by Kresley Cole
“Once you’ve collected all the icons, the earth should come back,” Gran said. “The sun as well.”
“Should come back?”
“There’s never been a disaster like this. I can’t say for certain.” She rubbed her temples, like I did whenever my head was hurting. “When you were a girl, I knew you would be important to the future of humanity, but I didn’t know how. Maybe you’re supposed to reseed the planet.”
Yet I couldn’t do that permanently until the game ended and daylight came back—if I even won. For that to happen, I’d have to lose Aric, Lark, Circe, Finn, Joules, and Gabriel. In other words, I’d be insane.
Now Gran had just confirmed a new threat—to all of them. I’d have to think about the Minors later. Put ’em on the list. “When the Empress won before, what did she do until the next game?”
Aric had revealed how he’d spent his solitary centuries: “I wander the earth and see men age before my eyes. I read any book or paper I can get my hands on. I watch the stars in the sky; over my lifetime some dim, some brighten. I sleep for weeks at a time and chase the dragon.”
When he’d made that confession, I’d thanked God I hadn’t been cursed to that. His horse looks sick, and he has no friends. Why would he have made friends? Just to watch them die, over and over?
Gran frowned. “What did the Empress do? She was immortal.”
“But how did she spend her time? What was her life like?” My life.
“I don’t know,” she said, clearly stumped. “Chroniclers only document the games. She probably ruled over men as a goddess. And relived her most glorious victories.”
So the Empress had spent centuries gazing at the twenty-one icons on the backs of her hands. I’ll pass. The more I thought about the game, the more I saw my battle against Richter as a one-way ticket. I didn’t expect to walk away unscathed from a murderer who leveled mountains and bled lava.
And I’d never stop until he was dead. “Gran, would you rather that I live happily for a few months or be miserable for hundreds of years?”
“We don’t have time for silly questions,” she said, exasperated. “Your immortal life will be a tribute to the gods. You will be the winner. You must be.” She waved at the vines seeming to pulsate all around us. “And why shouldn’t you win? You’ve already made brilliant plays. Your alliance is well-picked for the most part. Though Circe can be tricky.” A sudden gust of wind spattered rain against the window. Her eyes darted toward the glass. “The Flash must have weakened her. Her attack on the Emperor would have too. But she regains her strength with every single drop.” Gran met my gaze again. “At least that little Fauna will be easy to remove.”
My claws sharpened at even the imagined threat to Lark. The vines on the ceiling skittered. Enough. “I need you to understand some things. I didn’t turn out like you hoped. Given the choice, I would never fight or play this game. These icons on my hand disgust me—I have them only because I fought for my own life. I’ll help take out the Emperor and his allies, but I could never hurt my friends.”
Her eyes went wild. “Friends? Friends? They will betray you at the first opportunity!” Spittle dotted her lips. “The only reason Death might not is because his lust is stronger than his age-old need to kill.” She leaned in aggressively. “Do you think they care about you?”
I squared my shoulders. “Yes, I do.”
“You won’t for long,” she promised me. “Not after you’ve read our chronicles from front to back.”
“What are you talking about? We don’t have written chronicles.”
“You know we do.”
Mouth gone dry, I shook my head hard. “You would’ve . . . you would’ve shown them to me.”
“Evie,” she said in a measured tone, “I did.”
23
The Hunter
“Coo-yôn?”
A light neared, getting brighter. A lantern? Shadows wavered over the rock walls. I raised a hand to my forehead, shielding my eyes. Hadn’t seen this much light in weeks.
I squinted. Blinked. Blinked again. The image remained.
Before me was two of . . . Matthew. “Hunter!”
“You a ghost? You goan to take me to hell?”
He frowned. “Do you know the way?”
Sounded like something he’d say! Could this truly be coo-yôn? My heart got to pounding—made my leg throb like the devil. “You real?”
In a too-loud voice, he said, “We’re leaving.”
