The walk over to Washington Park was largely silent as the three of us took in the city. Unsurprisingly, it had a much different vibe during daylight hours than the eerie post-apocalyptic feeling it had inspired last night. Mostly it felt alive. There were more pedestrians on the street than I’d ever seen in Glenbrook, not that that was a particularly high bar. On a sunny, relatively warm day in April, the city seemed to be bustling. I could only compare it to the few times I’d been in DC for school trips and the family vacation we’d taken to New York City a few years back. It fell closer to the DC end of the spectrum, though without the government offices and museums every other building. Which I suppose just made it a normal city.

We were almost definitely going to be at the park a full two hours before Rodney had said to meet, but there wasn’t much we could really do about it. Check out at the hotel was 10 AM even if we hadn’t gotten there until after 3, and it was better to hang out in a public place to kill time. Surprisingly, we didn’t attract very many curious glances despite lugging our duffel bags and backpacks along with us. I suppose things that would stick out in a smaller town like Glenbrook were easily overlooked in the city. Three teenagers with bags could be on their way to the boxing gym or dance rehearsal or something, not really worth noting. It was oddly liberating in the anonymity of it all. No one would peg us as out of place unless we really tried to make ourselves seem that way.

Once we arrived, I immediately sank down onto a bench in the little corner of the park we’d claimed for ourselves. Another thing growing up in the suburbs doesn’t teach you: how to get by walking everywhere. I was far more used to sprints than marathons, or at least dance numbers followed by standing around backstage.

“We got time.” Jerry announced, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “And I could use some coffee that’s actually worthy of the name. You two want anything?”

I couldn’t nod fast enough, but Danielle was shrugging her bag off her shoulder and shaking her head. “I actually saw another place on the way here that I’d like to visit. I should be back by the time Rodney said to meet, if that’s alright?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Not gonna tell us what it is?”

She smiled mischievously. “I think it’ll make a nice surprise.” Without waiting for a response, she flipped her hair over her shoulder as she turned on her heel and strode off. God, it was like she’d been hauling around a hundred-pound backpack every day back in Glenbrook, she was so free and fluid now. She’d always been graceful, of course, but it was the difference between seeing a tiger in the zoo and one in the wild. Freedom just suited her so much better.

A hand waving in front of my face drew my attention back to the present, that being a knowingly smirking Jerry. “Done with your ogling?” He drawled.

“Ogling is such a dirty word for it.” I complained.

“You looked like you were hypnotized by her ass. If the shoe fits…” I smacked him in the arm. “Fine, fine. You want coffee?”

“Jerry, have I ever willingly turned down coffee?”

“There was that time you told me to cut you off before you either had a heart attack or saw the face of god.” He reminisced.

“We don’t speak of the double all-nighter.” I shuddered. “Dark times.”

“Fifty uninterrupted hours of consciousness.” Jerry shook his head. “Not our best idea, really.”

“What did I just tell you not to speak of?”

He held his hands up in surrender. “Fine, fine. I’ll pick you up a mocha or something. You good to watch our stuff?”

I waved my hand permissively. “Sooner you leave, sooner I can have real coffee.”

“Poor, deprived baby.” Jerry snickered, piling his bags with Danielle’s and heading in the opposite direction that she had gone. I took the opportunity to look around a bit, idly people-watching. The park seemed decently popular, as I guess it was as close to a dose of nature as you could get in the city. There were people playing frisbee, a couple holding hands, and I could hear the guitar strums of a busker closer to the center of the park. It felt peaceful. That probably should have been a warning sign.

