She took another deep breath, clearly affected by something more than typical slumlord dealings. "The smell was weird, too. Not rotten, or even... bad, but sharp. Aromatic, like some kind of weird flowers or plants or something. You can smell it all the way down the hallway. Anyway, I knocked on the door, just to check on him, no answer. Normally I'm supposed to give 24 hours notice before I check a place out, but if I think there's danger, I can come in sooner. I used the master key, opened the door, and... that's as far as I got. He has the whole living room cleared out, furniture all pushed to the side, candles lit everywhere, and some kind of circle on the floor. I don't know what he's doing, but..."

She shook her head, but didn't even pause as one hand came up to her chest to make the sign of the cross. "Dios mio, I don't know what he's doing, but I'm not going to be the one to check it out. Abuela would kill me if she heard I was even a little getting involved in anything like that. So. Fifty dollars off your next month's rent if you go in, look around his apartment, see if the little twerp is ok, and clean up whatever he's doing. Right now. Those candles were getting low, I don't want my building catching on fire. If it really is magic he's doing, I don't want to know about it, if he's... summoning devils to help him with his math homework, or doing voodoo to hex his old gym teacher or... whatever, just go in there and tell him to stop stinking up the hallway."

A nervous laugh finally escaped my lips as Sara finished her impromptu tirade, clearly feeling a little better at having gotten all of that off of her chest. She had spoken the last part in such a rush that I hadn't had the chance to get a word in edgewise, but now that she had finished, I spoke immediately. "A hundred. Two hundred if there is anything actually magic going on. I'll be honest and tell you. If I'm not sure, if it's spooky but maybe he's just trying something he found on 4chan, we split the difference and call it one-fifty."

My gig-work had been slow this month, and while I was pretty sure I was going to make rent, a little extra buffer wouldn't hurt anything. Also, I checked my gift as quickly as I could, and there weren't any bright warning signs in it, meaning even if she said no, I probably wouldn't piss her off badly enough for consequences in the process. To my utter shock, the petite brunette nodded her assent almost instantly. "Deal. I'll walk you to the hall and give you the master key. You check it out tonight, put out any candles, and do... whatever you can to stop any spooky shit you see, and I'll knock some off your next payment. If it's just stupid shit, let me know and I'll get the cops in to evict his ass. If he's hurt in there, we'll call an ambulance. And then I'll get the cops in to evict his ass."

My apartment was on the third floor - the result of a promise I made myself after my first apartment, to never let anyone live directly above me - and on the opposite side of the building, so it took a few minutes for Sara and I to walk to Mycah's apartment. I thought back as I did, trying to conjure an image of the man. Kid, really - I think I had only met him a couple of times, but had a vague recollection of a skinny scene kid, tall and gangly, looking like he only stopped haunting the Hot Topic because mall security kicked him out for staring again. The only reason I had caught his name was that he was one of the finalists at a Halloween party costume contest some of the residents had thrown. Thinking back, I couldn't remember the details of what he had worn, except that the scepter he'd carried around with it had looked surprisingly well made.

To my surprise, Sara stopped walking before we turned on to the hallway that contained Mycah's apartment. Even here, probably fifty feet away, I could start to pick up the astringent herbal scent my landlady warned me about. While not overpowering, it felt like the smell drifted straight up my nostrils and settled in roots at the back of my sinuses, leaving my whole face feeling slightly itchy. The brunette woman fished out a silver key with a worn lime-green cover and held it out to me, warning, "I will need that back," as a fierce look crossed her eyes. It faded quickly, though, and she followed it with a quieter, "I'll... I'm heading back to the main office. Stop by when you're done. If I don't hear back from you in an hour or two, I'm just calling the cops to be done with it."

I took the key, nodding and reassuring her, "It's probably nothing bad. If I'm worried, or he's tripped up on drugs or something, I'll just back out and come get you. If it's something spooky and I don't think I can handle it, I'll run, slam the door behind me, and call some of my cousins..." I waited until Sara was nodding along at that before grinning, and adding, "...the Ghostbusters."

I fled around the corner before Sara could process that entirely, laughing quietly to myself as I heard a few muttered curse words behind me. True to her word, though, the petite woman stayed behind, and I heard her start to head back towards the stairwell as I approached the apartment.

The smell grew stronger as I neared 214. I could tell immediately why Mycah's neighbors would have complained - the faintly itchy feeling on my face intensified into an almost burning sensation through my sinuses, making me feel as though I wanted to sneeze all the way back into my throat. I swallowed a few times to try to bring it under control, stepped up to the door, and slid the key Sara provided into the lock.

The door opened easily enough, with no more than a hint of a creak. The apartment beyond mostly mirrored mine in layout, lending the space an eerie sense of not-quite familiarity. The interior of Mycah's apartment was dark, lit only by a few oversized candles scattered around his mostly barren living room. I tried reaching inside and flicking the light switch by the door, but was disappointed when the overhead bulb flashed out immediately, dying before it had the chance to cast more than a split-second's illumination.

I checked with my gift before I actually took the first step past the apartment threshold. To my great relief, nearly the entire spectrum of outcomes for that limited action was a dull yellow - neither weal nor woe - with only a tiny hint of dull red to the side. That meant that I was in the realm of very little human intervention, with no free will to cloud my immediate future. That didn't necessarily bode well for Mycah, but it was possible he was so asleep - or drugged - that he wasn't in any position to wake up no matter what kind of stimulus he was exposed to.

Stepping into the apartment more fully, I began to walk very slowly and cautiously through the kitchen and towards the living room, checking my gift every couple of steps. None of the outcomes my talent foretold spoke of anything unusual happening, either to my benefit or my detriment, so I continued until I could see clearly past the kitchen counter and into the space beyond. Past the living room, a single darkened door opened into the bedroom, with the bathroom beyond that, but there weren't any lights on past the door frame, so I couldn't make out any details. Instead, I focused on what I could see of the living room, slowly sweeping my gaze over an admittedly very occult looking tableau.

Seven candles were guttering sporadically, having burned down to lumps of wax that could barely support a flame. Five of them were set in some kind of glass holders to form the points of a star set into a circle of some kind of white powder. Peering into the dim light, I realized that Mycah had actually pried the carpet up from the floor and shoved it to the side, revealing stained particle board underneath. The remaining two candles flanked a massively oversized book set on a short lectern, just tall enough to be read from a kneeling position. The book must have been more than a foot on each side, filled with hundreds of yellowed pages. It was open towards near the end, with only a few pages remaining, held in place by some kind of crystalline rod in the center. To either side of the lectern were about a dozen wooden bowls, most of which appeared to hold something, but it was difficult in the relative darkness to make out most of the contents.

To the right of the bowls, a couple feet outside of the circle on the floor, was a pair of converse sneakers, laces untied, one on its side. A little closer to the circle was a pair of what looked like socks, dropped onto the exposed subflooring.

I turned around at that point, walking back to the front door of the apartment and closing it quietly. I very deliberately did not lock either the doorknob or the deadbolt.

I walked over to the edge of the kitchen and paused to check my gift again. I wanted to take my time to very deliberately think through several possible actions that I might take, evaluating them to see how likely any of them were to bring me harm.