“Bolt cutters,” Ellie was saying when I turned the wheel off. She flicked the snake lock on The Keypers of the Zodiack.
“What’s that?” I took the bat off the wheel. I put it and the bowl on the drying rack next to a half dozen other pots.
“You never fire them,” Ellie said, looking up from the book at the filled drying rack. Many of the pots were bone dry, ready for the kiln.
I shrugged. “Throwing them is the best part.”
Ellie’s nose wrinkled. “Too messy. And you can’t really use them till you fire them, right? Otherwise they’ll just break.” Mr. Bingle, my cat, weaved between Ellie’s legs. She lifted him with the toe of her tennis shoe and scooted him aside.
Ellie sounded a lot like my mom. Mom was always after me to finish what I started. I wiped my muddy hands on my apron and tossed it aside. “What about bolt cutters?”
“Oh!” she said, her eyes lighting up as she jumped back with that thought. “We have bolt cutters at home. I’m going to text Brennan right now and tell him to bring them over.”
Ugh. I’d already sunk to asking Brennan for a ride today. No way was I asking him for another favor. And this lock was special somehow. I shook my head. “I don’t know about cutting it—”
But Ellie was already punching her thumbs on her phone. “You have a better idea how to sneak into that lock?”
The snakes! I grinned. “In fact, I do.”
Before we even reached the top of the stairs, Ellie’s phoned binged with a text back from Brennan: “No way,” it read. Ellie shrugged at me, and I pulled the string that opened the hatch to our attic. A wooden ladder tumbled down, barreling out like a captive set free. Dust flew everywhere. Ellie sneezed, a honking blast of a sneeze.
“Bless you,” I said to Ellie’s back. She was already plowing into the dark abyss of our attic. I peered into the black hole gaping above me. Cool air whooshed out of it like a sigh, an icy yawn from our tired, old home.
I heard Ellie yank the lightbulb chain. “Light’s burned out,” she yelled down to me. Slivers of insulation twinkled down in tiny shards, coating me like a sprinkling of magic dust.
Something about this gave me a chill, and I didn’t think it was the cool air. I knew what my Nina would say: “Climb on up, Jalen! Sometimes you gotta leap before you look.” My fingers flew to the pink streak of hair and started twirling.
“Jalen, I can’t see a thing,” Ellie shouted down. “Come up and show me where this jewelry box is.”
I stepped onto the ladder, then climbed the creaky steps and poked my head into the darkness. “Forget it, Ellie. Bad idea. Let’s just—”
“Here!” Ellie kicked aside a musty pile of clothes. Sometimes she had the subtlety of a bulldozer. “This looks like a jewelry box.”
“That’s it,” I said. I nodded at the small black chest she’d unearthed, but I didn’t move from my perch on the ladder. “It’s really dark up here. Maybe I should get a flashlight.”
“C’mon, Jalen,” Ellie teased. “Some part of you has to be Sagittarian. I’m going to find out which part.”
“My freshly painted toenails?” I asked. I could feel Ellie smirk at me, at my joke about the birthday pedicure she’d given me earlier that day. I sometimes wondered if Ellie and I would be friends if we weren’t neighbors. We liked different things, and we had such different families and clothes and houses. Most friends I saw at school looked like twins. Not us.
“Well, it’s certainly not your goth-girl tendencies,” she said, still rummaging.
I had to grin at that. Problem was, I was goth without even trying: pale skin, black hair. And that natural streak of white shooting through my dark locks. Nina was the only one brave enough to call it what it was: a shock lock. A lock of hair, whitened by shock. My very own public display of grief since I was nine.
And so lately I’d colored it—purple, blue, green, red—you name it. This week it was hot pink. Anything to cover the shock of white.
I climbed fully into the attic, crawling onto a crossbeam and through a sticky spiderweb. As I did, the spring on the hatch twanged, the ladder shot up, and the trap door of the attic snapped shut behind me.
“Not good,” Ellie whispered. The only light came through the slats in the vent on the opposite side of the attic. And we’d obviously disturbed the creatures who lived here, because they scurried into corners with scratches and squeaks.
