by Laura Powell
“See, we figure the die will only work after you’ve activated the fourth side. And once that’s done, we can get into the Arcanum whenever and wherever we like. We won’t be tagging after some knight. We’ll have our own move.”
But again, Blaine showed no reaction and Cat ground to a halt.
“If it’s all the same with you,” said Flora, who had moved on to inspecting her own fingernails, “I’d prefer to put off any excursions until after Christmas. Would it be frightfully difficult for people to get away on Boxing Day?”
Conversation descended into the wrangling over places and timings that occurs when any kind of group outing needs to be organized. Blaine didn’t contribute to this, either. But as the others were debating Cat’s suggestion of meeting at Piccadilly Circus at three o’clock, Boxing Day, he turned from staring out of the foggy window.
“There’s no sense rushing things,” he said suddenly. “It’s not like the future of humankind is at stake. We don’t even have to save the world from the Forces of Darkness.”
“Well, no,” said Toby, “but rescuing the Hanged Man—”
“Let’s not kid ourselves we’re doing it for his benefit.”
Nobody had anything to say to this, aware of the cards they each carried, held close as a promise. Blaine looked slowly round the table. “How did you lot get into this gig, anyway?”
Caught off guard, Cat found herself stammering. “It—it began when I sort of—of—stumbled into someone.”
“I … erm … overheard a conversation,” Toby said reluctantly, feet tap-tapping under the table.
“By following a thread,” said Flora, eyes defiant. “And you?”
“I read a book.” Blaine pushed his plate away and got to his feet. “Full of information, aren’t we?” he remarked sardonically. “See you later … team.”
“So you are going to join us?” Toby asked.
Blaine didn’t turn round. “I’m going to think about it.”
The other three stared after his departing back. “Looks like you’ve got some competition for that Enigmatic Loner tag, Cat,” Toby observed. “Funny, he doesn’t particularly sound like a street kid.”
“And how’re street kids supposed to sound?”
Toby ignored the question. “Do you reckon he’s in a gang? I’m sure that was a tattoo I saw on the back of his neck.”
“It was probably dirt,” said Flora, wrinkling her nose. Then she looked at Cat. “The two of you seem to have some kind of … rapport. I think you should go after him.”
“And say what?”
“Whatever it takes. We have to be certain he’s going to help. This is too important for second thoughts.”
Cat felt she had already done quite enough running around after Blaine. To be running after him on Flora’s orders was to add insult to injury. But of course Flora was right: they did need him. After her encounter with the King of Swords, Cat knew that better than anyone.
She caught up with Blaine at the end of the street. When he saw her, he raised his brows. “You’re eager.”
“No. Just desperate, remember?”
He laughed.
“Don’t play games with us,” she said abruptly. “There’s already more than enough of that in the Arcanum.” She drew him away from the pavement bustle, into the doorway of a closed-up shop. “Tell me straight: are you going to help or not?”
“I don’t know, do I? I don’t know anything about you. Or your friends.”
“All right, so ask me some questions.”
“You can start by telling me what you’re playing for.”
She took a deep breath. “Justice.”
“Hmm. And why’s a nice girl like you in need of law and order?”
“It’s not for me. It’s for my parents. Somebody … somebody shot them. Killed them for an invitation to the Game.”
He stared at her. “Jesus.”
“ ’S’OK,” she said awkwardly. “I mean, no, it’s not OK, obviously. But it was twelve years ago. Anyhow, winning Justice is my chance to make sense of what happened.”
“Yeah … There’s a lot of bad stuff in this world that goes unpunished. Unnoticed, too.” He was tracing the line of the scar on his right arm. Cat suspected the gesture was unconscious.
“And you’re looking for someone?” she said. “A Knight of Wands?”
Grudgingly, he nodded.
“And what do you want from him—payback? Because of what he did to your arm?”
Blaine looked down at the scar, as if surprised to find it there, and pulled his sleeve over it irritably. “My arm doesn’t matter. No. It was because of the … the other things he did. And not just to me.”
