The Empress || Jack Wilder

The Empress || Prologue

          Living in a small town means that everyone knows everyone.  And that means what they do, who they're with, and where they are.  Windsor, Colorado has been Alessandra's home for eighteen years, and she has only left three times.  It's not hard to imagine how stir crazy she's become.

          Two of the three times Alessandra left her small town of 18,000 were to see magic shows in Denver, Colorado.  Her first magic show was J. Daniel Atlas and his trustee assistant Henley Reeves.  That was the show that sparked her love for magic as more than a hobby.  The second show was a Merritt McKinney "Rise to Fame, Again" show.  Needless to say, he never again rose to fame.

          Everyone plays a part in the community of Windsor, and Alessandra's happens to be the street magician.  Her parents are old money of Windsor, and she means old when she says it.  Her family had been working in the government of their small town since its birth.

          Alessandra is the first in her family to be something different than a mayor, governor, lawyer, or anything of the like.  And trust when she says that everyone in the town likes it better that way.

          She couldn't have predicted that she would receive a tarot card with a date, an address, and time on it.  She couldn't have told anyone that she would travel halfway across the country in three days just to get to the address, and that she would be meeting four other magicians in a run down apartment building.

          But she can tell you that receiving that tarot card was the best thing that's ever happened to her, and that she is damn glad that she was chosen.

--

          Alessandra's sleek black SUV was parked behind the only magic shop in town, idling as she sat in the back seat sorting out her earnings and cards.  Cards were her specialty, along with hypnosis and pick pocketing.  Some would say she's well rounded, she calls it dedicated to the art.

          Counting a total of nearly two hundred dollars, three phony gold watches, and one pair of two karat diamond earrings, she concluded the day a particularly slow one.  It was Sunday after all, everyone was either at church or having a family dinner.  Her hands ghosted over her favorite deck of cards, her brown eyes following each movement.

          Something wasn't right.

          Suddenly she was in a slight panic, her hands quickly picking up each deck of cards and shuffling them, counting fifty-two in each set.  Feeling a bit relieved that someone hadn't stolen any cards, Alessandra turned her attention to the box of props in the truck of the car, thinking someone had taken something out before she ended the show.

          As she searched each and every prop, looking for a missing or even added one, her mind drifted to the end of her show.  Bo, the owner of the magic shop, had come out to collect his share of the earnings, sort of like a rent for letting Alessandra perform outside his shop, briefly stopping the second to final act.

          Her brows furrowed as she remembered something unusual at the end of the performance.  A man in a dark hoodie with the hood pulled up and hiding his face stomped out of the store, bumping Alessandra's shoulder without a second glance.  She turned around to tell him off, but he was already gone.  She barely saw something fall into the prop box, but never thought anything of it at the time.