The Blue Lady's Children
an excerpt

Chapter One

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere

--Mad World, Tears For Fears

It was the kind of morning that made Miami a tourist destination: the sky was a deep, cloudless blue, it was warm without being stifling, and a light breeze wafted through the high-rise glass towers that overlooked Biscayne Bay like shining monuments to some beneficent goddess of prosperity. People milled about on Brickell Avenue, out for their morning jogs or walking their dogs in the shade of the tree-lined sidewalks, while rows of cars made their leisurely way toward the bridge that traversed the Miami River.

Meanwhile, I was at the back of the line at Cafe DemiTasse, on the verge of jumping over the counter and making my own damn coffee. I would have killed my roommate for using the last of the espresso without warning me, but she was already gone by the time I woke up for class. Also, murder is illegal, but that is only a secondary consideration. Shiva (her name's Shivanee, but I call her Shiva for good reason) was the most passive-aggressive jerk I have ever met. She was always using the last of something without saying anything, or leaving wet towels all over our room, or forgetting to clean her hair out of the shower drain--and she has this long, black hair that could clog a storm drain, so the shower was hardly a challenge in the clog department.

I finally realized that there was some kind of fight going on at the front of the line. A fat lady wearing one of those expensive matching skirt suits with a chihuahua in her Coach purse was yelling at the barista. Everyone else in the line was pretending not to notice, but she was getting too loud to ignore. And you can only stare at the same swirly picture of a mug of coffee for so long before you get bored.

"When I am paying four dollars for a cup of coffee," she said, "I expect it to stay warm to the very last drop, do you hear me?" As if anyone for three blocks could fail to hear her screeching.

"Ma'am, I am very sorry, but there is nothing we can do," the poor server said. "All we have are regular cups until the next inventory shipment comes on Wednesday."

"Rest assured that your corporate office will hear of this!" The woman slammed her cup down on the counter and stormed out, nearly knocking me down with her dog. There was a collective sigh of relief and the line finally started to move. I swear, some people are so damn spoiled by modern magic. Not every coffee shop has disposable warming cups, and coffee should not be sitting around all day to get cold anyway. I still use regular mugs, myself; warming mugs drain a little bit of your personal energy unless they are the fancy kind with a crystal battery, so it kind of defeats the purpose of getting a caffeine-induced energy boost.

Which I was not going to get today because that woman had taken way too long to vamoose. I was going to be late for class, again, even if I ran, and Professor Roth was probably saving the most miserable fortune cookie just for me. Wonderful. I dashed out of the cafe and raced down the street back toward campus.

Every so often I stop to admire the college. Frost University of the Magical Arts and Sciences is not a huge school, but the main building takes up the corner right on the bay next to the bridge over the river, so there are great views all around: the city, the bay, the MacArthur Causeway connecting downtown to South Beach, and so on. It's built in what I am told is a Mediterranean Revival style of architecture, which apparently means you have to have a lot of arches and columns and everything is made of white stone blocks that gets dark, grimy streaks from all the rain. It's a beautiful school, really, which is one of the reasons I decided to come here. But I didn't have time to paint a picture; I was supposed to be in class five minutes ago.

I ran up the stairs, huffing and puffing like I was getting ready to blow the door down. As quietly as possible, I sneaked down the hall and up to the classroom. I grabbed the doorknob and turned it slowly, gently, then eased the door open and slid inside without making a sound.

And then the entire class started laughing.

"Hold on, hold on," a husky male voice said, and the laughter subsided. "Does it really count as divination if I didn't have to use any magic to figure out she'd be late?" The laughter erupted once again.

I turned around to see Professor Roth sitting cross-legged on his desk at the front of the class. He is a young guy, not even thirty years old, but he shaves his head because (as you can tell when he lets it go for a while) he is already balding. He has these dark hazel eyes that you can hardly see because he squints through his glasses, and he smokes like a chimney between classes so his teeth are a parchmenty yellow. Unlike most of the other teachers, he doesn't dress like a professional; he wears these awful Hawaiian shirts with big flower prints, and khaki shorts that show off his skinny legs, and sandals that belong flopping around on a beach instead of resting on top of a desk that he has to share with other professors. Most of the students love him, but I think he is simply ridiculous. He always has this amused smirk, like he's in on some joke you know nothing about.

My face always goes red as a fire truck when I am embarrassed, so I was ready for a five-alarm fire. I slunk over to the basket of fortune cookies and grabbed one, then headed for the nearest vacant desk.

"Now that Evie has joined us," Professor Roth said, "Maybe we can get started with our aleuromancy for the day. Get cracking."

Almost in unison, the fifteen of us opened our fortune cookies and began to scrutinize the fortunes inside. Some people think that fortune cookies can't possibly be accurate because they're written by random people who work for the cookie-making companies, and who don't even pretend to be using any kind of magic when they come up with their fortunes. But that is exactly why they can be so accurate; the entire process is completely randomized, with no possible influence exerted by personal contact between the fortune teller and the fortune receiver, so the only thing that affects the fortune that you get is, in theory at least, the force of your own destiny. This is the kind of stuff that Professor Roth says, but I can never tell whether he is serious or not. Do you choose the cookie, or does the cookie choose you? If someone else gives you the cookie, is the fortune still valid? Is it absolutely required for fortune cookies to taste like stale cardboard?

You can get three kinds of fortune cookies: descriptive, which tell you something about yourself; predictive, which give you information about something that's going to happen to you at some point; and imperative, which tell you to do something. Mine had been descriptive lately, which means that my destiny is obscure or, alternately, that I have a really boring life. I prefer to think of myself as mysterious. Professor Roth would probably smirk at the idea.

So I opened my fortune cookie expecting something like I'd gotten yesterday ("You have a tendency to focus too much on yourself.") and to my surprise it was an imperative fortune: "Look beyond the surface or you will be deceived." What was that supposed to mean?