“Shhh! You are real.” I choked out words: “Did Evie . . . d-did my girl . . . live?” I held my breath, waiting for his answer. The next few seconds would decide whether I hoped for a future—or accepted the end of a life that already felt too long.
Every moment of my existence seemed to lead up to this strange kid’s next words. All the pain. All the confusion. And then that sweet, sweet time when Evangeline Greene was all mine . . .
“Empress lived. Her smile died.”
“Ah, God, my girl’s alive.” Relief made me even more lightheaded. “Alive.” I shuddered, and my eyes grew damp. Couldn’t control my emotions, me. “How? I thought I got her killed like the rest.”
“Tredici saved her.”
“Tre-what?” Was he talking about Domīnija? I’d figured as much.
“Death!”
“Quiet, coo-yôn.” I slept apart from the other captives, but somebody would hear him before long. “I gotta get to Evie.” I tried to scramble up on my good leg. Only busted my ass.
Waves of dizziness hit. I had to gnash my teeth to keep from blacking out. “How’d you sneak past the guards?” Shackled slaves could move around down here at the terminus, but two armed guards kept anyone from getting near the mine elevator.
Coo-yôn shrugged. “Mad skillz.”
“Who’s with you? They comin’ in guns blazing?” I was going to get free of this hellhole! I’d get back to my girl.
He lowered his lantern. “I’m rogue.”
I tried sitting up again, slowly. “What’s that mean? Is Evie close?” God, let her be.
“I’m alone.”
The fuck? “No other Arcana with you? Then I’m trapped here. And soon you will be too if you doan go.” I sank back against the stone wall. “Tell her I love her. Tell her . . . tell her I’ll see her again. Somewhere, someway. Now leave!”
He shook his head and covered his lips with a forefinger. He was shushing me? After he’d been so loud? “Time for you to go.”
Started to ask him if he was crazy. Already knew the answer to that, me. “You must mean I’m about to die. You here to see me out?”
“To see you up.”
“You talking topside?” I squinted again. Was that blood on the backs of his hands?
Blood on his hands. Just like I had blood on mine. An army’s worth. “Why didn’t you warn me about Richter?” Jaw clenched, I grabbed the hem of his coat. “We lost Selena to that fils de pute. We lost an army.”
“I see far.”
“Goddamn it, why. Tell me you had a reason to let everyone die.”
“I had a reason.”
“More important than the future of mankind? ’Cause that’s what we were dealing with.” Maybe that attack had kept Richter from targeting even more people. Maybe the entire army would’ve gotten bonebreak fever and died in agony. “How can I trust you again?”
“Attempt escape, Hunter. Or be cut up for meat.”
Trusting him would be like playing Russian roulette with more than one bullet in the chamber.
He slanted his head. “It’s time for you to go. I thought you’d want to see her.”
“Of course I want to! Desperate to. But unless you got a hacksaw . . .” My blurry eyes tried to follow his movements.
From a backpack, coo-yôn produced a goddamned hacksaw! The Fool was saving my ass? The rescuer being rescued?
Dizziness had the mine spinning. I gave my head a hard shake. “Might pass out, coo-yôn. You got a plan to get us out of here?”
He kne
lt to saw. “No plan.”
Merde! “You ready to fight your way out of here, boy?” I asked, though he’d never lifted a finger to fight in the past. “If we doan win, they’re goan to catch us and lock you down here.”
When he peered up at me again, my blurred vision failed to place him for a second, almost as if I were seeing another face. Or a . . . mask. He didn’t look like the boy I’d spent months working beside.
Then he gave me his usual blank grin, back to the Fool again. He truly didn’t have a plan.
All the sudden I could read the future. By tonight, he would be in chains, and I’d be butchered. . . .
24
The Empress
Creepy book in hand, I sat beside the fire in Gran’s room.
Sure enough, the Empress’s line had chronicles.
Either I was going crazy, had gone crazy, or my grandmother was lying. Had she truly shown the book to me half my life ago? How could my memories have gotten so scrambled?
