The Serpent

by Sarah Fine

  Jules was gone, all her stuff gone, her presence gone, nothing to hold on to.

  Ernie pushed her grief away. The only way she’d get any closure was if she saw this through, if she looked Duncan in the eye and held him accountable for the way he’d made her friend suffer. Maybe the way he’d made her friend die. Knowing him and all he’d done so far, it seemed likely that he’d actually caused her death. It was just one item on the list of his many sins, including possibly trying to make himself the new Forger and breaking the entire world as a result. If she could play even a small part in stopping him, this would all be worth it.

  She put on a pot of coffee to brew; she needed any help she could get to stay alert and on her feet. As it began to drip, she went into her messy room and opened the closet door. There, up on the shelf, was the wooden box. Not a treasure box—Ernie had never considered its contents valuable or sharable. It was more of a place she’d locked all her naïve childhood hopes.

  She sat down on her bed with the box in her lap and slowly opened it. The postcard she’d gotten a few days ago was on top.

  Hoping I’ll be home before Christmas. Miss you so much. Love, Daddy.

  That was all, except for the creepy image on the other side, the guy with the monkeys crawling all over his head. She immediately thought of Alvarez and his emperor tamarin, that white-bearded little beast with the terrible screech, but this was exactly the kind of vintage postcard her father had collected at the shop before he’d left. She pulled out the others and looked through them. Nineteen in all. No postmarks, no dates. Now Ernie knew—if her dad was a Dealer, he could easily make sure things got to her without markings that gave away where and when he’d sent them. But why would he do that? Was he afraid some enemy would track his family down?

  It hadn’t mattered. At least two Dealers had seemed to know that her mother had received the Forger’s Marks. They’d shown up right on her doorstep.

  Ernie looked through the others, noting that there were animals on about half of them. She’d started to write dates on the cards a few years ago, but the ones she’d received as a child were unmarked. Impossible to put in order unless she could rely on memory. She laid them out: one with Easter greetings, one wishing her a happy birthday that had arrived six months late (she definitely remembered that), one telling her to make sure her mom had a good Mother’s Day (it had shown up two months early), another wishing her a happy Halloween, and two asking how her summer was going (one had actually arrived during the summer, but the other had December 1st!! printed at the top in Ernie’s handwriting, the letters jagged and angry). She’d always gotten mad, receiving his unseasonal seasonal greetings. It was like he’d wanted to rub salt in the wounds—he had abandoned them and hadn’t even cared enough to make sure a damn postcard arrived at the right time.

  Ernie read and reread the cards. Happy New Year, Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Thanksgiving. He was always hoping for visits that he never made.

  She’d been wrong. The postcards were just as meaningless as they’d always been.

  Ernie flopped backward on her bed. “Why did I think this was a good idea again?”

  She wiggled as she felt the half deck of cards in her back pocket, then pulled them out. Cold and dead. The shadow of the serpent that had appeared on her arm that morning had been just a fleeting victory, apparently. Now Duncan had put a leash on the snake, forcing it to stay with him.

  But did that mean it couldn’t hear Ernie?

  “Why would you want to serve someone who’s such a douchebag?” Ernie asked aloud. “I’m not exactly Wonder Woman, but you know I’m nicer than Duncan.”

  But then again, it was a snake. Maybe it liked working for another snake. Or maybe it had just been outsnaked.

  The words of the Forger came back to her. He’d bristled when she’d referred to the diamondback as a snake. The other Dealers had also seemed offended when she was casual about their vegetarianism.

  What if the snake was offended, too?

  Ernie sat up and looked again at the postcards, laid out in their rows over her rumpled sheets. She shuffled through her deck and found the Revelation card by its omega symbol. “Help a girl out, would you?”

  Nothing. She might as well have been clutching a stalk of celery for all the good it was doing her. She cleared her throat. “Diamondback? Oh, great diamondback, please honor me with your presence.”

