The Deck of Omens

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “I have the rest of the letter,” she said.

  May’s head shot up, her eyes wide. “What? How?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Violet transported her half of the letter from her bedroom to the dining room as carefully as she could. The edges did not fit together perfectly, but it was close enough that Violet could clearly see that they were in fact two halves of the same letter. Pieces were missing from the middle, destroying the occasional word or phrase, but not so much that she couldn’t decipher the general meaning.

  Silas, my dear—

  I regret to inform you that Millie, Clark, and I have discussed your proposal, and we must decline.

  “Silas?” Violet turned to May.

  “A Sullivan, I think.” May frowned. “Millie is definitely Millie Hawthorne, and we know this is from a Carlisle—”

  “So Clark probably has a creepy taxidermy dedicated to him somewhere.”

  “Probably, yeah.”

  “What they’re saying…” Violet stared at the note. “About the Beast. About the founders—”

  “No,” May whispered. “No, that can’t be true.”

  “Can’t it?” Violet asked. Behind them, the forest beckoned, trees that were slowly becoming tipped with silver. A world the founders had supposedly bound themselves to in order to protect it. But Violet thought suddenly of a phrase the Beast had taunted her with. It had stayed with her for weeks now—Do you really think I was bound here out of altruism?

  “We draw our powers from the Beast. Our families trapped it. They use it. Why does it seem so impossible that they made it?”

  May barely remembered going home. She was normally a cautious driver, but today she was careless with the silver family pickup, heedless of the fact that she’d only gotten her license a few months ago. She turned the radio up the highest it would go, pop music blaring through the speakers as she careened down the bumpy roads.

  She didn’t want to think about the letter she and Violet had found or the picture she’d taken of it, now stored in the phone stuffed in the cupholder. But the loud thumping of the music and her tires screeching on the road weren’t enough to drown out the worries swimming in her mind.

  If the Beast had been the founders’ creation, then everything May knew about her family’s purpose was a complete lie. They weren’t heroes protecting their town—they were handling a mess they’d made, a mess that had cost countless people their lives.

  She parked haphazardly in the driveway and rushed up the front steps, her only goal to make it to her bedroom without incident. It was a goal that was immediately thwarted by Justin emerging from the kitchen as soon as she slammed the front door.

  “What happened?” he asked, his eyes widening. “Did the corruption get worse?”

  May shook her head. The Hawthorne photographs on the walls of their front hallway glared at her, harsh and uncompromising. When she was a kid, she’d thought they all looked strong. Now she just thought they all looked miserable. Like they’d passed that down along with the ritual and the powers.

  She was so tired of trying to handle this on her own.

  “I have to show you something,” she whispered, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “Something bad.”

  She explained what she, Violet, and Harper had dug up at the Carlisle house. Justin peered at the letter on her phone, his face paling as he took it all in.

  “Do you think it’s true?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know. Violet seemed pretty convinced, but it’s just one letter.”

  “If this is true, then we’re frauds.”

  “I know.”

  “And our whole lives were for nothing.”

  “I know.”

  “Fuck!” The defeat in Justin’s eyes was like nothing May had ever seen before. “We’re not even good liars. We can’t even solve a problem our ancestors might have created.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Justin looked at her skeptically. “What?”

  May hesitated. Her founder blood might just be blood on her hands. Her mother wouldn’t listen to her. And it was true that her father had told her not to do anything rash, but she could not shake what Violet had said, either.

  She knew who she was. She knew what she could do. And she needed to prove that she had been given those powers for a reason; that this disease infecting the town would not be her undoing.

  “Justin,” she said softly. “What if I told you there was something we could do about the corruption?”

  The hawthorn tree was dying.

  Silver-gray veins spread from the place where the stone bark had cracked, winding around the back of the trunk and up toward the branches. The stone was mostly crumbled away, and the bark beneath it was melting and morphing, gray and pulsating, with iridescent veins sinking deep beneath the surface of the tree and winding toward its heart. Buds hung from the trees, still closed, the smallest of mercies. The stench was overwhelming.

  May could barely stand to look at it. This was so much worse than what Harper Carlisle had done. It was something far more insidious and dangerous, something that would swallow her whole world if she let it.

  “You’re sure we have to do this here?”

  May turned. She knew her brother’s expression, that tone of voice. Justin was afraid. Something stirred in her chest—a distant memory, clouded and foggy, of her brother standing in front of her, his face bearing that same expression. Behind them, drifting through the door, were the sounds of screams.

  Don’t go downstairs, May, he’d said. Don’t.

  “May?” Justin said softly, and she was back in the present, blinking. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Of course.” May lowered herself into the last clear patch of grass she could find. “Let’s hurry up, though. I don’t know how much time we have.”

  She flipped open the wooden box and drew out the Deck of Omens. It was the only thing that felt right out here, a small tether to the world she wanted instead of the one she was living in.

  “I need you to ask a question,” she said to Justin. “About what you want me to change. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Sure.” Justin sat hesitantly beside her. “How can we fix this?”

