License to Ensorcell Read Online Free Page A

public documents, but a year later he showed up working for them again. His life fell into a pattern of disappearances followed by a return to respectable police work. None of our operatives could find out why. No one knew where he went in between his Interpol stints, though we could assume that he was working for his deep cover agency. About his personal life, nothing except for a brief mention that he’d never married.
    And one detail that struck me as oddly humorous—his actual name: Ariel. Yes, I know about Ariel Sharon, who had more in common with fire and brimstone than magical spirits, but my education had pounded Shakespeare into my brain. No wonder, I thought, Nathan went by Ari.
    I logged off and shut down. When I came out of trance, I heard a slice of cold pizza calling to me from the refrigerator, a lot louder than all the healthy salad stuff I’d bought at the grocery store. After I ate, I considered turning on the TV, but my mind kept revolving around the problem of Ari Nathan. Tell him I was his handler—sure, easy enough to tell him, but would he listen? The way he’d run out for his “something personal” appointment without even giving me a full briefing made me doubt it. And where was he, anyway? Probably with some unfortunate woman, I figured, and good luck to her!
    Eventually, of course, curiosity got the better of me. Hey, it’s one of my job qualifications. I took out the pad of paper and box of crayons that I keep at home.
    The LDRS gave me three drawings, all of them less scribbly than usual. The first two puzzled me. I wondered if I were looking at a crime scene, because pale white bodies lay on the ground behind barbed wire. They all wore white clothing, as shapeless as pajamas. What had Nathan done, gone off the deep end and shot a lot of people? The third drawing showed two standing figures: a flesh and blood elderly man wearing a heavy gray sweater, black pants, and a yarmulke. He was looking at a white ghost—no, at a plaster sculpture.
    All of a sudden I realized what I was seeing: the Holocaust memorial out at the Legion of Honor art museum. I caught a glimpse of Nathan himself, also wearing a yarmulke, standing and staring at those symbols of remembered murder lying on the ground. I broke the trance. I was ashamed of myself, spying on him at such a moment, but the shame didn’t last, because the sense of danger came with the glimpse.
    I had a hard time breathing for a moment, just because of the danger-sense, or the Semi-Automatic Warning Mechanism. Outside the sunlight had faded. The purple neon sign on the Persian restaurant across the street lit up and began to blink. I drew the curtains and switched on both of the lamps in the living room, turned on the one in the bathroom, too, just because. Was he really an Israeli agent, I wondered, or was that a pretense? Was he working with Johnson instead of tracking him down, a double agent, a traitor? I decided to try to find out.
    At my kitchen table I did a tarot spread, something the Agency doesn’t have a name for, but it’s always worked for me, provided I use the old Marseilles deck and do a full layout. I took my pack out of its silk-lined sandalwood box. The scent from the wood soothed me and put me in the right mind for a reading. As I shuffled the cards, I focused on the sense of danger Nathan brought with him. Some guys smell of sweat; this guy smelled of danger.
    When I began turning them over, I expected to see a good many swords and maybe even the Death card or the Broken Tower. Instead, a spread heavy on cups lay in front of me, with the ace prominently displayed beside the Sun. In the middle, covering my significator, sat the Knight of Cups himself. The Empress leered at him from several cards away. The danger Nathan represented appeared obvious.
    “No,” I said aloud. “Not for all the cold cash in the world am I going to fall in love with this guy, or with any guy, but especially not this guy. And that’s