Cat felt a shiver that wasn’t from cold.
“Payback’s only part of what I want from that bastard.” He was speaking quickly and angrily, all reticence gone. “He’s my stepfather. He’s a bully and a liar and a thief. He’s the reason I left home. The reason I became a chancer, too … Anyway. We’re both in the Game, and I’ve been looking for him in the Arcanum. He’s hiding there. Or stuck in some move.”
“What will you do when you find him?”
“I don’t know. I know what he deserves. But first … There’re questions he has to answer, people he has to face. He needs to be forced to admit what he’s done. Then they’ll have to believe me. Then I can go back to my old life.”
Cat didn’t ask who “they” were. The expression on Blaine’s face seemed to forbid it. Instead, she got down to practicalities.
“If he’s a knight and you interfere in his round, you’ll be in danger of forfeit.”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“But you don’t have to,” she said earnestly. “Not if we manage to change the Game like the Hanged Man says. We’ll be free to do what we want in the Arcanum. We’ll each get our reward.”
“And we can trust this guy on the tree, can we?”
Cat remembered the shining blue of the Hanged Man’s gaze, how his voice had faded with the falling leaves. The gentleness of his smile. She had no words to describe the solemnity of the crypt—its sense of mystery, and power.
“The Hanged Man’s triumph is the card of sacrifice,” she said at last. “He was there at the beginning of the Game. He knows how it works and what’s wrong with it. What’s more, the kings and queens have found out we’re trying to help him, and it’s got them rattled.
“Alastor even tried to stop me finding you. He called the Hanged Man a traitor because he wants to spoil their Game. United, the four of us are a threat. So, yeah, I believe in my prize and, yeah, I believe in the man who promised it.”
Blaine looked at her and slowly nodded. “OK.”
“As in OK, you’ll help us?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “Fact is, I was always going to give it a shot.”
Cat stared, exasperated. “So why—?”
“Maybe I just wanted to put you through your paces. See how persuasive you could really be.”
Their eyes met, and he gave her a crooked sort of smile. Then he stepped out of the doorway. “Happy Christmas, Cat.”
CAT AND BEL’S CHRISTMAS began the same way it always did: not with stockings, but with working their way through a stack of Christmas crackers—jumping when they snapped apart, putting on the paper crowns, and laughing over the terrible prizes. Greg was spending the day with his elderly mother out in Rotherhithe, so it was just the two of them. For their ready-made lunch—hoisin duck and pancakes for Bel, roast chicken and trimmings for Cat—they turned on the stereo to drown out the interminable drum ’n’ bass from next door, and drew the curtains so that they ate under the glow of the fruit lights. Rain pattered cozily against the windowpanes.
Cat felt treacherous for wondering how this Christmas could have been different—how it might have been if she still had her mum and dad. Bel would be there too, of course. They’d all be squeezed up close round the table, chatting and laughing. There would be stockings and homemade p
ies and a real tree. A family Christmas, Disney style. Rose-tinted thinking, Cat told herself. Get over it.
Bel was in a very good mood. She’d bought them both feather boas, pink for her and purple for Cat, and insisted they get dolled up, adorning Cat’s face with swoops of silver eye shadow. She also made Cat wear her present from the Secret Santa at work: a sparkly four-leaf clover on a chain. Afterward, she produced a set of keys with a flourish. “Greg left them with me. I reckon it’s time you had a backstage tour of the palace.”
“I thought you said it’s a hole.”
“Hole, sweet hole. But there’s a karaoke machine left from the Christmas party, as many potato chips as you can eat, and widescreen telly in the bar. It’ll be fun. Like sneaking round school after hours.”
For the second time in a week, Cat was shown into the Palais Luxe’s dingy lobby. This time, however, they headed to the gaming floor, which was dominated by three blackjack tables and three roulette wheels. A plastic Christmas tree leaned drunkenly against a rank of slot machines. The paisley carpet was dark with grime, the ceiling low and the air stale with a lingering smell of sweat.
