Something Wicked This Way Comes

||7- Palms||

A sound like the faint chiming of a bell floated through the apartment. The noise startled Katalina and her eyes peeked open, exhaustion flooded over her. She lifted her head as she blinked her eyes. Trying to make sense of where she was.

She heard a soft breath, felt a familiar pulsing aura. Kat looked beside herself, eyes narrowing on Loki's form on the couch. Did she fall...asleep?

Katalina shook her head to clear her head. Tiredness weighed heavy on her shoulders—and another chime rung up from the floor below. Kat sighed, cradling her temples with her hand. She must have flipped her shop sign out of habit when she came back from the store.

Which reminded her that there was two bags of groceries still sitting in her hallway and a shattered tea mug on the kitchen floor

Katalina groaned, pushing herself up. Loki still slept, and by the looks of it, peacefully. Kat ran her hand through her mess of hair.

The bell rung again.

Katalina rolled her eyes and made her way to the stairwell. She cracked open the door to yell to person below that she would be down in a moment and then she headed back towards her kitchen. She grabbed the grocery bags as she past, tip-toeing over broken ceramic, and put them away.

Loki had been trying to put it in the sink she realized. Kat glanced back to him; she couldn't help the flash of disbelief that shot through her. Her gratitude and relief then flooded in quickly after. She had been right—Loki was not a threat to her.

A small smile graced her lips before she grabbed a broom from her pantry and started to clean up the broken mug.

***

She was a tourist—Katalina could just tell by the 'I Love Seattle' embellished in gold lettering across her neon hoodie. She didn't need her gifts for that. Kat could also assume that the girl was traveling back from her trip; which brought her through Ravenswood.

Ravenswood was too small itself to hold it's own tourism drawl—other then, perhaps, the several ghost tours and Kat's Psychic shop. But, it was a stop on the map with a gas station, two motels, and a small grocery store. There was quite a flow of traffic through the small town during tourist season.

Katalina stepped off the last step of the stairwell and made her way to the desk separating the wait area from the rest of her shop. She plastered a smile across her face and greeted her customer. After this, she'd make sure she flipped the sign the correct way, and locked up her shop for the rest of the day.

"You'll have to excuse me, my cat knocked one of my mugs onto the floor. You caught me as I was cleaning it up." Kat quickly explained, still beaming her smile. The girl, who's age looked to be dwindling just below twenty, snapped her gum. Her chestnut eyes had lit up at the mention of Katalina's cat.

"That's alright, my cat, Leos, he's quite the little bugger." The girl chirped, then laughed. Kat nodded her head.

"So what can I do for you today? Normal reading? Tarot?"

The girl tilted her head to the side, as if she was thinking, then she said, "haven't been to one of these places before. Every one I've seen all looked shady. Your's looked legit, and I thought I might as well check it out."

Katalina let out an airy laugh, "I can assure you that I'm the real deal."

The girl narrowed her eyes suspiciously but didn't say anything else.

There was a shift in the air, small but so sudden that Kat struggled to keep the smile on her lips. She couldn't place what it was or where it had came from. She focused back on the girl.