Summer Queen

by Amelia Wilde

  Summer Queen

  Amelia Wilde

  Hey, Serena—

  Check this out.

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

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  1

  Persephone

  Before

  Silvery bells chiming against glass shouldn’t strike terror into my heart.

  They’re bells. Harmless.

  But if I’m being honest, my heart was struck by terror a long time ago. My mother did it, over and over, with all the precision of a blacksmith banging a sword into its final shape. The difference is that I turned out thin and soft.

  I’m not a weapon.

  That makes me breakable.

  It especially makes me breakable for people like Luther Hades. Remember, my mother said to me before I got on the train to come to the city, if he finds you, you’ll wish you were already dead.

  Because he’ll kill me, I repeated back for the thousandth time.

  Worse. Then she pressed my suitcase into my hand, gave me a fierce kiss on the forehead, and gave me into the keeping of my very own security team.

  The security team is not here now, which is probably why my heart is racing, the beats uncontrollably fast and impossible to slow.

  This is the thing my mother warned me about. Going off on my own. I’m doing it, and I’ll probably pay for it. I always do.

  “Persephone.” My best friend Magda nudges me with an elbow. “Are you okay? You look pale. You aren’t going to throw up, are you?”

  I am not like the other girls at the boarding school in the city. I’m not even like Magda. I call her my best friend but I’m certain I’m not hers. We’re from different planets, and mine’s the kind of planet that can summon me home without a moment’s notice.

  Her, on the other hand?

  She has three credit cards from her father and looks like a nymph sprouted from a combination of an elegant, polished-wood library and a fashion magazine. She looks like she might conceivably be allowed to visit this off-campus mystic shop called The Fates.

  Magda wears a navy sheath dress and a silver necklace, her hair swept back into a gleaming ponytail. You could mistake her for a Kennedy or an actress. Or both.

  Whereas I am stuck wearing my school uniform. The only thing it has in common with Magda’s weekend outfit is that part of my uniform is navy. That part is the navy sweater vest that’s too warm in the late September heat.

  “Seph?”

  The others are already ahead of us so far that the bell chimes again, its sound muted by the glass. Magda blinks at me.

  “I’m not going to throw up,” I say finally. “Let’s go.”

  We push our way into the narrow shop against a weak wave of air conditioning. The bell on the door chimes again. Three times, three chimes. It doesn’t mean anything—it’s a bell on a door. But I can’t relax.

  The shop seems normal. I don’t have a lot of experience shopping in stores because that’s always been absolutely forbidden. The city had been forbidden until a little over two years ago.

  As winter rolled into spring I found it harder and harder to get out of bed.

  No matter how many soups my mother made and how many thick chunks of bread she brought to me, I got thinner. She pinched and threatened and begged and finally I did something dramatic—I told her that I would die if she didn’t let me go to school.

  By the time fall came I was on my way into the city, accompanied by two huge men who would live in the building across the street and watch my every move. Except today.

  I’ve lost them for this one, single outing.

  The potential fallout of this—losing school, losing everything—is like acid in my throat. If my mother discovers that I’ve put myself in danger she’ll make me come home. No discussion. Those have always been the terms.

  I run my fingertips over a row of crystal necklaces on silver chains, their meanings on neatly printed papers beneath each display. One for strength. One for calming. One for optimism. I could use all three right now.

  Jewelry. Books. Rows of small boxes on the shelves—tarot cards. Jill and Amy have already gone toward the back of the store. It’s a surprisingly long room. It looks a lot smaller from the outside, but now that I’m through the door it looks like it goes on forever.

  A woman appears from nowhere, and it’s only after she’s out in the main store that I see the doorway behind her. A beaded curtain hides the next room.

  “You’re here for a reading.” There’s no lift in her voice. It’s not a question. And she’s looking straight at me.

  My stomach turns to ice and my face to fire. She looks…ageless. Like she could be twenty-five or fifty and there’s no telling which one is true. The woman wears a gray… what is it? Magda would call it a jumpsuit. The word “jumpsuit” doesn’t do justice to how elegant it looks, from its thin straps to the wide legs that flow around the woman’s ankles.

  “I’m not.” My voice sounds too loud in the little store and Jill and Amy turn to look at me. Their eyes shine, and I can’t tell if it’s because they’re interested in a reading or because they’re waiting to laugh at me.

  I can never tell. I’m trying to speak the language of the other girls in the boarding school, but at the beginning of my third year I still feel like I’m only fluent in linen dresses and planting my mother’s flowers.

  “She is.” Magda’s firm. No nonsense. She steps up and threads her arm through mine. “Come on, Seph. Let’s see if there’s vomit in your future.”

  Two other women come out of a room to the side.

