The Deck of Omens

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “Don’t tell me what to do.” He shook her off and ambled toward the cooler. His eyes lit on the stumps at the other side of the clearing, nails half hammered in. “Hey—let’s play Monster in the Gray.”

  Violet could feel the tension pulsating through the clearing, all of it centered on Isaac. He was wheeling out of control, a car screaming off the road, and yet she did not know how to stop him. She’d thought the Sullivans were dangerous because they destroyed the world around them. Now she understood the real danger was just how easily they destroyed themselves.

  “Fuck it.” Justin’s voice was low and gravelly. “It’s a party, isn’t it? May, turn up the music. I’m getting a refill. Let’s play.”

  Harper Carlisle had never really been drunk before. Once or twice, she’d stolen a little of her parents’ whiskey just to try it, but that was it. She’d decided the moment Violet shoved a red Solo cup in her hand that she would pour most of it out on the grass and nurse the rest. She was vulnerable enough at Justin Hawthorne’s birthday party as it was. Getting sloppy would only make this whole thing even more likely to end in disaster.

  Although disaster seemed imminent anyway. It had been bad enough when she and Violet were the only party guests, but Isaac’s presence had set her on edge. He was in no condition to play a drinking game. She didn’t understand what Justin and Violet were thinking, enabling him like that, and she watched with apprehension as they herded him across the clearing, arguing loudly about the rules.

  Harper was about to walk over and give them all a piece of her mind when she felt May’s spindly fingers close around her shoulder.

  “Harper.” Her voice was not hostile, but it was stern. “We should talk.”

  Harper turned, a tiny bit sad that she had set her sword down on a nearby log. May’s hair shone white-blond in the lantern light, the veins in her neck standing out against her pale skin.

  “Well, that’s a first,” she said shortly.

  May clenched her perfectly manicured hand into a fist. “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t play nice.” Harper shook her head. “You ignored me right up until I was a threat to you. All that time when Justin was trying to help Violet, and even Isaac was polite to me—you wouldn’t even make eye contact.”

  May flushed. “I didn’t think we could trust you. And I was right. You were working for the Church, which everyone else here seems to have conveniently forgotten.”

  Two could play at that line of logic. “The same way they’ve forgotten how you betrayed all of us for your mother?”

  “You turned my tree to stone.”

  “You’ve allowed your mother to run this town into the ground.”

  “I didn’t have any other choice.” May’s voice trembled, her hand unclenching, and Harper saw something she’d never expected: tears glimmering in the corners of the other girl’s eyes. May tipped her cup to her mouth and took a long, emphatic swallow, then shook her head. Her next words were so soft, Harper could barely hear them. “You think my mother is hard on Justin? Please. Justin gets to misbehave. Justin gets to rebel. And he still gets to come back home, because he’s always been her favorite. Some of us don’t have the luxury of messing up.”

  “But you’re the one with powers,” Harper said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” May said bitterly. “Augusta only pays attention to me now because she needs me. But she watches me in a way she’s never watched Justin, and she always finds a way to blame me when something goes wrong.”

  “Then why listen to her at all, if you’re never going to make her happy?”

  May’s gaze traveled above Harper’s head to somewhere far away, and Harper knew she was remembering things she did not want to talk about.

  “I don’t,” she said finally. “Not anymore.”

  “Oh.” Harper paused. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “The Gray.” May’s voice was soft, almost breathy. “Is it true the corruption is in there, too?”

  Harper nodded. She was tired of telling the story over and over again, but perhaps the Justin Shot had loosened her tongue. “I don’t think the Beast is causing it,” she said. “It seemed like the corruption was attacking it, too, just as much as it’s attacking the town.”

  May’s brow furrowed. “That can’t be right.”

  “I know what I saw,” Harper said, tensing. But before either of them could say anything more, Justin’s voice broke through the clearing.

  “Hey!” Harper turned to see him just a few feet away, looking puzzled. “You two coming or what? We have a game to play.”

