Fated Read Online Free Page B

self-esteem enough to the point that he’ll stop spending his money on booze. After seeking social assistance, he’ll eventually find his way back to his assigned path, land a job working for McDonald’s, and in ten years he’ll be managing his own franchise.
    Instead, he takes the money and goes inside the liquor store.
    It’s so disheartening to see the life choices humans make.
    A split second later I’m in Reno, Nevada, at the Silver Legacy Casino, drinking a double latte from Starbucks while I watch thirty-two-year-old Mavis Hanson turn her last five hundred dollars into chips at the blackjack table. Mavis has been playing blackjack for the past six hours and is down more than three large but she can’t stop now.
    Mavis owes a lot of people a lot of money. But instead of taking on a second job or working harder at her full-time job and trying to get a promotion, she decided to empty out her savings account in an attempt to win enough at the casinos so she can pay off her debts all at once. Now she’s down to her last five hundred dollars. After that’s gone, the only money she’ll have to her name will be Monopoly money.
    If she gets up now and walks away from the table, she’ll realize what a big mistake she’s made, but at least she won’t be destitute and she’ll have the courage to go back to work and try to get her affairs in order. But if she gambles the last of her savings away, she won’t make it to her thirty-third birthday.
    Unless, of course, Lady Luck intervenes.
    “Hey, Fabio,” says Lady Luck as she glides up next to me, shimmering like an Egyptian goddess in a twenty-four-karat-gold sequined dress with spaghetti straps. Her hair is in cornrows with strands of diamonds sparkling in the casino lights.
    “Hey, Liza,” I say, putting on my sunglasses to cut down on the glare. “You look like you just got in from Vegas.”
    “Monaco, sugar,” she says. “I love the Mediterranean this time of year. But it’s more like a vacation than work, you know?”
    I nod in agreement, but I haven’t had a vacation since before the French Revolution.
    Lady Luck is an Intangible. A notion. A concept. Vague and abstract. Like Serendipity, Creativity, Chance, and Fame. I think Laughter is an Intangible, while Humor is an Attribute. Not to be confused with the Emotives, who, naturally, are in charge of emotions—Love, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Compassion, Disgust, and all of the other feelings humans experience.
    Emotives can get a bit theatrical and don’t tend to exhibit a lot of reason, plus they can be rather single-minded, so you can’t expect a lot of stimulating conversation. Intangibles are more fun to hang out with. I think it’s because they don’t take themselves so seriously and appreciate a wider range of subjects. But they tend to be fickle.
    I seldom see Lady Luck for more than a few minutes because she can’t seem to stay in one place for any length of time. She’s like a honeybee, buzzing from human to human, pollinating them with luck before buzzing off.
    The thing about Lady Luck is that she has ADD.
    She blows a kiss at a defeated-looking elderly gentleman sitting at a dollar slot machine. Two seconds later, he wins a thousand bucks and starts laughing.
    That rule about not getting involved? It applies only to Fate and Destiny and Death. After all, you can’t be an Intangible or an Emotive or one of the Deadly Sins without having some kind of an impact. But it all comes down to what humans do with their luck or their fear or their jealousy that determines their eventual outcome.
    That’s what I am. An Eventual. Same for Destiny, Death, and Karma. There are also the Lesser Sins like Gossip and Prejudice, all of the Contrary Virtues, the Heavenly Virtues, and, of course, the Subversives—War, Hysteria, Conspiracy, and Paranoia, among others. You don’t really want to plan a team-building weekend and invite any of the Subversives.
    “So what brings you to the biggest little city in