Both Matthew and Selena had said my line chronicled, but I’d thought the knowledge had been passed down verbally or something.
After Gran’s revelation, she’d dug an ancient-looking book out of her bag, having trouble lifting the weighty thing. The battered leather of the cover looked like the skin of a Bagman.
She’d been stunned by my lack of recognition, sinking down on her bed, looking ten years older. “No wonder you hesitate to kill them,” she’d said, as if explaining the worst tragedy. . . .
Now she watched me like a hawk. “Nothing?” I shook my head. “How could you not remember?”
“I was only eight when you went away, and I was forbidden to talk about anything you taught me.” Young as I was, I’d been old enough to know that Mom had banished my grandmother for her beliefs. Why wouldn’t I have pushed Arcana stuff from my mind to avoid a similar fate? “When I got older and I had visions of the apocalypse, Mom blamed you, so she sent me to a head-shrink place, like the one you went to. I got . . . deprogrammed.”
They’d pumped me full of drugs, then asked, Do you understand why you must reject your grandmother’s teachings? Those mental ward docs had done a number on my head, but I’d thought I’d shaken off most of their “therapy.”
Yet I’d failed to recall vital events from the past. No, the situation was worse than that: I hadn’t even realized the memories were missing in the first place. “I have . . . gaps in my memory.” My brain felt like Swiss cheese at this point. Apparently, the gaps even predated the deprogramming.
If Gran was telling the truth about all this . . .
So why did I sense she was lying to me—about something? “I remember the day you were arrested. You talked to me about the cards.”
“I’d been talking to you about them all your life, always telling you stories.” Almost to herself, she said, “I knew Karen hated my beliefs. Didn’t know how much though.”
“Maybe reading will trigger some recollection.” Would I recognize these pages from my childhood? Why would she ever lie about this?
But I hesitated to open the book. It gave me chills. Even Gran gave me chills. “This was passed down?”
“From my mother, and then her mother before her.”
Mom had told me the whole line was disturbed. I supposed I was merely the latest in a long line. “How far back do these chronicles go?”
“There are detailed entries from the last two games, but the games before that are summarized.” She waved me on. “Open it, then.”
If this book was the gateway to transforming permanently into the red witch, would I be tempting fate just to read it?
With a shaking hand, I cracked open the weathered leather. The scent of old parchment swirled up. An orderly script filled the page. It began: What followeth is the trew and sworne chronikles of Our Lady of Thorns, the Emperice of all Arcana, chosen to represent Demeter and Aphrodite, embody’g life, all its cycles, and the myst’ries of love. . . .
“Who was the chronicler here?” I asked. “Who wrote these words?”
“They’ve been translated by chroniclers over the generations, transcribed and retranscribed. But they were first recorded by the Empress’s mother.”
“My mother, in that other life. Was Mom reincarnated too? Were you?”
Gran shrugged. “Maybe. We can’t know for certain.”
“Was this chronicler a Tarasova?”
“Probably. We’ve been fortunate in our line. Our chroniclers are usually gifted with second sight.”
I took a deep breath, bracing myself to read. . . .
At the beginning of the oldest entries, the Empress’s mother—possibly Mom in another life—had summarized what they’d gathered about the previous games, all the way to the first one.
In the inaugural game, my allies had been the Fool, Fauna, and the Priestess. My kills: the Star, the Hierophant, and the Hermit.
Though I’d been brimming with power, it hadn’t saved me. My death had been at the hand of a trusted friend, the ultimate winner—
The Fool.
My jaw slackened. My stomach roiled. He’d murdered her.
Me.
Matthew, my former best friend, had beheaded me. His ally.
Gran’s tone was smug as she said, “Still feel the same way about your friends?”
No. No, I did not. I’d barely cracked open the book before I’d almost puked.
Matthew had won the entire game. And he remembered the past! He knew about his betrayal. My nausea worsened as I gazed at the back of my hand, at my icons.