I pushed down on the hatch, hard, but it didn’t budge. It was too difficult to push when I couldn’t stand up fully in this cramped space.
Panic swelled my throat shut. “Mom’s not home yet,” I choked out. “Might not be home all night. Who’s going to let us out?”
Ellie fished around for something, then her cell phone screen lit up the dark attic like a star. The glow from the phone didn’t stretch far and the darkness crowded in, the rafters and beams and piles of stuff stealing from our circle of light whenever they could snatch it from us.
“I’ll text Brennan again and tell him he absolutely has to come,” Ellie said. “‘Locked in attic,’” she muttered while typing. “‘Need you.’”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. Great. There’d be no end to Brennan’s teasing now. But he was close, and we didn’t have many options. I really hated asking for favors, especially from blowhards like Brennan. And today I’d racked up two. No, three, including the bolt cutters he’d refused to bring us. Now he’d get the pleasure of rescuing us from my mistake.
The cell phone washed the attic in blue light, and I was reminded of those Picasso paintings where everything was gray and blue and lilac. Like the moon, whose murky edges blend into the night.
The phone binged again. “Ha! Dorks!” read Brennan’s reply.
Panic rose again. “Is he coming or not?” I asked.
Ellie’s mouth drew to the side of her face. “Sure. Yeah. I think so. Let’s look for that pin.”
I could tell Ellie was changing the subject, but there was nothing else to do up here, anyway. I hefted open Nina’s ebony jewelry box; it took both hands to lift the ivory-inlaid cover. Nina’s pin was right there on top, resting on a pile of pearls, like a mother snake guarding her nest of eggs. Poised to strike, poison at the ready.
The pin was brass, with a single snake twining around a staff. Just as I remembered it, when I’d seen it so long ago.
It was at the hospital, the very hospital where Nina lay, battling cancer tonight. The hospital where I’d been when I was so sick, too. I had been sleeping, lulled into dreamland by beeping machines and the gentle whoosh of the respirator, when my eyes fluttered open. I saw this, this pin gleaming over Nina’s heart. I’d tried to ask about it, but I couldn’t speak, so I pointed at it instead. Nina told me the pin was a symbol of healing. I remember thinking that odd, since snakes usually symbolize death and poison and pain.
“Wow,” Ellie sighed over my shoulder, hunched in the cramped attic. Her sigh made me jump; I’d forgotten she was there. “You were right, J. That snake looks just like the two on the lock.”
In the blue light of the attic, I held the pin next to the lock. The snake on the pin was an exact match: tiny, intricately carved scales, a diamond-shaped head, a thin, slithery split tongue, emerald-green eyes. Identical snakes, tangled together by fate.
Before I considered the coincidence too much to scare me, I jammed the end of the pin—the point of the staff and the curl of the snake’s tail—into the lock on my new book.
It fit.
I turned the key in the lock, and the bodies of the snakes began to untangle. The heads of the snakes twisted away from one another and toward me, sizing me up with blank emerald eyes. The heart of the lock cracked slightly apart.
Click!
It was likely a tiny click, a small, satisfying opening. But to me, that click echoed around this dark space, and I could feel it in my gut.
“It worked!” Ellie said, She shot upright and slammed her head on a rafter. “I can’t believe that worked!”
&
nbsp; “Me either,” I muttered.
The lock had split apart just enough for me to remove the chains binding the book. Which I did, carefully. The cover was warped and crinkly stiff.
I folded the book open, and its spine creaked. A yellowed piece of paper, obviously torn from the book, slid from the pages and floated to the floor of the attic. It was blank. Or wait, no—it wasn’t blank? A picture of the lock—the heart-and-snake lock I’d just opened—appeared in the middle of the page.
Ellie nodded eagerly. “Put the lock there,” she said, nudging my shoulder. I couldn’t see for sure in the dark attic, but I knew her eyes were twinkling with anticipation.
I picked up the lock, key still embedded, and placed it on the piece of paper on the floor. I twisted the lock until its position matched the illustration. The paper and the lock felt almost magnetized, drawn to one another in the pull of attraction, clicking precisely into position. The moment it was aligned, the eyes of all three snakes—the two on the lock and the one on the key—flashed a burst of blinding green light.
