Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  You could still join us, Mia.

  We need you, Mia.

  Stop fighting us.

  Stand with us.

  Fight with us.

  He was close enough now that I could have reached out and shoved him away. But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t stop staring at his neck. His shoulder-length hair caught on the collar of his shirt, and skin that usually remained covered was revealed for the briefest of moments. Just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of the veiny red mark that reached down Mr. Kale’s neck from behind his ear.

  Mr. Kale began to take another step toward me. He reached for me, as though to pull me into an embrace. I caught sight of the circular brand on his palm and revulsion swelled in me. Whatever spell Mr. Kale had been spinning inside my head broke. I took two quick steps back, out of his reach. He frowned, and the pressure in my head went away. It was quickly replaced with rage so fierce it was like gasoline thrown on the fire in my heart, and this time I let it burn.

  “I know what you’re up to,” I said. It was strange how cold my voice was, when inside I was molten. “You can do more than read people’s thoughts, can’t you? You can make them do things, like you made my mom tell a bunch of strangers what had happened to her, when she wouldn’t even—” When she wouldn’t tell me. I shook this thought from my head. I didn’t want Mr. Kale to have access to it. “That’s what you wanted to do to me here, yesterday …” I continued. “What your little initiation was all about, your bonding ritual. You didn’t think Katrina’s blackmail was enough to secure my loyalty, so you decided to try a surefire way to control me.”

  “I can bend a person’s will to mine,” Mr. Kale admitted. There was no trace of guilt in his eyes. “But only if a part of them wants to comply. Your mother wanted to tell what happened to her. I could never have influenced her to do so otherwise. Isn’t there any part of you, Mia, that wants to help us?”

  I shook my head. It was time for me to end this.

  “If you bother my brother or me again, if you even look at either of us in a way I don’t like, I’ll turn you in to the police, and the principal, and reporters, and anyone who’ll listen to me. I’ll tell them you’re a cult leader, and you’re recruiting students to join. And you know what will happen then? You’ll get fired. Maybe you’ll even go to jail. And you know what I’ll do?”

  His mouth tightened. “What will you do, Miss Price?”

  “Go about my life as though none of this ever happened.”

  “Do you really think that’s possible?” Mr. Kale asked. “Can you ignore what you know to be true? I’ve seen inside your mind, Mia. I know what you’ve done. I know about the man you hurt before you came to Los Angeles. But I also know about the girl you saved. Janna was her name, wasn’t it? You brought her back, healed her. I know you’re afraid of your ability, afraid you’ll hurt people in an attempt to help, but that’s all the more reason to join us. You need us as much as we need you. If you let me, I can help you control your ability.”

  They’ll try to use you …

  My fists clenched. I was nobody’s tool.

  “Katrina told me about your chain of command,” I said. “The most powerful Seeker is the one in charge, right? If I were to join your circle, that would be me, wouldn’t it? I’d take your place.”

  Mr. Kale’s brow hunched. “Katrina told you that?”

  “She told me enough. Is that what you want from me? You want me to lead your cult?”

  “Not … not exactly.” For the first time I could remember, Mr. Kale looked uncomfortable. He dropped his eyes and shifted on his feet, as though he’d been caught and didn’t want to admit it.

  “What, then! What do you want from me?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Then I’ll never join you.”

  I turned and stalked to the door. I almost made it through before realization stopped me cold.

  The vision of martyrs.

  I felt a weight on my chest, like someone was standing on it. I could barely breathe.

  The vision of martyrs. Jeremy’s visions.

  They’ll try to use you.

  Suddenly I knew what the Seekers wanted from me, and it was not for me to lead them into their final battle.

  They wanted me to die for them.

  Mr. Kale’s spring-loaded door slammed behind me with a sound as loud as a shotgun blast in my ears.

  Once again, I found myself running from room 317. The halls were empty, so there was no one to get in my way. I pounded down two flights of stairs, not slowing until I reached the main hallway on the first floor, and then I stopped dead.

  Every locker in the hallway had a red flyer taped to its front. Bloodred, with black print. An image of the Seekers in their red cloaks and black masks flashed into my head.

  Students were lined up in the commons to receive their rations, and I could see that many of them held red flyers and talked excitedly in groups, while Followers in white kept their distance but watched the rest of the students closely.

  I decided to forgo my rations for today. I had to get out of this school.

  I hurried to my locker to collect my things, not bothering to read the flyers as I passed. I didn’t want to know what they said. In my peripheral vision, the red sheets of paper blurred like a long sweep of blood. But when I reached my own locker, I could no longer avoid the words printed on the flyers.

  BEGINNING OF THE END PARTY

  APRIL 17

  AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD

  HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

  “Hurry up please it’s time.”

  I whirled to find Parker reading aloud over my shoulder, holding his rations box. I snatched the flyer off my locker, crumpled it, and tossed it into the nearby trash can.

  “You riding home with me?” I asked.

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I thought you might catch a ride with whoever brought you to school this morning.”

  “Nope,” he said. I waited for him to say more, to tell me whom he’d ridden with, but he left it at “nope.”

  They’ll try to use you.