Bel turned on the lights and sound system, flooding the room with Andy Williams crooning about Paris skies. The slot machines twinkled into life. “Our own private party palace,” she said cheerfully, going to the bar to help herself to a rum and Coke. She came back with a can of lemonade for Cat and an armful of snacks. “C’mon, what do you fancy? Roulette? Poker? James Bond brooding in a corner?”
“Game of tiddlywinks is all I’m fit for.”
“We’ll see about that.” Bel flicked her feather boa over her shoulder and sashayed over to the nearest roulette wheel. “Would Madam care to place her chips?”
Cat gave in. She opened a packet of peanuts and placed three on the betting table to the side of the wheel. A straight inside bet, number eight. Eight was the Triumph of Justice.
Bel spun the wheel in one direction and launched the ball in another. “No more bets!” she called, as the ball got ready to drop from the outside track of the wheel toward the numbered slots. It whizzed around some more, bounced and settled. “Unlucky,” she said, placing a marker on the green 0 square on the layout and scooping up Cat’s peanuts. “Try again.”
But Cat was still staring at the wheel, where an image of the Lottery at Temple House had flashed before her eyes. “No,” she said, with sudden vehemence. “That’s enough.”
Her aunt laughed. “All right, puss-cat. You keep hold of your peanuts. There was a bloke here yesterday—bloodshot eyes, probably hadn’t changed his clothes all week—and I watched him lose ten grand in an hour. Ten grand! Course, you can’t stop them, and they wouldn’t thank you if you tried.” She frowned, her effervescence suddenly fizzing away. “You know what I heard? Back in the old days, Lady Luck was a girl called Hecate. That’s the Queen of Witches.”
Cat’s mouth felt dry. “Who told you that?”
“Oh … just someone I used to know.”
“A gambler?”
“Yeah. They’re a superstitious bunch.” Bel cleared her throat. “Got a meeting with Leo set up after the holiday—you remember, from that charity poker night? The manager at Alliette’s. Anyhow, he reckons there might be an opening for me there.”
Cat looked at the opposite wall, and its posters of soft-focus couples laughing as they placed their bets. They didn’t bear much resemblance to the solitary, dead-eyed figures she had seen waiting outside the Luxe’s doors. “D’you think it’ll really be that different? I mean, it would be bigger and flashier. Obviously. But underneath, it’s … it’s all the same, isn’t it?”
Bel acted as if she hadn’t heard. She moved toward the blacked-out windows, flexing her hands restlessly. “When you first start handling the chips, it stretches your fingers. Makes them ache. I don’t even notice it now.…” She was still frowning. “I’m a good dealer, Cat: slick with the cards, quick with numbers. The gamblers like me. At Alliette’s they have proper training programs, for management and that. There wouldn’t be so many night shifts. And after all the moving around and starting over … well, it could be my lucky break. Our lucky break, you know?”
“Yeah,” said Cat softly. “I know.”
On Sunday, Cat got a call from Toby about an hour before they were due to meet the others. He sounded unnaturally subdued. “There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he said. “I’ll be at Piccadilly Circus in five—can you come and meet me?”
She sighed. It had not been a good night. The odds are ag-gainst you, murmured the stranger in her dreams, and she had woken up to find her eyes swollen and gluey, as if she’d been crying in her sleep. But although it was a relief to get out of the flat—where Greg and Bel were drinking gin and jeering at the television—the gray quiet of the city, deep in its post-Christmas torpor, felt just as oppressive. Toby’s serious tone had shaken her more than she liked to admit.
“What’s all this about?” she asked as briskly as she could make it.
Toby took a while to answer, hunched over himself and frowning. “I need to tell you how I got into the Game.”
“Something to do with saving a girl’s life, you said.”
“That’s right. But something just happened, something …” He paused and then shook his head. “I’d better start at the beginning.