Hisssssssssssss! I jerked my hand away. A fine mist rose off the paper, a smoky, swirling, hissing mist. It stank like sulfur, like rotten eggs. The eyes of the snakes dulled but continued to glow, pulsing in the dark attic.
“What is that?” Ellie whispered, lifting her sweatshirt collar over her nose. I shook my head, too mesmerized to speak.
The mist began to float and wind and twist to the outer edges of the piece of paper, revealing ink. Moving, liquid-like ink. More snakes. Black-ink snakes, darting and slithering toward one another, first forming letters…
Unlock it.
And then a chart.
The ink soaked into the paper, and I saw: It was a zodiac chart, round like the sun, divided into equal parts, one for each horoscope sign.
The mist cleared, the hissing faded, the pulsing green eyes lowered to a dull glow. But the sulfur smell remained, stinging my eyes and throat. The lock, the paper, the chart remained as well.
Something was odd about this chart, aside from the fact that it had literally appeared from mist. Nina was a staunch believer in astrology, so I’d seen plenty of zodiac charts, divided into the twelve horoscope signs. This one was different.
How? I blinked at the chart, trying to figure out what was off. I started at the top of the chart and counted clockwise around: Aries the Ram, Taurus the Bull, Gemini the Twins, Cancer the Crab, Leo the Lion, Virgo the Maiden, Libra the Scales, Scorpio the Scorpion, Ophiuchus the Snake…
Ophiuchus? O-what?!
I blinked but counted through the remaining signs: Sagittarius the Archer, Capricorn the Goat, Aquarius the Water Bearer, Pisces the Fish.
This zodiac chart had thirteen signs. Thirteen, not twelve. I counted twice to make sure.
“Thirteen signs…” I muttered to the paper. A new zodiac. Of course, I didn’t believe in horoscopes or zodiacs or astrological signs of any sort—what a load of hoo. I only read this stuff for Nina. And yet, staring at that new, crowded zodiac chart, a zing shot down my spine.
“A sign between Scorpio and Sagittarius,” I said, studying the thirteen-sign chart but still refusing to touch the paper. I located my birth date on the outside of the wheel. “According to this, my new sign is O-however-you-say-it.”
Ellie flipped through the brittle pages of the book.
“Hey, that sign is listed in here.” She read the description of the sign:
“‘Ophiuchus (o-PHEW-cuss), the snake. November 30–December 17. Ophiuchus, thou art overlooked. Thou hast a hunger, then, that thou strivest to fill with knowledge, and thou seekest the truth above all. Because of this, thou art a favourite among authority figures. However, know that with hunger comes jealousy; the jealousy of the hungered cannot be matched. Too, this black blood masks a vicious secretive streak, so that thou art wildly misinterpreted. Because of this, thou lackest trust and commitment. And yet, thy friends art thy lifeline; thou definest thine own identity through the lens of others. Should thou overcomest thine thy crippling anger, thine healer’s hands have the power to revive lost souls.’”
This was me.
I hovered above the paper, studying this new zodiac chart—this ancient zodiac chart, according to what Ellie read in The Keypers of the Zodiack. There were actually thirteen constellations in the path our planet took around the sun. Thirteen signs, not twelve.
“‘When the Babylonians first developed a zodiac chart,’” Ellie read, “‘they rightly included all thirteen constellations. The twelve-sign zodiac evolved later from the Greeks. The Greeks based their zodiac on the Legend of the Twelve Labours of Hercules. In this myth, Hercules had angered King Eurystheus, and the king demanded that Hercules perform Twelve Labours, or Challenges, to spare his life.
“‘As Hercules achieved victory after victory, he honored his Challengers by casting them into the heavens as constellations. These twelve groupings of stars, the Greeks believed, were given the power to control our personalities.’”
Ellie continued reading. “‘Over time, the twelve-sign zodiac became the standard. The thirteenth sign, Ophiuchus, was forever lost.’”
A lost sign.
“Total crap,” Ellie said. She slammed the book shut and looked over my shoulder at the thirteen-sign chart. “There is no way I’m not a Libra. I mean, now I’m suddenly a Virgo? No way.”