  “Just need to get a refill,” May said, shaking her head and heading toward the cooler. Whatever had just happened between her and Harper had passed, but Harper knew something had shifted between them.

  She stared at the stump, at Isaac, who was swaying softly, at Justin’s earnest face as he waited for her answer.

  Saying yes was a bad idea. She nodded anyway.

  The drinking game was called Monster in the Gray. Nails lined the edge of a tree stump in an uneven circle, their tips driven into the wood. The object of the game, Justin explained, was to take a hammer, throw it up in the air, catch it, and drive the nail deeper into the tree. If you didn’t touch the nail, you drank.

  “Well, that seems like a great way to send your friends to the hospital,” Violet said, eyeing the stump with concern.

  “I can’t believe you made a big deal out of the sword and then wanted us to play this,” said Harper.

  “Isaac,” May stage-whispered. “I think they’re scared.”

  Isaac’s grin was too wide. “I think they are.” He grabbed the hammer, tossed it, caught it, and drove the nearest nail deep into the splintered wood in one quick, fluid motion. May and Justin nodded appreciatively. Even Harper had to admit that she was begrudgingly impressed.

  “See?” he said, handing it to Violet. “You’re the founders, guarding the town border, and if you drive all the nails in—”

  “The Beast doesn’t get out, yeah, yeah, I get it.” Violet hefted the tool, looking anxious. “I’m not sure how to do this—”

  “Here.” Isaac reached over and adjusted Violet’s fingers, shifting her grip. “So you don’t hurt yourself.” His hands lingered over hers, and Harper wondered if it was the alcohol or something entirely different that made them both pull away from each other a bit too slowly.

  “Thanks,” Violet said softly.

  Harper glanced around at Justin and May to see that both of them were watching this, too, May still sober enough to look bored by it, Justin too drunk to pretend his focus was anywhere else.

  “Okay,” Violet said, tossing the hammer up in the air. She caught it, but her swing went wild, completely missing the nail, and her laughter washed the moment away.

  The game went on and on. Harper tried it and realized her hand-eye coordination from sword training had made her very good at it, while Violet remained singularly terrible. They passed the hammer around, talking and laughing, until the bonfire was down to the embers and the sky above them was black. Harper stuck to her single cup of liquor. Everyone else had indulged far more, and it showed.

  Still, she was having far more fun than she’d anticipated. It was her first party and it wasn’t so bad, not when it meant she could forget for ten seconds that her dad had tried to kill her and there was an unstoppable corruption slowly infecting the entire town. Her foreboding from earlier had worn off—even Isaac seemed to be sobering up a little. Maybe this would be all right.

  “How does it still taste so terrible?” Violet grumbled from beside her, shaking her cup accusatorially. They were sitting on the logs in front of the remnants of fire to combat the chilly fall air.

  “I’m not sure,” May said thoughtfully from the log next to her. “I think my taste buds have gone numb.”

  “Hey!” Isaac called out from the edge of the clearing. “Can somebody tell me which way the house is? I need water.”

  “Oh m
y god,” May said, shaking her head. “How are you lost? It’s literally right there.”

  “And I am literally wasted, thank you very much.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll help you.” She got up, and Violet followed her out of the clearing, saying something to May about finding a bathroom.

  Which left Harper and Justin alone, a situation Harper had deliberately been trying to avoid. Harper set her now-empty cup on the ground, her heartbeat accelerating, and when she looked back up again, Justin had gotten up from his seat across the clearing.

  “Hey,” he said, gesturing at the log beside her. “Can I?”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry nobody came to your party.”

  “That’s not true.” Justin’s voice was quiet and earnest as he sat down. “You came.”

  Harper snorted. “Out of obligation.”

  But Justin was already shaking his head. “You never do anything you don’t want to do.” He set his drink down on the tree stump beside them and leaned forward. Harper had absolutely no idea what to do about the look on his face: solemn and serious, nothing at all like the drunk Justin she’d heard stories about. “Do you remember how we used to talk about this? How it would be after our rituals?”