I suppose I must have looked like an easy mark. Clearly a high school kid, looking around like this wasn’t my usual haunt, surrounded by bags - an out-of-towner. If someone thought all the bags were mine, they’d peg me pretty quick as a runaway. Exactly the kind of person that doesn’t have enough of a support system to steer them away from bad choices, who could be convinced by a bit of fast talking to sign up for just about anything if it promised a safe environment and friends.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” A smooth voice spoke from the other end of the bench. I turned to see a slightly older man, probably in his late twenties. He was wearing almost stereotypical business casual: light khakis and brown leather shoes, a light blue button-down shirt with no tie, and a thin navy blazer. His mouth was upturned into what he probably thought was a casual, disarming smile but it stretched just a little too wide for comfort. The part that really raised the hairs on the back of my neck, though, was the look in his muddy brown eyes. It was somehow simultaneously mechanical and burning with zeal, like he had been emptied of all thoughts except devotion to whatever he was selling and a script to follow. He looked like a used car salesman that had found religion. I distrusted him instantly.

“It is nice.” I responded neutrally, hoping I could manage to bore him away.

“Not usually this warm so soon after Fool’s Day.” He continued in that same practiced smooth tone, like a customer service operator. “Fate must be doing us a favor, huh?”

I suppressed my cringe, channeling Danielle to keep my face blank and impassive. “Just good luck, I suppose.” I slowly drew my phone out of my pocket, grateful that it was on the other side of his vision. It seemed more like he was trying to sell me on a cult than abduct me, but better safe than sorry.

“Ain’t that the truth.” Did he think throwing in folksy little sayings made him more relatable? Maybe that had been in the cult programming pamphlet. “It’s like the whole world is stretched out in front of us, just waiting to be taken.” And there was a check for weirdly grandiose and aggressive rhetoric.

“I don’t know if I quite see it that way.” I was trying to keep my responses neutral, but there was really no neutral way to respond to that question. Either agreeing or disagreeing gave him a pivot. Kudos to the cult scriptwriter for that line.

“No? Maybe you just haven’t had the right support around you before.” And there it was, the introduction to a larger group or cause. This guy really was grown in a lab to do cult recruitment. I pressed the call button subtly on my phone. I didn’t want to risk speaking directly, but hopefully enough could be picked up from context that I might need rescue.

“I can’t say I’m all that interested in that kind of thing.” I needed to start shutting this down, he very apparently wasn’t the type to pick up on hints. “I have plenty of support from friends and family.” Maybe showing I wasn’t an unattached, impressionable kid would get him to give up?

“Of course, but sometimes they just don’t understand, do they?” He smiled in a way that was almost rueful and sympathetic but not quite all the way there. “Sometimes you need people who really understand what you’re going through.”

I had to suppress a laugh at that. I sincerely doubted there was anyone on the planet who understood what I was going through. Which was such a teenage thing to think, but I’d say I had earned it. Still, I couldn’t tell this guy that. It was exactly what he wanted to hear.

Apparently I’d paused long enough that he took my silence as agreement, as he edged a bit closer on the bench and launched into the next part of his pitch. “I know it can be hard to talk about.” He said, voice dripping with faux empathy. “You don’t have to say anything. I was in your shoes not so long ago myself.”

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I’d heard almost the same sentiment from Rodney on the train, and it struck me just how vast the difference was between the gruff biker and this smarmy probable cult recruiter. Rodney hadn’t been afraid of offending my sensibilities, offering his unfiltered personality. This guy felt like any personality he’d once possessed had been filtered so many times that only the barest traces of it were left around the edges, the rest of his brain stuffed full of zeal and sales tactics.

“Thanks for your kind words.” I lied, feeling the opposite of thankful. “But I should probably be going to meet my friends.”

“What’s the rush? Sometimes you just have to stop and smell the florist.” He gestured broadly, and sure enough, there was a woman selling flowers in the direction he pointed. I sincerely doubted that he was allowed within a hundred feet of her if he made a habit of stopping to smell the florist, though. I couldn’t help it. I had to ask.

“...don’t you mean the flowers?” I really shouldn’t have engaged him, but I was both baffled and concerned for this florist.

“Her name is Caroline.” He said, and the creepiest part was how his voice and smile didn’t slip one millimeter. “She’s an angel, isn’t she?”