“So I board at this school called Hargrove, right? It’s just outside London. Anyway, there was this secret club: the Chameleons. They gave people dares.”
“Dares?”
“It was silly to begin with. The challenges were connected to film titles; anyone who got Mrs. Doubtfire had to turn up to assembly in drag—that sort of stuff. Toward the end of last term, though, it was becoming … well, there was one called The Invisible Man, and the girl who got it wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone and nobody was allowed to speak to her for a week. It was like she didn’t exist. Even the teachers seemed to stop noticing her.”
“Sounds kind of twisted.”
“Yeah, but it was also exciting. Boarding school is a really regimented, claustrophobic world, and those dares were a chance to throw out the rules. To see the old conventions turned upside down. Enjoy a bit of risk. Like the Hanged Man’s Lottery, I suppose.
“OK. Anyway … there was this girl … a couple of years older than me, part of the popular crowd. Mia wasn’t a snob, though. She was different from the rest. In fact, she was really nice.” Now he was blushing beneath his freckles. “One evening I was in the art studio, late. And I’d just turned off the lights in the back room when I heard her and the art teacher, Mr. Marlow, come in the main door. Mia sounded really agitated. She was saying she was in over her head, and that she’d never thought it would come to this. Then they started talking about how this last move had to be a fair fight. And that whoever lost it would have to start all over again, with a new round.”
“So … they were both knights, competing for the same triumph?” Cat asked. She remembered Toby telling her that in such cases the Game Masters made their fifth and final move into a competition.
“Exactly. But at the time, I assumed it was something to do with the Chameleons and their dares. It wasn’t that surprising that Mr. Marlow was involved. He was this sleazebag who thought it was cool to smoke dope with students. Anyway, in the end they agreed to meet at midnight in the clock tower.
“Now, the clock tower was way on the other side of the playing fields. It was out of bounds and all spooky and rickety, the perfect setting for a secret society. I thought this was my big chance to see who was in the Chameleons, how the dares were organized and so on.
“I got to the tower before midnight and crept up the stairs to the room at the top. I heard shouting behind the door, followed by a crashing sound. Marlow was yelling and Mia screamed, so I burst into the room. Mia had a gash on her head. She was clutching something in her hand and Marlow was grabbing for it. Later, I realized it must have been an Arcanum coin. On the wall behind them, you see, this weird c
ircle design had appeared. A threshold wheel. So I think Mr. Marlow had tried to knock out Mia, or even kill her, before she could enter their move.”
Cat frowned. “Isn’t that cheating?”
“Probably. He must have decided it was worth a forfeit if he got his triumph at the end. Or maybe the rules are different for when knights play against knights.
“Of course I didn’t know anything about this at the time. I didn’t have time to think. Mr. Marlow had ahold of Mia. So I just hurled myself at him. He was a big man, but I took him by surprise, and somehow managed to get him off her. A moment later, he was back on his feet, and literally flung me out of the room.
“I knocked my head on the wall, not hard, but enough to make things go fuzzy. I remember a ripping sound, though. Like a piece of paper being torn, but louder.
“The next thing I knew, Mia was dragging me downstairs. She was screaming that we had to get out. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘He’ll kill us! The Ace—’
“Just as we got outside, the tower began to shake. The bricks didn’t look solid anymore. They sort of … trembled in the air, as if the whole building was made of silk. Then there was this awful groaning, cracking noise, and the roof of the tower collapsed.”
“With—with the teacher still inside?”
“No. Afterward, there was no sign of him. He must’ve escaped into the Arcanum in time.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. It must’ve been the Ace of Pentacles. Root of Earth, you know? Creating earthquakes is part of its job. And aces are the only cards that have power on both sides of the threshold.”
“What happened next? What did you do?”
“I just stood there gawping. People were already coming out of the school, raising the alarm and so on. Mia kept her cool, though. She said I had to go back to my dorm and not tell anyone what I’d seen. She said I’d understand later. And that she’d take care of explanations.