Did the Fool stare at his hands so much because he missed seeing his own sick icons? The markings must be earned. . . .
25
The Hunter
The second metal cuff finally fell away, revealing my lower leg. I winced. Infected to high hell and back. I told coo-yôn, “If you doan have a plan—or an army—to get us out of here, then we need weapons.”
Say we could somehow make it topside. I knew of only two ways in or out: one for people, and one for trucks. The first was insanely guarded, the second impossibly guarded.
“No weapons.” He stretched my arm over his shoulders, lifting me with surprising ease. But then, I’d lost weight and he’d gained muscle. He’d grown taller too, was my height now.
He started down the mine shaft. Too bad we’d never get to the elevator, much less up.
We passed coughing, bedded-down slaves. Everyone down here seemed to have sickness in the lungs, myself included.
The other men didn’t holler to be freed or to join us. ’Cause they all knew this escape attempt was hopeless. I heard some of them muttering: “Dumbasses.” “Where do they think they’re going?” “We’ll be dining on them all week.”
Matthew and I neared the elevator. “Coo-yôn, I can’t see shit. But I know the guards have automatic weapons.”
“Yes.”
Again, what choice did I have but to trust this boy? When we arrived at the elevator, I frowned. No guards?
Damn my heart for pounding. All it did was make my head swirl and my leg throb some more. And it wasn’t like we would get past the dozen or so slavers above anyway.
Matthew shoved the elevator gate aside, helping me in. It took me three tries to push the right switch. We started upward. “If they ain’t waiting for us, then get ready to run for the door.”
We were about to reach topside! Never thought I’d live to see it again.
The elevator clanged to a stop. He dragged back the door with a screech, and I tensed to fight. . . .
No one. “I’ll be damned.” We lurched out into the overseers’ quarters, a large area with corrugated metal walls. Low fluorescent lights dangled from the rock ceiling. Beds and chairs were scattered throughout. “Where is everybody?” Maybe the Fool had timed this rescue while the men were away.
“Think,” coo-yôn said. “Safety starts with you.” Huh? He pointed to an old workplace sign that I could barely make out.
“Ouais. Thanks for reading that for me.”
Below the sign was a weapons cage. I squinted and made out a padlock. “Need inside that cage, me.”
He helped me head toward it, rounding some map tables. “Why ain’t there a soul . . . ?” I trailed off when something squelched under my bare feet.
Blood? It had congealed in the dirt.
I gazed past the tables. My vision couldn’t be right, ’cause I saw hacked-up and bullet-riddled bodies.
Glassy eyes. Jutting tongues. A nearly severed head. Spatter painted the walls.
Who’d done this bloodbath? “You . . . you gotta be working with Gabe? Joules?”
Though Matthew had never locked gazes with me before, he stared me down. In a spine-chilling tone, he said, “Hunts. And campaigns.”
“You did this?” He’d never once set out to hurt anyone before. Never even raised his voice, except with fear.
“They did it to themselves. Knives and guns.”
Two dead overseers had bloody machetes in hand. Others held rifles. I’d been so far down in the mine I hadn’t heard gunshots. “But you somehow made them do it.”
“I hunted and campaigned.”
Again, I felt like I was with a stranger.
A man’s voice sounded from the entrance: “Where the hell is everybody?”
“Putain!” I bit out under my breath. “The next shift must be here. A dozen more men’ll be between us and the exit. You got any bright ideas?”
In the space of a heartbeat, he was back to being a nonchalant seventeen-year-old. “Didn’t get farther than this. My power ran out.”
“Go snatch a gun off the dead!”
Blank look.
“All right, take me to a weapon.”
He guided me to a fallen overseer, then helped me dip to grab an automatic rifle. I straightened—
A bullet whizzed past my head.
“Go, go!” I fired blindly over my shoulder. A yell told me I’d hit somebody.
As Matthew started away, more bullets peppered the metal wall beside us.
