The Deck of Omens

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “I’m not the Hawthornes’ attack dog.” Isaac’s voice was low but vehement. “You know that, right?”

  Violet glanced up at him. He was looking at her a shade too intensely, and she knew that although she’d been mostly teasing, it was important to him that she didn’t actually believe what she’d said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  His jaw loosened, and he nodded once, brusquely. “Good.”

  Something had been off about Isaac lately—a layer on top of other layers, a problem Violet told herself wasn’t hers to try to solve. Besides, if she didn’t ask questions, she could still maintain the illusion that she didn’t want to know how he’d gotten that scar on his neck—or what had really happened to his family.

  “Anyway,” Isaac said, a little too quickly, “I already looked at the Church’s archives. You can read them all on your own time if you want, but the only interesting stuff is in here.”

  He pulled a different notebook out of the stack and flipped it open, tapping on the name scrawled on the title page. Maurice Carlisle.

  “This belonged to Harper’s dad.”

  Isaac nodded. “I wasn’t sure how Harper would take it if she was here, honestly. Us rifling through his things. But you said you wanted to kill the Beast—and I don’t think we’re going to solve a mystery that’s plagued this town for a century and a half by playing nice.”

  “I know we aren’t,” Violet said quietly. “I don’t care. It messed up my family. I want it dead.”

  “So do I,” Isaac said.

  “You read these notes already. And you must have found something, or you wouldn’t have bothered with all this.”

  Isaac met her eyes, and she knew she was right.

  “Here,” he said simply, flipping the notebook open to a bookmarked page. “It’s how the Church of the Four Deities planned the ritual they tried to do on your mom. The one to turn her into a vessel for the Beast.”

  Violet looked down at the page. The words were scratched in messy handwriting.

  The Beast has warned us that it cannot survive in corporeal form in Four Paths without a host. If cut off from the Gray for too long, it will wither and die.… We cannot allow this to happen. We must not seal the gate before the transfer of its soul is complete.

  Her throat went dry. This was exactly what they’d been looking for: a weakness.

  “So if we can draw the Beast out,” she said slowly, “the same way the Church did, but cut it off from the Gray…”

  “It’ll die,” Isaac finished.

  “How can we close the Gray, though?”

  Isaac raised his hands in the air. “My power extends to the Gray, remember? Any portal it opens, I can disintegrate.”

  Violet winced, remembering how much messing directly with the Gray had seemed to cost Isaac, but nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “But that doesn’t answer how we would lure it out, does it? We’d need somebody connected to it. Somebody—oh.”

  Suddenly she was back on the night of that ritual again, staring at her mother’s lifeless body lying in the circle of bone. Watching Rosie appear in front of her, in her bedroom, in the Gray, in the spire.

  She couldn’t do that again. Not willingly. Not when it had taken everything she had just to escape with her life.

  “Absolutely not.” Violet slammed the book shut. “I refuse to be monster bait.”

  “You just said you agreed that we couldn’t play nice,” Isaac said roughly. “And you already drove it out of your head once. I know you can do it again.”

  “This is different,” Violet whispered, thinking of how the Beast had melted the flesh away from Rosie’s face, forced her to watch it decay. “I beat it that one time, yeah. But if it comes back, it’s not going to let me get away so easily. And we don’t even know if this will work. To risk everything like this—it’s reckless.”

  “Maybe it is,” Isaac said. “But if you really want it dead, well, this might be our best chance.”

  “I have to think about this.” Violet snatched up the journal and stuffed it in her bag. “Just give me a little time, okay?”

  Isaac’s face softened. He made no move to get the book back from her, which Violet appreciated.

  “All right. But know this: Nobody’s ever changed things in Four Paths by pulling a punch. They pay for every victory.”

  Violet’s eyes strayed to the founders on the wall, all solemn, all beautiful, all dead.

  “I know,” she said, and then she turned and strode out the door.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Most of Four Paths avoided the depths of the forest, especially at night. But it was the part of town May loved best. She tipped her head back and shook the tension out of her shoulders, listening to the birds chirping in the trees. A yellow moon hung above her head, a waxing gibbous surrounded by a sea of hazy stars.

  “I think I just twisted an ankle,” grumbled a voice beside her. “This is totally going to mess with my race next week.”

  The tension returned to May’s shoulders immediately. She moved her gaze away from the sky and toward the figure on her right—Justin Hawthorne, her older brother, Four Paths’ guilt-ridden golden boy and their mother’s undisputed favorite child.

  “You’ll live,” she said tersely. “Stop complaining. You should feel lucky you’re back on the patrol schedule at all.”

  “Yeah, on a trial basis,” said Justin.

  May thought bitterly that a trial basis was more than Justin deserved considering all the shit he’d put their family through. He’d betrayed their mother and she’d still given him what he wanted.

  Justin, it seemed, was impervious to true damage—he would spring right back up again no matter how many times you knocked him down, while May felt sometimes as if she would shatter into tiny pieces if she had to handle one more catastrophe.

  “Let’s just concentrate on completing the route,” May said. He was ruining the way the forest made her feel at night, reminding her of everything she couldn’t be. “We need to be on alert. We don’t know when or how Dad is coming back.”