  Nothing. Ernie let out an exasperated sigh. Did the thing understand sarcasm? Did it know her skin crawled just thinking of it? She thought about Gabe, how he talked to his kestrel and seemed to have an intense love for the bird. The other Dealers were the same—protective and reverent of their animals—and their animals seemed to return the sentiment. The animals offered their bodies and their power. Maybe what they expected in exchange was respect. And maybe they deserved it.

  “Sorry again,” Ernie said. “I’m not so good at showing respect. Also really bad at sincerity, but . . .” Ernie closed her eyes. “I’m sure if we got to know each other, we’d get along fine, Ms. Diamondback.” Hadn’t Gabe and the Forger both referred to the serpent as a she? “I’m new to this and made a bad start of it, but if you give me a chance, I’d love a do-over.” Ernie’s eyes stung, and tears slipped out from beneath her lids, which she’d clamped shut in an effort to hold them in. She sniffled. “I’m sorry. This whole thing has just been so much. Maybe we can help each other. Please?” It came out as a hoarse whisper.

  Ernie sat up and looked at her arm. Nothing. She squeezed the cards. Nothing.

  Defeated, she trudged to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee, not yet ready to return to the shop in Woodfin. What was the point, anyway? The Dealers were betting on her only because they believed she could play the cards. If they found out she was useless, they’d turn on her in a second. It wasn’t a situation she was eager to walk back into.

  She took a sip and let the liquid burn her tongue and throat. Maybe this pain would distract her from the other terrible aches that signaled her doom. With heavy limbs, she plodded back to her room to put away the cards.

  She heard the rattling buzz just before she spotted the snake. With a shriek, she jumped back, her drink flying, the mug landing with a thud on the hallway carpet, coffee splattering on the walls.

  The diamondback was coiled on her bed amid the postcards, its tail up and shaking furiously. Ernie wished she’d done some research on serpent behavior earlier, but she assumed that the rattling was bad. The snake was pissed or scared, just like she was.

  “Sorry!” Ernie said, trying to catch her breath. “Sorry! I’m glad you’re here!” Duncan must be sleeping, so this was her chance to make friendly with the reptile whose loyalty she needed to win if she wanted to live. Standing in the doorway of her room, at what she hoped was a safe distance, she raised one hand and waved. “Hi.”

  The snake eyed her. Its rattle slowed to a soft rustling.

  “I’d call you by your name if I knew it,” Ernie said. “I’d like us to be on a first-name basis.”

  The diamondback stopped rattling, but it was still wound up tight, its body wrapped around one of the postcards. Ernie cautiously moved forward. “I know you could pretty much end me if you wanted to,” she said. “I know you’re powerful. So I’m going to assume that’s not your goal here and that Duncan didn’t send you. I’m going to trust you.” She took another step forward.

  The snake didn’t move.

  Cold sweat had broken out in beads across Ernie’s nose and upper lip. Her heart was beating like she’d just done a few minutes of tire flips followed by a hard sprint. She put her hands out, then pulled them back, thinking that she didn’t want to offer the thing something to bite, but then she put her hands out again. “See? Trust. My hands are shaking because, to be honest, you scare me.”

  The snake turned its head for a moment, gazing at Ernie’s pillows. Then it looked at her again.

  “You want my pillows?” She took a step toward them, reaching for one, but the
rattling drove her back. “I guess that means no?”

  The snake stopped rattling, then did the same head movement as before.

  Holy crap. “You want me to sit down?” She hadn’t been that close to a snake since fifth-grade summer camp, which her mom had signed her up for just to get her out of the house, away from the television. Ernie hadn’t protested—she’d known her mom was dealing with a lot, and hadn’t wanted to make it worse. Ernie had been sticking close to home because she was worried about her mother, not because she loved Seinfeld reruns so much. The first day had been fine, but on the second day, when the campers were swimming in the pond to get away from the stifling summer heat, Ernie had come face to face with a water moccasin. She’d never swum so fast in her life. She’d been convinced the thing was chasing her. She’d crawled onto the shore, screaming like it had bitten her. She’d refused to get in the water again for the rest of the summer. Yet here she was now, lowering herself—carefully—onto her bed, not three feet from a large rattlesnake. Life was funny sometimes.

