Greenvale Apartments' resident psychic, Edrie, though known as Claire, was generally considered harmless and sometimes worth the price. She charged exorbitant amounts for insight, no matter the subject, and she had no compassion for the downtrodden who both lived and worked in this building. But, and this was something she’d learned the hard way, going easy on the girls in this place would get them nowhere. In fact, she wished someone would have made life a little more difficult for her; she might have gotten out of this place. Now, though she had the means to do so, she remained.

She’d grown comfortable in a way. Content.

Her apartment was as small as any, yet where most were dull and gray, with the stink of alcohol and cigarettes, Edrie’s was hung with billowing silks and live plants. String lights and stardust.

She was psychic, the damnable ability was the reason she left home so many, many years ago, cutting ties with everyone and burning bridges as she went. The reason she left her whole life and threw away all the things she’d ever known. For some reason, the sixteen-year-old Edrie thought the world needed her, that she was an integral part of the universe born with glorious purpose. When it turned out she wasn’t, when the reality hit that she was stupid and foolish and that she’d left behind everything, she did the only thing she knew how to do. It was that or die on the streets. Or, maybe it wasn’t. She didn’t like to think back much, but she knew that when she was young it seemed so big. So important. Every choice was life or death. Everything she did had to mean something to someone and to her… Her life was a mess that there was no coming back from.

Even still, she got herself into a stable position much quicker than most, if they ever did at all, thanks to her curse. The apartment complex was anything but stable in the larger scheme of things, but it did offer some level of protection in that clients were pre-payers and rent was deducted directly. That safety net kept even the most strung out of girls from missing payments and getting kicked out. Almost nothing else could force someone out of this place. They took every girl if she would work and once they came in they rarely left. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was better than street work. Here, sleepers were screened for diseases and the rates were good. They took home most of their money and everyone in the area knew who they were, and what they did. There was no hiding it. The law turned a blind eye as some of their most frequent flyers wore the badge. They even had a few fairy-tale endings to advertise when a new girl came around.

That wasn’t Edrie’s story, of course, and she’d finally figured out it wasn’t supposed to be. Despite her youthful dreams of somehow saving the world and getting the guy, nothing she saw ever pointed to it happening and she was too old for it now.

No man was coming to rescue her and she couldn’t save herself either. No one here was destined to be anything more than a blip on the timeline.

Except perhaps –

As a child, she had a go-along-to-get-along personality. She had no qualms with her parents, siblings, or other relatives. She didn’t run away to be with a boyfriend.

What she saw, or thought she saw, led her to leave in the dead of night.

For a long time, she mistook her ability. She thought she was simply good at ‘reading’ people, at seeing what was on their minds. She thought she could tell what was at the heart of a situation and thought she might have a career in counseling someday. After correctly predicting a national tragedy, however, though she spoke of it to no one, she realized she had power and it was power she felt driven to understand.

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Slowly, quietly, she began collecting books that she found in stale back rooms and garage sales. They were things no one took seriously in this day and age but were once considered practical for daily living if you were willing to risk being burned at the stake. It was amazing how they seemed to fall into her possession and she was sure that it was destiny.

Now she knew she’d never found anything of great value, but back then it was all so dreamlike. The start of something incredible and she felt like the sole person, in all the world, who knew it was real. Forgotten knowledge, but not inaccessible. In later years she would see the foolishness of those feelings, but she was young and naive then. Wanting to be special.

That innocence didn’t last long. With books about magic came temptation she wasn’t able to resist. She didn’t even know she should. She was oblivious to the toll it was taking; hours meditating and she thought she was making her body healthy when in reality she was giving over energy. Her soul. Greed bloomed wild like a weed and she didn’t see it for what it was until it was far too late.

She gained power, more than she’d ever had, but even now she didn’t know the true cost of it.

People didn’t believe in magic anymore, not serious people, not people in corporate, and it was hard to impress someone who thought you were crazy. Even when she told them of things that were yet to happen, in the immediate future no less, it didn’t amount to a hill of beans. They brushed it off like they did her. No matter what it was, it was a coincidence.

The problem, she later learned after every single lead she thought she had fell flat, was that she was playing the wrong part. All the things she saw in the future blinded her to life directly in front of her. There she was, trying to chase down the depressed, the anxiety-ridden, the power-hungry, when what she should have done was wait for them to come to her

Instead of spending days watching the entrances to big company buildings looking for someone well-dressed enough to be at least middle class and skittish enough to possibly pay for a psychic reading, if she could get them to believe her, she could have set up shop. Even sitting in a back alley with a fake crystal ball would have been better than what she was doing.

She came across desperate because she was and she wasn’t smart enough to take on another role. Not a natural actress and prone to making reckless decisions.

Why was hindsight twenty-twenty? Why did it take her so long to find that answer? It wasn’t until she hit rock bottom, low enough to sell herself to multiple men a night, that she finally figured out what she should have been doing all along.

She took on a stage name, Claire. Predictable and it fit well enough. A fake identity. No one here knew her real name. She hadn’t even spoken it in decades; she couldn’t think who she’d last heard say it. Not that it mattered, no doubt her parents were passed and her siblings were better off without her, but as she looked at the child in this room down the hall from her own, Edrie thought she would tell her. Exactly who the girl was she didn’t know, but she’d seen things that no one else did for her whole life and today she had a premonition about this child.

This one saw things, too, things Edrie never dreamed of.

All the time she spent trying to become powerful, though her intentions were for good, never came close to what she saw in this little girl with tired eyes that were still so clear. She didn’t belong in a place like this. As much greatness as Edrie had tried to claim for herself she knew, somehow, that this child surpassed her without even trying and had no idea it happened.

She would need guidance on this path and it was obvious that her mother wasn’t equipped to lead the way.

Edrie saw them when they came in on the first day and that night dreamed the most startling dream of the small child on a train to nowhere. Truly nowhere. If the train ever reached its destination it would be the end of all things.

“You,” she pointed at the girl. “Are not all that you appear.” An affected vocabulary and tone that she’d adopted as her own. Mystic. The words of a psychic. It worked every time despite how hard her customers tried to tell themselves it was cheesy and unrealistic.

For a moment, an instant, the Ink Pen loomed in the shadow of the door against the wall in the corridor. Luna could feel it and so could Edrie. The suffocation of nothing. The older woman turned in time to see it, really see it, as it rounded and took her. All of her. Her face, her name, her history, her presence. It was all gone.

And Ink Pen grew a tiny bit stronger.