  They don’t wear the same thing as the first, but the outfits are similar enough that they look like three flowers together. Never mind that flowers aren’t usually gray. Their clothes are the soft color of ashes on white petals, almost a fawnish gray.

  It’s deceptive, somehow.

  I know it is, even if I don’t know why.

  Magda tugs me forward and motions to the other girls. Come with us.

  Jill and Amy don’t hesitate. This is a show for them but it’s something else for me. My skin knows it. My heart knows it. Run, run. This fortune holds danger for me. It holds truth.

  There’s no running with Magda’s arm through mine.

  The three women disappear behind the beaded curtain and we’re close behind them. The beads aren’t beads, I realize as they slip through my fingers—they’re rocks. Small, black rocks. Like something carved out of the side of a dark mountain.

  Like the mountain that watches over my home.

  The side room has two halves. One is mostly taken up with a round table big enough for four people to sit at. The other half is storage. It’s almost too familiar. Wooden shelves, wooden baskets. My mother would use the same things.

  Does she know I’m here? Does she sense it? Is she coming to put an end to this even now? Most of me is horrified at the thought of her finding out, but a small part, a tiny, weak part of
me longs for the safety of her bruising grip.

  “We should go,” I whisper into Magda’s ear.

  She gives a sharp shake of her head. “I want to see this.”

  “I don’t have any money for a reading.”

  “I’ll pay.” Magda flicks her eyes toward me, then the table. “Little Seph, always so clean and pretty. Always so perfect. I want to know what’s going to happen to you.”

  I don’t. I have the tingling, knife’s-edge sense that what these women have to tell me isn’t something I want to know. My throat feels too tight to contain my heartbeat. If my hair could stand up against its own weight, it would. My wool-blend skirt itches against my legs with every step Magda makes me take until I get to the seat at the table. Jill and Amy hang back but Magda stays, a hand on my shoulder. Why does she want this? There’s nothing about me that could possibly interest her or anyone else.

  I’ve lived a boring, isolated life. It’s far from perfect.

  The three women take the other seats at the table.

  For the life of me I can’t tell if the one who holds the cards is the one who spoke to me before. A shimmering quality takes over my vision. Good. This is going to be the moment when I pass out in this weird little shop and my friends have to call for help. The security team finds out I’m missing, and my mother finds out I’m missing, and then I’m dead or trapped back home, which is basically the same thing.

  The woman with the cards passes them back and forth in her hands, watching me. Magda’s hand tightens on my shoulder.

  “The future,” the woman says, and the other two nod their agreement.

  “Doesn’t Persephone get to pick?” Magda sounds so innocent, but I know it’s an act. She’s not. Not really. Not the way I am. I’m pretending to be worldly and she’s pretending that these women aren’t absolutely in charge.

  The woman with the cards meets Magda’s eyes above my shoulders. “Sometimes the cards choose.”

  She looks back to me, and I have the sensation of the sun dropping down too close, lighting up the sweat gathering at my hairline and the pounding pulse in my neck for everyone to see. Then she half-rises from her chair and places the cards on the table in front of me.

  “Persephone.” She settles back in her seat as she tests my name. I wish I knew hers, but I bet it’s something secret and strange and wouldn’t make me feel any safer. “Shuffle the deck.”

  I feel, rather than see, Jill and Amy move closer in.

  My hands feel oversized and clumsy on the cards. They’re old, worn smooth by lots of readings. What if I threw them all up in the air, right now, a little explosion of papers and fortunes? It would blow up the tension in the room, at least.

  I shuffle the deck.

  Three stacks, two stacks. It’s folding more than shuffling—folding the cards in on one another like I’d fold egg whites into a cake batter. It doesn’t seem right to riffle them the way I would for a new game of solitaire at home, so I don’t.

  The cards can’t actually be hot under my hands, can they? No, no. It’s only me and my nerves. My heartbeat is louder than any clock I’ve ever heard.

  “Done.” I put them back in the center of the table, as far as I can reach. “I guess.”

  “The future,” the woman intones, and picks them up with an easy lift. Her eyes settle back on me. She must know I’m not supposed to be here. She must be able to see it in my face. “In order to read your future, we need guidance from the cards on who you are now.”

  She turns the first card over.

  Everyone leans in.

  The bright image on the card could be me. My mouth goes dry at the details—the simple dress the woman wears, sunlight beaming down on her face. She leans out over the edge of a cliff, arms thrown open wide. She’s going to fall.

  “The Fool.” She lifts a hand to tap the card. “A blank slate. A new beginning.”

  I feel like a blank slate. A blank person. It still stings a little. The fool? All of the cards she has in that deck, and the fool is what I get? Fine. Fine. I don’t need to get worked up over this. They’re only cards. Maybe I am foolish for coming here.