  Harper’s throat burned. She could feel the alcohol coursing through her system, the cool autumn air against her face. “You used to promise you’d read my cards.”

  “And you would tell me that I wasn’t allowed to lie to you,” Justin said hoarsely. “That I had to tell you what was going to happen, even if it was terrible.”

  “And you’d say…” Harper paused, remembering the rest of it. The ache in her chest was suddenly unbearable, a deep, wordless longing that cut her to the core.

  “That it wouldn’t matter.” Justin’s voice trembled. “Because nothing that bad would ever happen to us.”

  Harper knew it wasn’t funny, but the laugh spilled out of her anyway, a little bitter, a little sad. “You had to know even then that it was never going to be like that, Justin.”

  “I was trying to be optimistic.”

  “By telling yourself nice lies?”

  “I get it, okay? I was naive and wrong and we’re all fucked up now.” Justin’s eyes met hers, and Harper realized she could no longer pretend this was any kind of normal conversation. Not when she had to think through every word before she said it. Not when their knees were brushing and the lanterns in the trees had given everything around them a soft, hazy glow. “Happy fucking birthday, I guess.”

  She already knew this moment would become a memory that she would call upon more often than she was proud of, replaying each exquisite, agonizing word they had said until she knew them all by heart.

  Harper reached her hand upward, cupping it around his cheek. Her fingers curled in the soft blond hair behind his ear as his eyes went wide.

  “You could probably turn me to stone, huh?” he whispered. “If you really wanted to?”

  “I probably could.” Harper swept the curve of her palm down to his neck. His heartbeat pulsed through her hand, so fast, so fragile. “But I wouldn’t.”

  He leaned toward her, so handsome, so tentative. His eyes looked flat and unnatural in the darkness, and suddenly it all rushed through Harper—the Beast, the Gray, the corruption. She jerked back, nauseous, her hand returning to her lap.

  “Sorry,” Justin mumbled, looking horrified. “I didn’t mean to overstep.”

  “That’s not it.” Harper shuddered. “I—I just—You know how I went into the Gray?”

  Justin nodded solemnly. “Of course.”

  “Well, I didn’t just see the corruption in there,” she said heavily. “I also saw the Beast. And it’s been, um… It’s been haunting me.”

  Justin stared at her for a long, unbroken moment, the only sound the soft rustle of the leaves in the trees behind them and the crackle of the firelight. “What did it look like?”

  It was a child’s question—something they had asked each other dozens of times, when they were young and the Gray was a nightmare they could only dream about instead of one they had lived, when the monster inside it felt almost exciting. Because the idea of being necessary, the only people who could protect everyone, was intoxicating. It tugged at her even now, but the question it asked was different than the one she’d asked as a child. What would we do, it said, if there was no monster for us to fight?

  Harper had pictured the monster in the Gray with a thousand eyes, with a spider’s wiry legs, with great pointed teeth and slavering jaws. Now she stared at Justin’s face and wondered why she’d even entertained the thought that the Beast could look like something else.

  “You don’t want to know,” she whispered.

  Justin frowned. “I can handle it.”

  The words hung in her throat, suspended.

  “Well,” she said at last. “I guess Violet saw Rosie for a reason. Because it shows you the person who’ll hurt you the most.”

  She saw the moment he figured it out—the pain that cut through the flickering firelight, a raw, deep wound that she had needed no blade to inflict. And Harper understood in that moment that she should never have told him the truth. All it had done was make him look at her like he’d broken her and make her angry that he thought she needed to be fixed.

  “Oh,” he said quietly. “I see. I—I have to go.”

  He rose to his feet and stumbled off into the trees. Harper pulled her jacket around her shoulders and huddled closer to the fire, shivering. She’d thought not drinking much would help her handle this, but it wasn’t about the alcohol. The problem was her and Justin.