  Mentioning their father was a cheap shot, but it did what May had intended—made Justin tense up, too.

  “Are you totally sure you saw him returning?” he asked, not for the first time.

  The Hawthorne family did not talk about Ezra Bishop. No one had ever specifically made the rule, but May had followed it anyway—it was an unspoken truth in a sea of other unspoken truths, and May had grown quite good at learning how to veer away from anything that might tip the delicate balance between herself, her mother, and Justin.

  But there was no avoiding this. Not anymore. And deep down, May was grateful for it.

  Augusta hated May’s father, so of course Justin did, too. But May missed him. He was the only person in her life who had ever chosen her over Justin. Who had ever made her feel special. She knew he wasn’t perfect—but neither was Augusta.

  “I’m certain,” she said. “Mom’s pretending it isn’t happening. But it will. Those cards don’t lie.”

  But they’d changed—changed for May. Justin didn’t know that, though. Nobody did. And although Augusta had reacted to the news of her ex-boyfriend returning to town about as well as she’d reacted to her ex-girlfriend returning to town—which is to say she’d firmly refused to talk about it—May knew that the future she had chosen would come to pass.

  She trusted the cards. She trusted herself.

  “I know,” Justin said quietly. “But he left so long ago. I thought maybe this time, he was finally gone for good.”

  May remembered their father’s last day in town. It had begun with a fight, as most days did, but this time, when Augusta had told him to get out, he’d listened.

  I’ll be back soon, he had told May, planting a kiss on her blond head. She’d clung to his waist, her head buried in the soft leather of his jacket, and wailed like a banshee when Augusta peeled her away. It was the last time she had cried in fron
t of someone else.

  Take me with you, she’d asked her father, and Augusta would never forgive her for it.

  It had been seven years, long past soon, but May still held out hope for his return.

  The birdsong had faded away now, and there was only the sound of their footsteps as they crunched through the underbrush.

  “He promised he’d come back,” May said to Justin.

  Justin shrugged, his broad shoulders silhouetted in the moonlight. What little she could make out of his face was frowning. “Yeah, well, he broke every other promise he ever made to us. Why would he have told the truth that time?”

  The words flew out before she could stop them. “You’re not really one to talk about lies.”

  Justin scowled in response. “Neither are you, May. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how you sold us out to Mom.”

  “I didn’t sell you out,” May said. “I was worried about you. And I apologized for going too far.”

  She had said some awful things to Justin. She felt bad about that. But she had been tired of tagging along while he dragged people into dangerous situations, and worried that his propensity for playing the hero would only end in tragedy. Isaac cared about Justin far too much to ever call him out, and Augusta indulged him too much to see the truth. May had been the only one to hold him accountable for his decisions—and in the end, it hadn’t even mattered.

  Justin got to be the hero who helped save the day, and May’s hawthorn tree got turned to stone. It wasn’t fair.

  “I know you said you were sorry,” Justin said. “But our mother has been taking peoples’ memories away for years, and you don’t seem to care about it at all.”

  “That’s not true,” May whispered. “I care more than you know.”

  She had cared enough to give Violet her memories back—but she wasn’t Justin. She couldn’t just go around flagrantly disregarding her mother’s rules and expecting to be welcomed back with open arms. Justin would never understand how hard she had to work to be treated half as well as he was on a bad day. Which was why she hadn’t told him about Violet.

  Because he wouldn’t be impressed. Because he wouldn’t understand what a big deal it had been for her to act against Augusta at all.

  Justin coughed, grimacing, and turned toward her, jolting her away from her rising fury.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Do you smell that?”

  May breathed in deeply. She knew the smell of Four Paths’ woods well—earth and oak. This time of year it was often tinged with the slight scent of dying leaves.

  But May held a hand up to her mouth as a wave of decay washed over her, frowning. Dead leaves didn’t smell like this. Perhaps there was some kind of rotting animal—but no. This was more than that. It was the kind of smell that felt like a tangible thing, like the very air around her was somehow diseased.

  “Yeah, I smell it,” May said, pulling her flashlight out of her pocket and shining it on the thicket of branches in front of them. Again she noticed how silent it was, but this time she felt a twinge of unease. She should’ve picked up on the strangeness of that ages ago, but she’d been too busy arguing with Justin. “Something’s wrong.”

  “You think the Gray got someone new?” Justin asked grimly. They both had their flashlights out now. May scanned the clearing around them for any sign of the smell, but there was nothing strange about the nearby forest.

  May shook her head. “The bodies… they don’t smell like anything.”

  May was deeply disturbed by the corpses that the Gray spat out, but at least she knew what they looked like. She didn’t know what this was.

  She held up her hand, noted the direction the wind was blowing, and pointed into the trees. “It’s coming from over there.”

  “Great.” Justin crashed forward through the underbrush with all the subtlety of a steamroller.

  “Hey!” May yelled after him, reluctantly following in his wake. “You are literally that dude in the first five minutes of a horror movie right now. I hope you know that.”

  “We’re on patrol,” Justin said cheerfully from in front of her. “It’s our job to walk into trouble.”