  “What’s to come,” she says, and I can’t take my eyes off that fool, that innocent fool who has no idea she’s about to tumble off the edge. Or maybe she does, and she’s fine with it.

  Another card.

  A lightning bolt tears through the frame to a tower of stones. The image is the act of striking, pure energy throwing the walls of the tower to the ground. I can feel the shake and crash as stones shear away and tear into earth.

  “The Tower can mean liberation.” She considers it in its spot next to the fool. “A sudden change. A destruction.”

  “A destruction of what?” I can’t stop myself from asking. “Of me?”

  “It could be,” Jill chimes in. And to my horror, the rest of the women around the table make sounds of agreement. “It could be anything. And everything.”

  Anything? Everything? It could definitely mean my school career. Coming here could be what triggers the destruction of my only freedom. It could be worse than that, even though right now school feels like everything.

  “Consequences,” the lady snaps. “And for whom. The final two cards.”

  The first one she flips over is Death.

  Wings. Bones. Darkness, like a shadow over everything. My heart stops.

  “A metaphorical death.” She purses her lips. “But possibly a physical one. As relates to...” One more card. The card shows a queen, and it’s my mother. It could be my mother. She has the same regal pose as her, the same set to her jaw. She stares out of the frame of the card, defiant and steadfast. “A queen. A mother figure.”

  My lips have gone numb, my fingertips aching.

  “Do you know this person?” The woman’s soft question cuts to the quick.

  “My mother? Of course I know her.”

  Amy lets out a short laugh and swallows the rest of it back.

  “The cards are saying I’m going to have my world destroyed? I don’t understand. You’re saying that my mother is going to die?”

  The woman traces a hand around all four cards. “You are at the center of these cards. Without this little fool here, none of the rest is in motion.”

  A hot flush of anger, followed by a guilty, wretched hope. “So it’s my fault.”

  “There’s no fault in the cards. Only cause and effect.”

  “She’s not going to die.” I look her in the eye. This shadow of a queen, this fortune teller in a city shop, she—she’s not real. This isn’t real. But she looks back at me as steadily as the woman on the card. “And definitely not because of me. Like—what? I’m going to kill her or something? That’s crazy. I would never do that.”

  “Never is a long time,” she says, and picks up the cards.

  I stand up, fast and hard enough to rock the table. “You’re a liar. A cheat.”

  Except it doesn’t feel like the truth. It feels like I’m the liar. I’m the cheat. I’m the one who’s going to kill my mother, who I love, love, love. I love her, don’t I? Except sometimes, when her fingerprints are there, purple and blue on my arm, I hate her.

  I barely make it out of the shop before my stomach clenches. My knees land on glittering gravel. I throw up in hard, wrenching spasms that last for ages. That’s how the security team finds me—kneeling in the alley, my mother screaming over the phone.

  2

  Hades

  Four years later

  Pain is a strong hand. A fist, unrelenting.

  A vice around my temples made from bone and diamonds.

  Everything I’ve ever done puts the force of itself around my eye sockets and the back of my head, drilling in deep. If I could be in the dark, I would.

  But fuck if I’ll walk away from the bright glare outside the sterile operating room two levels above the mines.

  Not until they tell me if my dog is dead.

  I’ve been standing here for minutes or hours. An eternity. At
some point in the distant past I considered sitting. Fuck that. I am not a superstitious man. I don’t have time in my life for mysticism and wonder at the workings of the universe. Yet a gnawing at the pit of my gut warns me away from taking a seat. It would feel like giving up.

  Dr. Martin sweats underneath the strings of his surgical mask. The back of his neck gleams. The man must know that this is the most important surgery of his life. How could he not? He knew the terms when he signed his contract. His services in exchange for another life. Somewhere, in this mountain, someone might have told his wife the stakes. Or perhaps not. She doesn’t matter to me.

  Conor’s blood left a hot stain on my hands. The unbelievable gall of that fucker. To betray me twice? Twice? He might as well be Zeus.

  The thought filters down through the pain circling my skull. There are things I need to keep the knife’s edge at bay. None of them are here, outside the specialty operating suite I had built with the knowledge that it would probably never be used. Who the fuck would have the balls to come into my mountain and shoot my dog?

  Other than my brother.

  Dr. Martin’s team surrounds the table, heads bowed over the anesthetized form of my dog.

  Another pain taps at the back of my mind. It’s a steady beat, like a dripping faucet. There’s a certain pleasure in feeling it. Pain, properly felt, is fucking extravagant. But there’s more extravagance in the denial of it. It’s an old habit. I won’t think about other dead dogs and other bursts of loss, each one its own neutron bomb. They all left radiation hanging in the air until those parts of my memory were unlivable.