  I wanted to tell my brother what I suspected about the Seekers, what their real reason was for wanting me to join them. But the truth was, I didn’t think Parker would believe me. He’d think I was trying to get him back on my side.

  He didn’t trust me any more than I trusted him.

  So I didn’t say anything, just turned away to spin my locker combination. But when I opened the door, something small and flat fluttered to my feet. I knelt to pick it up.

  It was a tarot card.

  No, not a tarot card. The tarot card. The Tower card from Katrina’s deck.

  “What’s that?” Parker asked.

  I slipped the card into my pocket before he could see it. “Nothing,” I said, and I meant it. It was nothing to me.

  We had to pass through the corridor of the dead and missing to exit the school. I shuddered to see hundreds of red flyers pinned to the walls there. The afternoon sunlight shone through the high windows and reflected off the red paper, painting everything in red light, including us.

  29

  “I WANT YOU to stay here with Mom,” I told Parker as I pulled up to the curb in front of our house. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back soon.”

  Parker’s grip on his rations box tightened, leaving fingertip-sized impressions in the cardboard. “You’re going to see that guy, aren’t you? What’s his name … Jason?”

  “Jeremy.”

  “You barely know him, Mia. You shouldn’t be … doing whatever you’re doing with him.”

  Blood rushed to my cheeks, heating them like little furnaces. “Thanks for the advice, Prophet. What makes you think we’re doing anything?”

  “I heard him leave the house this morning.”

  “So. He needed a place to crash. We both had a rough night.”

  “Oh, yeah? What happened?” He sounded too casual.

  “I’m guessing you already know.�
� It really was a guess, but his silence confirmed my suspicions. “Quentin told you.”

  My brother stared straight ahead, still gripping the box like it would come alive and try to jump from his hands. “He said you were in the Waste last night, helping Katrina. Why do you get to do whatever you want, while I have to put aside what’s important to me?”

  “First, I wasn’t helping Katrina. Second … you know a lot less about the Seekers and what they’re really up to than you think. They’re dangerous, Parker.”

  “So what? This whole city is dangerous. The whole world is dangerous. You know what’s really dangerous? Standing next to you, Mia, but I’ve done that my whole life, haven’t I? I’ve always stood by you … even when a storm was coming.”

  “Parker …”

  “I don’t want to stand by you anymore.” His voice was anguished, but saying the words couldn’t hurt as bad as hearing them.

  “Pick a side then,” I told him, fighting to hold back the emotion ripping apart my insides. “Us or them. But you don’t get to have both.”

  Parker threw open my car door and got out too quickly. The box on his lap tipped and threw its contents onto the sidewalk. Parker kicked a bottle of water across the lawn, but left everything else where it lay as he stormed inside the house.

  I sat there with my car running, gripping the steering wheel, my whole body shaking. I sat there until the heat of rage inside me cooled, and I thought I could drive without losing control of the car.

  Then I pulled the note Jeremy had given me from my pocket, smoothed it out. I knew I should go inside. Check on Mom. Make up with Parker. So many things I should do, but none of them were things I wanted to do. Besides, doing what I should hadn’t gotten me anywhere so far.

  I reread Jeremy’s note. My eyes kept fixating on the word “need.” I need to see you. He needed me. Someone needed me.

  And I needed to see him, too. At that moment, there was nothing in the world I needed, or wanted, more.

  30

  I DROVE EAST on Venice Boulevard, away from the beach and Tentville, away from my home and my crazy-making family, searching for the address Jeremy had written on his note. Even with my car windows rolled up, I could feel the storm warning tingling on my skin, like I was wearing it, a coat with pins and needles sewn in, to act as my own personal iron maiden. But the skies were clear, cloudless, relentlessly blue.

  What if I wasn’t sensing a storm traveling across the ocean, building over the water like it was supposed to? What if the storm I sensed was like the one that appeared out of a clear blue sky the day of the quake?

  What if Prophet was right?

  I muttered to myself, “No. No, no, no. There is no storm. There is no storm.”

  The windows of buildings I passed were wallpapered with red flyers, exactly like the ones I’d seen at Skyline. Telephone poles, too. The doors of houses. Apartments. Trees. There were thousands of them, everywhere I looked. I didn’t need to read them to know what they said.

  Hurry up please it’s time.

  “There is no storm.” I continued the mantra. “There is no storm.”

  Traffic on the main roads was bumper-to-bumper, like vast, narrow parking lots stretching for miles north and south. It was like half the city had suddenly decided today was the day to get out. Maybe they’d heard Prophet’s proclamation, that the beginning of the end was scheduled for tomorrow, and figured it couldn’t hurt to put some distance between themselves and Los Angeles.

  “There is no storm.”

  I left the main roads and started winding my way through side streets. The red flyers were everywhere, papering the city. The Seekers had to be behind this. They must be trying to gather as many people as possible for one last Rove. One last recruiting effort, although it was coming a little late in the game if they believed Prophet’s storm really would hit tomorrow.

  I shook my head. “There is. No. Storm.”

  The sky was purple by the time I found it, a small, quaint house on a dead-end street in Culver City, only a few miles from my house in Venice, but it had taken me almost two hours to get there.