  May vehemently disagreed with that. Anomalies in the woods were meant to be mapped—she whipped out her phone and placed a pin at their location—and reported to Augusta. But this was classic Justin, breaking the rules, knowing there would always be someone there to catch him if he fell. If the Beast didn’t kill him, maybe she would.

  The ground sloped upward into a small hill. May paused for a brief rest while Justin, always in better shape than her, surged ahead. She was searching her backpack for a water bottle when she heard her name.

  “May…” Justin’s voice floated through the trees. “I found it.”

  His tone was too somber to warrant a snippy I told you this would be disturbing.

  “All right. I’m coming.” May clambered uphill and ducked beneath a low-hanging branch, pinching her nose in a futile attempt to block out the smell of decay.

  She found Justin standing stiffly in the center of a small clearing, the shaky beam of his flashlight trained on the tree in front of him.

  There was something horribly wrong with it. Part of the bark had faded from brown to a dark gray, and rivulets of liquid dripped down the trunk, leaving a slick, oily sheen behind them. The smell that wafted from it was nearly unbearable. May’s eyes stung; she tried to blink her tears away, coughing.

  May raised her flashlight, shuddering as she traced the spread of gray toward its branches.

  “What do you think is happening here?” Justin asked, his voice muffled by the hand he’d clapped over his mouth and nose.

  “I don’t know,” May said. She had been in the Gray just once, the time she had saved Justin from the Beast after he’d failed his ritual. Something about this tree reminded her of the forest she’d seen there, pulsating and alien, branches twisted toward her like clawing hands. But it wasn’t the same—although it was damaged, the bark that remained was still unmistakably normal, still part of Four Paths.

  She took a picture of it on her phone, then lowered her flashlight to the ground.

  Iridescent liquid pooled on the ground below, soaking into the soil. May watched, alarmed, as it slid toward them. She’d never heard of anything like this before, yet it looked oddly familiar.

  “We should move,” she said, grabbing Justin’s arm and yanking him back. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to touch it.”

  For once he didn’t protest, his expression nervous. “Yeah. Wait—what’s that?”

  He gestured at the tree, and May swung her phone flashlight forward, a terrible sense of déjà vu washing over her.

  She didn’t know why it had taken this long for her to recognize it. But now, as she saw the half-melted trunk, harshly illuminated, and watched a tendril of gray emerge, she remembered sitting beneath the hawthorn tree just a few days ago, shuddering at that exact image. Before she could even fully process what it might mean, the gray dissipated, vanishing into the air like a puff of smoke. She shone her flashlight on the tree, on the iridescent trails of liquid still creeping toward them, but all signs of it were gone.

  “Shit,” she whispered, her grip tightening on Justin’s arm. She had seen this coming for them, but that didn’t tell her what it was—or how to stop it.

  “You saw that too.” His voice was raw. “The Gray. You saw it, right?”

  May nodded, nausea churning in her stomach. “Let’s get out of here. Mom needs to know about this.”

  They hurried back through the forest, their earlier argument forgotten. Long after the smell faded away, May still felt the touch of decay against her skin, as if rot were seeping into her very pores. And in her mind, that smoke unfurled over and over again, reaching for her.

  Isaac Sullivan pressed a hand against the vault in his family’s mausoleum that he should have been buried in, the plaque still engraved with his full name, and sighed.

  Then he
flipped it off.

  He didn’t particularly enjoy visiting his grave—it was always an unpleasant experience, best done with a stolen six-pack and a friend. But today it had felt necessary, even though he was stone-cold sober and was currently not speaking to the only friend he would have wanted to take here.

  “This fucking family,” he muttered, the sound of his footsteps echoing off the mausoleum’s marble floors as he paced down the row of vaults. “This fucking town.”

  Most of Four Paths’ dead were buried deep underground, their ashes stored in forgotten passageways in the catacombs beneath the town hall. But the founders each had their own wing in the mausoleum’s main building. It was red-brown stone and polished marble, dozens of urns tucked away in neat rows of vaults.

  Isaac’s eyes strayed to the biggest plaque, the one at the top of the room, engraved with the Sullivans’ signature dagger.

  Richard Sullivan was buried here. His founder. His ancestor.

  Isaac had never met him, but it didn’t matter—he hated him. For making a deal he didn’t understand with a monster he’d never properly seen. For trapping his descendants in a town where people died in awful ways and leaving them to stop it. For giving Isaac the powers that had led to the urns slotted neatly beside his own empty grave.

  Guilt churned in his throat and made his eyes water, but Isaac forced himself to look at the plaques on either side of his. Caleb’s and Isaiah’s. It was the least he could do, considering the fact that two of his older brothers were dead because of him.

  Grieving them was a harsh, strange thing, a double-edged knife that caught Isaac unawares each time he thought, perhaps, he’d begun to heal. It had only stopped hurting as much once he stopped trying to stanch the flow of his agony, once he accepted that his grief would always be an open wound.

  But then a voice rang out from behind him and gouged it all open again.

  “This fucking family, indeed,” said Gabriel. “Shit, I hate this place.”