  The weight of the question surged through May’s soul. A pathway opened, as it always did—but it was different from any pathway she’d ever felt before. These roots were not the normal ones she encountered in a reading, the ones that twined around Four Paths. They felt deeper—a kind of familiarity that made May wonder if they were her own, even though that wasn’t possible. She couldn’t do a reading for herself.

  The Deck of Omens grew warm in her hands immediately, and May sensed something at the other end of the tether, something like fear. And when the roots began to vanish, one by one, it felt like they were running away instead of choosing which ones would show the correct path forward.

  She focused her mind the same way she had before, beneath the stone tree. She thought of the corruption, tangling its way around the town. She thought of her fear, of her parents, of the world she thought she’d understood transforming into something utterly unknowable. And she felt it again—easier this time. One path spiraling more brightly than the others. A future that was different.

  She grabbed it. She pulled. And as she pulled, an image swirled around her: endless fog just like what she’d seen when she touched the tree. But this time, something was different. A person was lying on the ground beside her, screaming and clawing at their bloated body. Roots rippled beneath their skin, wriggling up their arms and past their neck as a cloudy whiteness spread across the pupils, bleaching all the life out of them. Their spine gave a jerk, and then their body let out a horrible, sickening crack, the torso and legs winding in opposite directions, as if a hand had lifted them up and twisted them in two.

  May gasped for breath and found herself beneath the tree again, shuddering. It was just a vision. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t.

/>   “What happened?” Justin was kneeling beside her, looking concerned.

  May shook him off. “Nothing.”

  There were bloody tears on her cheeks and three cards left in her hands. May found she had to work harder than usual to hold on to them. Stubbornly, she laid them on the ground, then stretched her hands out toward Justin’s.

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “Let’s see what happens.”

  His hands shook in hers, clammy and anxious. May pulled them away, dread coursing through her.

  She flipped the first card over. It was blank.

  “What?” The word bubbled out of her throat before she could think to hold it back. To pretend this was supposed to happen.

  “What does that mean?” Justin asked from beside her.

  May’s stomach churned. “I don’t know.”

  Never in her life had she heard of the Deck of Omens showing its chosen wielder nothing.

  She flipped over the second card, then the third, but they were blank too.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered as blood dripped onto her collar. “What are you trying to tell me? What do you want?”

  And then, above her, she heard it. The branches of the hawthorn tree groaned and creaked in a sudden gust of wind, and May raised her head, gasping.

  The buds above her had opened all at once, dozens of hands unfurling. Fog poured from them, faster than she could comprehend, darkening the sky around them.

  The corruption had gone airborne.

  She met Justin’s eyes and breathed, “Run.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Isaac found his brother at the Pathways Inn, a cheap old house that had been partitioned off into motel rooms at some point and stayed open for business mostly out of sheer will.

  Lia Raynes, whose family owned the place, was sitting behind the counter when Isaac walked in, texting and looking incredibly bored. She nearly dropped her phone in her lap when he approached the front desk.

  “Don’t know why you look so surprised,” Isaac said tiredly. “You know who’s staying here.”

  Lia gulped. “Yeah. I know. Did he come back to help with the corruption? Is the rest of your family coming back, too?”

  Everybody always knew his business. It was one of his least favorite side effects of being a founder.

  “Which room is he staying in?” Isaac asked, ignoring the question.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Lia, looking disappointed that he hadn’t offered up more information. “He’s out back. He likes to read on the porch.”

  “A man of culture, I see.”

  Lia’s thumbs flew furiously across her phone screen as Isaac pushed open the back door and ascended onto the porch. In thirty seconds, the entirety of Four Paths High School would know all about the meeting between the Sullivan brothers. But Isaac didn’t have it in him to care.

  Facing things head-on didn’t just mean apologizing to Justin. It meant confronting Gabriel about the role he’d played in Isaac’s ritual and seeing what he had to say for himself.

  As Isaac approached, his brother looked up from the rocking chair on the porch and flipped his tattered paperback shut, sliding it into the backpack he’d propped up against the railing. It was chilly, but he hadn’t bothered with a jacket. His T-shirt showed off the tops of his tattoo sleeves—the trees that wound across his biceps, roots twisting around his arms that looked eerily like the one that had tried to burrow beneath his skin.

  “Isaac.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Is there another emergency you want my help with or something?”

  “No.” Isaac crossed the porch in two long strides. “I want the truth, Gabriel.”

  “Dramatic.” Gabriel’s mouth twisted. “You know the truth. I’m here about Mom.”

  “I’m not talking about that,” Isaac said softly. “I’m talking about my ritual.”

  Gabriel paused, and for a long moment all Isaac could hear was the gentle rustling of the breeze in the forest behind them, the slight creaking of the porch’s floorboards beneath his feet. Then, at last, he spoke.

  “Took you long enough,” he said. “Good thing I brought reinforcements.”

