Concentrate!I am!
Am I doing too much?
Yo!Concentrate on the colors!
Shaking my head, I banished the commotion building in my brain and poured my focus into the woman sitting across from me. And finally, with all those background thoughts fading, I watched as she revealed herself to me.
It started with a simmering, lime-sick sort of smoke that rose up from the floor, leaving streaks of rot wherever it reached or where its bubbles popped.
Anxiety.That made sense. Although my client was perfectly poised, I had long since learned that people—especially women—often withheld entire storms within themselves. Women had violent maelstroms of acrid emotion bottled up beneath a placid veneer.
“Breathe in deeply through your nose,” I murmured as I continued observing the tapestry forming around her. “Hold it in your chest, then release.”
Of course, the anxiety wasn’t the only thing filling the empty space of my small reading room. No, there were also alchemical swirls of deep, decrepit blue, clinging to anything it could get itself on like lingering cigarette smoke.
Dread.
There were other streaks that would occasionally lance through the mess: the bright red mist of rage, the yellow lightning strikes of insecurity, the dull gray clouds of denial.
It was a cacophony of colors all swirling and fighting each other, almost enough to make my eyes hurt. The busy display wasn’t metaphorical for me, wasn’t abstract. It was as real and tangible as anything else.
Because I was an empath.
“Reach into those deep, deep parts of you and open them. Allow the fates to move through you.”
I wasn’t an empath in the way the worst people in the world always loved to claim on social media, of course. I was one in the oracle kind of way. The magical bloodline sort of way. As in, actually saw emotions in a synesthesia sort of way, with even the most hidden secrets and guarded feelings being laid bare. Every single eldest daughter in the Donmoue family had been given some sort of gift of sight, and I was no exception.
My mother had had precognition, which she’d turned into being quite the popular psychic personality. Her mother had been a medium, and able to communicate with and channel the souls of the dead.Hermother had been a telepath, and so on and so on before that. All leading down to little ol’ me, the emotion detector.
I wasn’t going to lie, it sure came in handy to see everything a person was feeling—even things they didn’t realize themselves—but it certainly wasn’t as showy as being able to see the literal future. So, after a very long time, I’d made peace with not following in the footsteps of the great Ophelia Donmoue and lettingHaus de Donmouegracefully close.
But then my mother died.
It had been surprisingly early for one of our kind. She’d only been seventy. My mother had had me at forty-five, so we hadn’thad a lot of time together. I’d suddenly found myself unwilling to let go of the business my mother and grandmother had built.
So, I’d decided to take up the mantle of Ophelia Donmoue, née Annie, and become her official psychic heir. It was going okayish, or at least as okay as one could imagine for someone with no precognition at all.
What I did have was ADHD.
“Your spirit is crowded,” I said, still staring at the woman and drinking in everything I could about her—not just the technicolor miasma behind her. “You are afraid, but also afraid of said fear. You are conflicted. The fates cannot wade through such murkiness.”
The woman took a little breath. “You can sense all that?”
“I only know what the fates tell me,” I lied. Yeah, I felt a bit guilty for it, but nobody was going to come see anempath,especially when the term had been hijacked by pop culture as an excuse for people to cover up shitty behavior—not always, of course, but too often.
Or maybe I was a bit sour about it because I was an actual empath.
“What is it that you seek?” I asked, closing my eyes and mentally going over everything I noticed.
“Clarity.”
“I see,” I said, perhaps a little ironically. But already, I was turning my mental picture of her this way and that, my mind beginning to rattle off anything and everything about her.
I can see her wedding-ring tan above her ring.Must have been fiddling with it nervously before she entered and jammed it back on too hard.In my head, a mental image of her twisting it up and down the digit played.
If she’s gotten it lower on her finger, she’s lost weight recently.
Judging by the anxiety, I would say it’s from stress rather than purposeful effort.