  The diamondback watched her, its head resting on its coiled body, its tail drooping.

  “The Forger said you were feeling pretty crappy because the deck is split. I’m sorry about that. I’m feeling crappy, too.”

  The snake’s tongue flitted out. Ernie had no idea what that meant, but at least it wasn’t rattling, so she continued. “I’m going to try to make this better for both of us, but there’s no way I can do it without your help.”

  Ernie gritted her teeth as the reptile slowly slithered toward her. “Okay! Okay, this is good,” she said in a squeaky voice. Her heart rate had jacked up again, shaking her rib cage. Holding her breath, she rolled up the left sleeve of her shirt and held out her bare arm. “If-if you wanted, y-you could . . .”

  The snake recoiled, withdrawing to its position at the foot of the bed, the postcard with the New Year’s greeting still trapped by its body.

  “Sorry,” Ernie said, pulling her arm back and looking down at it, trying to figure out what could have offended the thing. “I did shower today, if that helps.”

  The snake seemed unimpressed. It merely crouched—did snakes crouch?—on the end of Ernie’s bed, holding the damn postcard hostage. Ernie didn’t know what else to say, so she picked up her cards. They seemed warmer now, and she hoped it wasn’t just her imagination. “I need to figure something out,” she explained to the reptile. “Something that could help me get what I need. It’s my dad. He was—maybe still is—a Dealer, too. The Dragonfly.”

  The snake seemed calm—and maybe interested? It was really hard to tell, because all it did was flick its tongue in and out. So Ernie explained how her father had left her and her mother, and how she thought maybe he would come help. He’d sent those Marks to her mom, so all this was partly his fault.

  The snake—the diamondback, Ernie silently corrected herself—slid its long body in a strange undulating motion, until the postcard it held was lying faceup on its body. Happy New Year! I think I might have found a way to get myself home to you.

  This one was different than the rest. He hadn’t even bothered to sign his name.

  The deck in Ernie’s hand pulsed with definite heat, and Ernie sucked in a breath as the Revelation card pulled itself up from the thin stack. She looked back and forth from it to the diamondback. “I guess that’s a pretty clear instruction,” she murmured, and plucked the card out. She laid it faceup in front of the postcards and looked at it. Into it, really. Because underneath the omega symbol, she saw herself, like a mirror—except it was like she was watching herself from several feet below. Barely breathing, Ernie watched her card-self laying out the postcards. “I already did that,” she said.

  The snake rattled, and the cards pulsed cold at her. Like a slap on the wrist or something. Better than a bite, for sure. “Okay, I haven’t done that. Or I need to do it again.”

  She collected the postcards and created a stack. Gingerly, she pulled the Happy New Year postcard from the snake’s body, sighing with relief when it stayed still, didn’t rattle, didn’t strike. She peered closely at the image of herself in the card and realized she could see the postcards’ backs, and that her card-self was laying them out methodically. First, one with a bunch of fruits and vegetables with legs and eyes, standing around looking at each other, the carrot with its arms folded, watching a small plant in the dirt, maybe a baby carrot? Vintage and creepy, just like the rest of them. It had always hurt, because her dad had collected cards like this—she remembered some of them from before, and there were still boxes of them in the shop. He delighted in the macabre images, the innocent weirdness of them. She’d delighted in his delight, sitting on his lap and flipping through them. She’d loved them—until they came back into her life, scrawled with empty promises. The loitering-veggie card was the one wishing her a good Epiphany, of all things—the day her mom always took down the Christmas decorations. She demanded they stay untouched until then, or else the family would face a year of bad luck or something like that.

  My big girl—I miss you. I bet you’ve grown already, Weed. Love, Daddy.