Maybe I’d had this guy pegged entirely wrong from the start. He wasn’t a cult recruiter, he was just a delusional pest who apparently went around sniffing random women. That was both better and worse. Better in the sense that he hadn’t tried to cozy up to me to get a whiff yet, worse in the sheer ‘what the fuck’ factor. At least a cult recruiter had a purpose approaching a random kid in the park. Although… I didn’t want to think about it, but I now dearly wished I had some pepper spray on me. If it had been dark or we were in a more isolated place, maybe I would have been thinking about possible abduction by a sex offender. To try it here in broad daylight would mean he was the especially unstable kind.

“I’m sorry, I have to go before my friends get worried.” I said, blindly gathering up the bags by my feet with one hand while not taking my eyes off the creep on the bench with me.

“There’s no hurry, my friend.” His gaze was fixed and unblinking, a snake looking at a mouse. I really didn’t want to be the mouse in this scenario. “The Hierophants of the Zodiac are a place where we can all learn to be our true selves, together. Doesn’t that sound like exactly where you want to be?”

I don’t know if his brain had run out of semi-comprehensible script and fallen back on trying to hypnotize me through eye contact or if this was the sort of approach that would work on him, but I was about a hundred and twenty-three percent done with this whole interaction. If our bags weren’t so awkward for one person to carry, I would have walked away a couple sentences into his pitch. Now I was staring down someone who was definitely the creepiest person I’d ever encountered in my life, someone who was almost making me believe in those conspiracy theories about reptilians because of just how bizarre this whole interaction had been. I’d had fever dreams that made far more sense than the past few minutes.

“Is there a problem here?” An unnecessarily loud voice interrupted our staring contest, cold and full of barely suppressed fury. I relaxed immediately. Danielle had gotten my call and apparently came storming back to rescue or avenge me. I still didn’t dare take my eyes off the creep as his plastered-on smile finally fell and he stood up slowly, holding his hands in surrender. Danielle’s shout had brought a bit more attention from passersby, and apparently he wasn’t quite crazy enough to physically press the issue with so many witnesses.

“I’ll just leave my card.” He said in parting, tone still oddly smooth and friendly. I wondered if that was practiced or if he felt emotions at all. I kept my eyes locked on him as he placed the card gingerly down on the wood of the bench, then turned and strided away like he hadn’t just made his best efforts to recruit a teenager to what I was now convinced was a sex cult with religious PR.

“I feel like I need to take six showers.” I shuddered, collapsing back on the bench. “Holy shit. If it wasn’t for Rodney, I’d say we need to get the hell out of Cincinnati immediately. Between last night and this, it has not made a great first impression.”

I looked up at Danielle and my heart skipped a beat. Then it started aggressively jumping rope. The place she’d visited was apparently a hair salon, and they’d done fantastic work extremely quickly. Where her black tresses were once shoulder-length and lightly curled, now she sported a tousled pixie undercut, practically buzzed down around her ears and fluffed up on top. Coupled with the stern expression she was still sporting from shouting down the creep and the heavier makeup I’d noticed her sporting this morning and naively assumed was just to disguise her features a bit, it was a capital-L look. And when she snorted in response to my little joke, I could feel that moment being permanently saved in my memory.

“It certainly has been an experience.” She said coolly, sauntering over to the bench to sit down. Had she always swayed her hips that much when she walked? This would require further observation. “Are you alright?”

My brain stuttered back into some semblance of coherency. “M’fine.” I coughed. “I’m fine. He didn’t actually do anything besides give me the creeps. Thought he was some cult nutjob at first, then he started veering into sex pest territory at the end.”

Danielle scowled. “In broad daylight in the park. How did he expect to get away with that?”

I shrugged. “I think he thought I was a runaway, that all these bags were mine. And he wasn’t exactly all there, y’know? It felt like he was an alien reading off a script and poorly mimicking human emotion.”

Danielle picked up the card he’d left, narrowing her eyes at it. “The Hierophants of the Zodiac? Were they trying to cram together astrology and tarot and hoping it would turn out extra mystic?”