I half smiled. Ellie took this horoscope stuff way too seriously. But it was intriguing. Wedging a thirteenth sign into the zodiac meant all the dates of the astrological calendar would shift. This would change the horoscope signs of my family members, my friends. The sign that we’d defined ourselves with, aligned ourselves with, now suddenly different? I have to admit, I liked the sound of all that chaos.
“And Brennan? What would his new sign be? His birthday’s August first,” Ellie said.
“I know when his birthday is.”
The ancient chart was difficult to see in the dull blue light of the cell phone, and the eyes of the snakes were now only slightly brighter than glow-in-the-dark stars. I’d need more light to read the chart.
I nudged the paper with my toe. Nothing happened. I tapped it quickly, lightly with one finger. Nothing.
Finally, I took a deep breath and picked up the paper. The lock clung to it, like it had been glued to the spot where I’d placed it.
I crossed to the other side of the attic, ignoring the scuffling and hissing of furry things, and opened the vent like a shutter, letting in light from the full moon.
I lifted the thin piece of paper with both hands. It became almost transparent against the moonlight. The words “Unlock it” just above the heart-and-snake lock, just above the thirteen-sign chart.
Unlock it.
It was irresistible. I reached up and turned the key in the lock one more notch.
The heart cracked completely in two, a fully broken heart. The eyes of the snakes flashed, filling the room with green lightning. The paper turned into hissing mist and disappeared, surrounding me, enveloping me, trapping me. The lock clattered to the floor.
My axis tilted, my ears buzzed, and a thought blazed through my head like fire before my skull smacked against the floor of the attic:
I am an Ophiuchus.
At the time, I didn’t know that everyone would change because of me.
That everything I loved about everyone I knew would vanish.
That all that chaos would leap right off that page.
Had I known that, I never would’ve opened the lock.
“Are you okay?”
The question echoed in my head. I blinked, then blinked again. A drumbeat of pain poundpoundpounded through my skull with my pulse.
Brennan snapped his fingers at me. The darkness receded, the light blinded me. I was standing in the hallway of the second story of my house, no longer in the attic. The hatch door was open, the ladder was down, and cold air wafted in from above. My whole body tingled, like when your arm falls asleep, then slowly prickles back to life.
> “What?” My voice sounded far away. Buried. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
“Of course I came! You were locked in an attic.” Brennan looked upset. “Are you okay? You guys were up there for a while. Want me to make you some hot chocolate?”
“So you can poison it?” My fingers shot up to cover my mouth. Had I really said that?
But Brennan’s face sank into a frown, rather than snapped into the snarl I’d expected. Odd.
I looked down at myself, holding The Keypers of the Zodiack in one hand, Nina’s pin clasped to my T-shirt over my heart. Freshly painted toenails. It was all the same, except I was somehow wearing that pin. Still, something was different. More—colorful? The world now seemed painted in oranges and yellows and reds. A Matisse, not a Picasso. The sun, not the moon. It reminded me of the time when I’d been in the hospital, when I’d seen the world though fevery eyes.
My pulse raced. “You guys didn’t—black out or anything just then? How did we get down here? How long were we up there? Where is the lock? Why am I wearing this pin?” Even as I was asking the questions, I wanted my mouth to stop talking. But I couldn’t. Stop talking. I moved my jawbone around to try and open my blocked ears.
Ellie cocked her head at me, her blond ponytail swinging. She didn’t have a ponytail earlier, did she? “Are you okay, Jalen? Maybe we should go sit down.”
She took The Keypers of the Zodiack from my hand and led me downstairs to the overstuffed couch in our living room. She sat down placed the book on the cushion beside her, and patted the seat. So calm. No animation—why was she acting like this? Was I really hurt and they just weren’t telling me? I scanned my body—no cuts, no blood, no bruises.
Mr. Bingle jumped into her lap and started purring. Ellie smiled and stroked him, twining the fingers of her left hand in his orange fur. Her right hand flew to her mouth, and she gnawed off the electric-green fingernail polish with her teeth.
“When did you start biting your nails?” The words clogged my throat.
The 13th Sign Page 2
