I didn't know how to read tarot cards. I watched as the man in the hoodie finished shuffling the deck, then turned over the top cards in order and laid them on the table.
As far as I knew, these kinds of readings involved arranging the cards in a triangle, a pentagram, or a hexagon, or laying them out in one or two rows. But the man in the hoodie seemed to be playing solitaire, placing each card on top of another until he'd made three columns of three cards each.
He clicked his tongue, pressed down on the card in the very middle, pulled it out, and flipped it over.
To my surprise, there should have been only one card, but another card was stuck to the back of the one he'd drawn—a Death card. The design on it didn't quite match the deck on the table. It was obvious he'd used two different decks.
Some people gasped, others looked astonished, and a few blurted out questions, asking how he'd done it.
My first thought was that it was a magic trick. Maybe the man in the hoodie had done something while shuffling or turning over the cards to slip this one in.
Clearly, none of them suspected him of cheating. They all jumped to supernatural explanations, saying a ghost had slipped in a card or that the man in the hoodie had some special ability.
That was when I learned the man in the hoodie's group chat nickname was Fortune Teller. Aside from this embarrassingly pretentious nickname, he'd never told them his real name.
The Fortune Teller ignored the questions around him and calmly said, "Since Death has been chosen, whoever it is should step forward."
The onlookers didn't react. They just looked at one another.
"I don't