“I think they could’ve crammed a magic eight ball and a healing crystal reference in there if they’d really been trying. Zodiac Hierophants of the Crystal Ball? Wait, that’s something different. Crystal eight ball? No, that sounds drug-related. Hm…”

She snorted. “If they’re all like that guy, I’m sure there are plenty of drugs involved.”

“We have attracted our fair share of characters, haven’t we?” I mused.

“It’s mostly you.” I shot her a betrayed look, but she just shrugged. “I think the universe is trying to counterbalance your lack of List by throwing lots of weirdness your way. I mean, we’d barely spoken a few days ago and now we’ve run away together.”

“When you phrase it like that, you’ll give a guy ideas.” I teased.

“Would that be such a bad thing?” She teased back. My higher thought functions and language abilities immediately shut down. Confident Danielle behaving impersonally I could handle. Hesitantly joking Danielle of two days ago was a delightful if slightly nerve-wracking development. Confidently teasing Danielle with a new punkish haircut? I was thrilled that she was diving headfirst into all the things she’d never been allowed to consider before, but my face was considering picking up a part-time job as a branding iron it was so hot.

I don’t remember exactly what I mangled the English language into saying or if it was coherent at all. I’d meant to suavely excuse myself to stretch my legs and work off some of the nervous energy from the conversation with Mr. Creep. Instead, I probably sounded like I was speaking in tongues and trying to pantomime my way through an explanation of the American Revolution. Either way, I found myself speedwalking out of the park in the vague direction that Jerry had gone earlier, chased all the way by Danielle’s laughter.

There was one big problem with this plan: I had no idea where Jerry had actually gone to get coffee, and the more I thought about it, the more it made no sense that Danielle had come back before him. It was far quicker to pick up a couple of drinks to go than to have major hair surgery done. With that kernel of worry sprouting uncomfortably in my gut, I kept my head on a swivel as I strode down this street I had almost picked at random. There was a little cafe at the end of it that looked promising, but the familiar figure that emerged from it was the opposite of comforting. Mr. Creep had apparently gone to refuel, and it was only him stepping aside for a couple of middle-aged ladies that let me catch a glimpse before he saw me. I ducked blindly into the door of the shop I was currently passing. It couldn’t be worse than encountering him again.

The interior of the shop was predominantly deep indigo dotted with little bits of silver and gold tracery. At first I didn’t see much beyond that dark color scheme that lent the shop an air of mystery even in the middle of the day. Once my eyes started to adjust, I almost wished I’d been able to stay blind. Decks of tarot cards lined one wall, with a collection of crystals artfully arranged on specialized shelves below them. An actual crystal ball had a prominent position on a dais in the center of the small space, resting on a velvet cushion. Those bits of silver and gold I had spotted were murals painted to resemble the creatures of the zodiac and the astrological signs. My heart sank. Of all the places to dodge into looking to avoid a crazy cult weirdo, I may have just stumbled into their headquarters.

“Young man, do you seek the wisdom of the cards and stars?” An extremely dry, almost unenthused voice sounded. I blinked and saw a man my eyes must have immediately dismissed on their first pass over the space, though I’m not sure how. He could not have looked more out of place if he tried. Where the space around him was packed full of vaguely mystical paraphernalia, this man looked like he had been crunching numbers for decades on end. He looked like the kind of man who ate the same high-fiber cereal for breakfast every morning and took the exact same vacation every single year. Thinning brown hair, thick glasses, a pressed white dress shirt and an honest to god pocket protector completed the image of a middle manager at an accounting firm. He was the least mystic man I’d ever seen in my life.

Right, he had asked a question. “No, I’m good.” I already had one cult weirdo trying to recruit me, I did not need another in the mix.

“Nonetheless, the Fates have brought you to my door.” The man said. “It has been quite some time since I have seen a Nexus.”

Did I have an aura drawing weird encounters to me like flies to honey? I’d really like to turn it off now.