  Most of the houses on this particular street looked, from the outside, either empty or uninhabitable. A few had collapsed. In others, the windows were busted out. Walls were tagged with spray paint. Lawns were yellow. But there were two houses that appeared untouched, the one that matched the address Jeremy had given me, and another across the street with a sign in the window that announced in an old-fashioned, hard-to-read font:

  I felt in my pocket for the tarot card Katrina had stuck in my locker. Before I knew what I was doing, I had crossed the street and stood at the psychic’s front door. KNOCK, read a plaque the size of a stick of gum affixed above the doorknob. I did.

  Katrina and Mr. Kale said the Tower girl would always draw the Tower card. I had drawn it twice from Katrina’s deck, which was strange, but could still easily be explained by chance. I wanted to prove once and for all that I was not the Tower girl. I would ask this psychic for a tarot reading, and I would see what a deck other than Katrina’s turned up.

  The door cracked and an eye peered out at me. “Yes? Who’s there?” The woman’s voice was a deep gurgle.

  I put on my warmest smile. “I’d like a tarot reading.”

  The door swung open. “Come in,” said a tiny, hunched figure in a layered, velvet skirt with a knitted shawl around her shoulders. Her hair was long and gray and hung past her breasts. Looked like she hadn’t brushed it that month.

  Great, I thought. Of all the psychics in L.A., I chose the fortune-teller who looked like an escaped carny. Still, I followed the woman inside.

  “What did you say your name was?” the old woman asked as she led me down a dark hallway to a room at the rear of the house. The whole place smelled like onions and made my eyes water. It was decorated in stereotypical fortune-teller motifs, with hunks of crystal displayed in glass cabinets, beads hanging in doorways, patchy pillows and blankets everywhere.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “It’s Mia.”

  “I am Madam Lupescu.” Of course she was. “Have a seat.”

  She gestured to a small round table laid with a lace tablecloth. All it needed was a crystal ball.

  I sat down, and she sat across from me and stared at me. Then the awkwardness set in.

  “So,” I said, needing to fill the silence, “how long have you been a psychic?”

  “Is that what you came to find out?” Her eyes peered at me through weathered eyelids that sagged like an elephant’s.

  “No, I was just—”

  “You were being polite. Making small talk. Wasting time when there is so little time left to waste.” She smiled, showing yellow teeth that had been worn down to the nubs. She leaned toward me over the table and I smelled the coffee on her breath, and it made me like coffee quite a bit less. “Let’s begin,” she said.

  She produced a velvet pouch from a pocket in her voluminous skirt, loosened the drawstring, and dropped a deck of cards into her hand. Like Katrina’s deck, this one looked old. The woman shuffled, her gnarled fingers surprisingly dexterous as the cards whipped through them. She placed the deck facedown on the table. “Cut to the left,” she said.

  I did as I was told. Madam Lupescu took the deck and dealt five cards, laying them out in the shape of an even-sided cross.

  I studied the cards intently, and then exhaled a pent-up breath and smiled.

  The Tower card was not among those Madam Lupescu had dealt.

  I was not the Tower girl.

  I was free. I could get up and leave now, drop my last ten dollars on the table and head for the door. It would be rude to simply walk out. I would sit patiently and hear Madam Lupescu’s reading, dismiss it, and then move on with my life.

  “Major arcana.” The old woman whistled, then pointed with three fingers to the three cards in the middle. “Past, present, future,” she said, then indicated first the bottom card and then the top. “Reason and potential.”


  She pointed to the card that represented my past. It depicted a glowing orb in the sky and two baying hounds. “The Moon. It is fear. Self-deception. Disorientation.”

  Okay. Fair enough.

  She indicated the reason card. I didn’t like this one. It showed a horned red beast with a forked tail that wrapped around a man and a woman.

  “The Devil. He is the reason for your Moon. Your fear. He is bondage and ignorance. Slavery and hopelessness. But this …” She pointed to the top card: potential. It showed a man in a red robe that reminded me way too much of the Seekers’ cloaks. He was sitting on a throne, holding a golden scepter and wearing a gaudy golden crown. “The Hierophant.”

  My mouth went dry. “The … the Hierophant? That’s my—” I had to swallow. “My potential?”

  The old woman nodded. “He represents power and knowledge, and commands respect. He sits on the throne between law and liberty, obedience and disobedience. Between heaven and earth.”

  “What about those two?” I said quickly, pointing to present and future. My present card showed a winged monkey perched on a wheel. “This is the Wheel of Fortune, right?”

  “Yes,” Madam Lupescu confirmed. “Destiny. It marks a turning point.”

  I chewed my lip. “What about my future?” I felt a squirm of nervousness in my stomach, like I had swallowed something that wasn’t quite dead yet.

  My future card showed a naked man and woman holding hands.

  Madam Lupescu scowled thoughtfully at the card. She picked at one corner of it and revealed—

  My breath stopped.

  “Odd.” Madam Lupescu peeled the card with the naked man and woman off the card stuck to its back. Then she laid the two side by side.

  I still couldn’t breathe.