  He grabbed the backpack and raised it in the air, patting the side. Isaac recognized the sound of bottles clinking together.

  “I don’t need to drink,” he said, his stomach churning at the memory of his meltdown.

  “Oh, they’re not for you.” There was something dangerous in Gabriel’s voice. “They’re for me.”

  Isaac heard a noise and turned to see Lia’s face peering through the upper window, her eyes wide with curiosity. At the sight of him, she hastily drew the curtains shut.

  “I don’t want the whole town to hear this,” he said.

  “Then let’s go somewhere even they won’t follow.”

  Gabriel drove them to the edge of the ruins. Neither had mentioned it as a destination, but Isaac had known exactly where they were going from the moment his brother started the car. It was late afternoon as they settled on a fallen tree behind the backyard. The autumn wind whipped at the edges of Isaac’s jacket. Gabriel shrugged on a flannel and pulled two beers out of his backpack.

  “You sure you don’t want one?” he asked. “This stuff’s basically water, anyway. Or at least that’s how people treated it at Potsdam. College is wild.”

  Isaac inspected the red-and-white label. In another world, Gabriel would’ve bought him this beer for a party instead of trying to hand him one in front of the ashes of their family home.

  “I’m sure,” he said firmly. It was easy to forget about the rest of the world when you were in Four Paths. But unlike Justin and May, Isaac was determined to actually get out of here for college—if he could manage to get into a place that wouldn’t send him into twenty years of student loan debt, anyway.

  “So that’s what college is like?” he asked, because it was easier than talking about anything else. “People drinking all the time?”

  “Not all the time,” said Gabriel. “Depends on where you go to school. And depends on who your friends are.”

  “What did you tell them?” asked Isaac.

  “Tell who?”

  “Your friends. About… this.”

  Gabriel looked out at the ashes, his mouth set in a grim line. His profile was sharp and gaunt, his stubble rough and uneven across his chin. “I lied. Told them my family was dead. Told them I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “That’s not really a lie.”

  “It’s not really the truth, either.” Gabriel paused and took a long pull of his beer. “I only went to college because I’d applied before everything went to shit. And for the first semester or two, I was just… angry. I didn’t go to class. I drank, I did whatever drugs people gave me, and I got into fights. I had a reputation.”

  “I was angry, too.” Isaac was still angry—in a way that he was unsure how to handle, in a place inside of him that still felt too raw to touch. “But you don’t seem out of control anymore.”

  Gabriel looked out at the ashes. “I’m not.”

  “So what changed?”

  “I met a girl.”

  Isaac rolled his eyes. “There it is.”

  He couldn’t help it—he felt a stab of envy. That his brother had been able to fall for someone who could care for him the same way he cared for her.

  But when he turned to look at his brother, Gabriel did not look any happier. “We dated for two years,” he continued. “I went to therapy. I got myself back on track. And then—after letting down my guard, after finally trusting her—I tried to tell her some of the truth. Left the weirdest stuff out, obviously.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  Gabriel looked pained. “I almost wish she hadn’t. It was too much for her to handle, she said, because she could see I hadn’t actually dealt with it, and she left.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” Gabriel’s tone clearly indicated otherwise. He finished his be
er, placed the empty bottle carefully in his backpack, and pulled out another. “It made me realize that if I wanted to exist in the rest of this world, I had to come back. Mom needed help, but so did I. Your ritual never really leaves my head.”

  His words sparked a deep, unbridled fury in Isaac.

  “Oh, fuck off,” he said bitterly.

  Gabriel blinked. “Excuse me? I’m just trying to explain my side of things to you. I thought that was what you wanted.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m loving this,” said Isaac. “It’s great to hear about how traumatized you are from that time you tried to murder me in cold blood.”

  Gabriel froze. “Is that what you think happened?”

  Isaac’s throat went tight, and he swiveled his head around to look at Gabriel. “That is what happened.”

  “Let me tell you what I remember,” Gabriel said. “About that day. About what happened.”

  Isaac realized his hands were beginning to shake, and he took a deep breath, knowing he was not ready to hear any of this, knowing already that there wasn’t a chance in hell he could walk away.

  “All right,” he said, and Gabriel began.

  “They didn’t tell us,” he said, “that someone would have to die. Not for a very long time. I did my ritual, and Caleb and Isaiah and Uncle Simon chained me up and bled me onto that altar, and it hurt. When it was over they told me that I had taken it well, and that I would carry on the Sullivan legacy. I assumed everyone’s ritual was like that—I didn’t ask too many questions, and they liked it that way. They told me specifically not to tell you, so whenever you asked about it I just shook my head. Because I was proud of being included.

  “I’d always wanted to be like Caleb and Isaiah—it would’ve been cool to shatter things—and I was disappointed at first when I realized I could heal. But soon, I felt very useful. Everyone wanted me on their patrol because I was handy if there was an injury, or if a Sullivan lost control. And it was fine for years… until they told Mom it would be you.