  He’d taken to calling her Weed just before he left. She’d grown three inches the year before. But she’d gotten this postcard two years ago, and seeing such a stupid comment from him had nearly made her rip the card down the middle. But she’d put a date on it and kept it, and now she was putting it on the top row. She squinted at the warm Revelation card while the snake sat still at the foot of the bed, just watching, maybe concentrating—who knew what went on in its cold-blooded mind?—but she was grateful for its presence. The second card was the one for Chinese New Year, but it featured a happy group of people floating through the sky in a boat strapped to a pig, as if it were a hot-air balloon. Ernie thought of Minh, though he wasn’t Chinese and his pig was black and hairy.

  The snake rattled, as if to get her to focus, and it worked, because the sound rang primal alarms in Ernie’s head every time she heard it. “Keep your hair on,” she said, then flashed a smile at the snake, who did not smile back, because it was a snake.

  She got to the fifth card, one for Presidents’ Day, with Abe Lincoln holding an ax, and a giant eagle with its wings spread overhead. I’ve gotten delayed but hope to be home by the summer, it said. And Ernie figured, as she watched her card-self putting the last postcard in place, that she was supposed to set them out not by the date she’d received them but by the holiday they were meant to commemorate. So she did, with a little help from Revelation, because the postcards were seriously weird, and sometimes it was hard to tell what exactly was being celebrated.

  In the end, she had her nineteen postcards laid out, with Happy New Year at the end. No duplicates—only one valentine, only one for Mother’s Day, one for summer solstice, one for back-to-school that she’d gotten the year after she graduated. One for Thanksgiving, one mention of Christmas. It seemed so strange. If she were going to be a neglectful parent, she’d send a card every Christmas, or maybe on the kid’s birthday every year. But there was only one of each. One for each holiday or occasion Ernie could think of, several wondering how much she’d grown, though that had stopped being relevant over a decade ago.

  Ernie stared down at her collection, her mouth dry. “Could these have all been from the same year?”

  The snake raised its head, just slightly.

  Ernie swallowed and looked down at the Revelation card, which was filling up with a deep crimson oozing like liquid from the edges of the card, covering up her card-self. She opened her mouth to ask why, but as she raised her head, she caught sight of the final card, Happy New Year, and noticed something she hadn’t seen before or had dismissed at the time.

  A faint red smear at the bottom edge of the card. She lifted it to the light. Was that blood? It looked like part of a fingerprint. Like someone handling the card had bled on it. Ernie’s stomach clenched. “I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me right now,” she said to the snake, “but I’m not sure I can take much mo
re.”

  She didn’t want to let her brain loose to ponder all the terrible reasons there might be a bloody fingerprint on this card. This card that had arrived two years ago but had maybe been written much earlier than that. The number of whys in her mind nearly drowned out the dread.

  The doorbell rang. Ernie shrieked at the sudden noise and jumped up, disoriented and panting. She looked back at the cards, which were in disarray from her sudden movement.

  The snake was gone.

  “No! No . . .” She picked her way over to the end of the bed, being careful of where she placed her feet, and looked around, worried she’d knocked the animal to the floor with the ruckus she’d just made. “Sn—diamondback?” she whispered. No response. She lunged over her bed and grabbed the deck. Cold. Ernie collapsed onto the mattress, fatigue crashing over her like a rogue wave. She’d wasted her chance with the serpent—she should have worked harder to get it to crawl onto her arm, or to bond with it. She’d thought she would have longer, and now it was too late. Duncan must have awakened and yanked her back to his side, screwing Ernie over yet again. All because of that damn tile—part of a set that her father had sent to her mother. Her family had been wrapped up with the Dealers for decades before she’d even known they existed, and now, it seemed, it was going to be the literal death of her. She wanted to cry, but she was too tired to manage a single tear.

  The doorbell rang again. Ernie turned toward it. Would an armed Dealer there to kill her have the courtesy of knocking first?

  “Ernie,” said a gruff voice from the other side of the door.

  Relief nearly choked her. Stumbling toward the sound of Gabe’s voice, she pulled herself along the back of the couch and then staggered over to the door. She whipped it open without even checking the keyhole.