  She wanted to run her fingers through his soft blond hair—then close her hand into a fist and push him down to his knees. She wanted her lips on his throat in the same place she would put a blade. She wanted him to look at her the way he had when they had fought at the festival, with awe and fear and want, a want that matched hers. Neither of them knew exactly what to do about this wanting—and yet neither could bear to let it fade away.

  She hadn’t cried since she’d left home, but suddenly it was all too much: her father, the corruption, her siblings. Harper tucked her knees up to her forehead, her residual limb aching, and let the tears come.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Isaac could not remember the last time he’d been drunk like this. He’d started after he got home from the archives, with the dusty bottle of whiskey under the sink that he and Justin had paid a college student to buy for them. Just a shot to stop his hands from shaking and dull the knife’s edge of his memory. But one shot had turned into three had turned into cradling the bottle like a baby while blaring music from his phone in a pitiful attempt to stop thinking.

  The dagger at his throat. Gabriel’s ambivalent stare. Blood dripping down his neck as he staggered through the woods, unable to scream for help.

  The whiskey turned into a red Solo cup, the apartment turned into the forest, and finally Isaac reached a sort of intoxicated equilibrium. He floated outside his body still, but it was almost peaceful, as if he were watching himself play Monster in the Gray and down far too many Justin Shots from behind a movie screen. He was the eye of a storm of his own making.

  He’d come to the Hawthorne house with May and Violet, but he’d lost them somehow on the way back. The clearing was close, he knew it was, if only he could find it. Unfortunately, all the trees looked the same at night and the world around him had started spinning a little while ago, blurring in and out of focus. Isaac knew he couldn’t be lost. He’d lived in this shithole his entire life. Even wasted out of his mind, the forest was as familiar to him as his own bedroom.

  The smell of charred flesh. Hot, thick panic in his chest. Gabriel’s eyes like dark coals burning in the night—

  A hand clamped down on his shoulder and Isaac whirled, heat buzzing in his palms.

  Justin’s blond hair shone ashen in the moonlight. Isaac blinked, trying to focus. Justin was speaking, he realized, but the words were fad
ing in and out, disappearing beneath the shrill, distant sound of screaming.

  He knew those noises weren’t real. He knew because they were Isaiah’s and Caleb’s screams from the night they’d died, forever echoing in his memory.

  “What?” he croaked.

  Justin’s grip tightened. “I said, are you all right?”

  Isaac’s palms fizzled. His Solo cup was half-melted, plastic and alcohol oozing between his fingers. He opened his hand and let it fall into the dead leaves.

  “Yeah.” The word did not feel like it was coming out of his mouth. “Just drunk.”

  “I’ve seen you drunk,” Justin said, an urgency in his voice that Isaac had spent so many years latching on to as a form of affection. “This is different.”

  “Fine,” Isaac drawled. “I’m really drunk.”

  “Isaac,” Justin said softly. “You’re shaking.”

  Justin’s hand burned on Isaac’s shoulder. Isaac’s stomach twisted painfully. He wanted nothing more than to lean into his grip and tell his friend what was happening to him. It would be so easy to implode and let Justin put him back together. It had been that way ever since the first time Isaac had come to after his ritual, his wrists and ankles still manacled. Justin had been sitting next to him, two fingers pressed to his neck, his eyes wide open with shock.

  “What happened?” he’d whispered, and Isaac had closed his eyes and pretended not to hear the question.

  After his ritual, Isaac drew attention like a beacon wherever he went. But when Justin was there, the tone of that attention changed. And as the town grew used to seeing them together, Isaac grew used to it, too. Justin was always there when Isaac needed him, and it had all been fine and good until the day Isaac realized that he was completely in love with him.

  He’d always known Justin didn’t feel the same way about him. Couldn’t feel the same way about him. So Isaac had done his best to get over his feelings with people who thought he was a bad boy, who wanted to do something thrilling and dangerous so they could whisper to their friends about it the next day.